Take a walk down Chingford Road and you’ll find a largely unremarkable thoroughfare of terraced family homes and shared flats. Unremarkable, that is, except for one feature.
Splattered across the windows, brickwork, driveways, cars and even the bins of at least a dozen properties in the road in Walthamstow, east London, are slashes of vivid red paint.
One house even has the word ‘brothel’ daubed across its front, despite there being no evidence that it is anything but a regular home.
More than a month since the paint mysteriously appeared, residents are no closer to understanding why their houses have been targeted – or even how they can afford to remove it.
‘I have lived here for 15 years and I have never seen anything like it,’ Peter Marshall, a retired window cleaner, told the Mail when we visited Chingford Road this week. ‘It’s shocking and really not very nice.’
But this small neighbourhood is far from alone in being targeted in this way.
In London, there have been 14 red-paint attacks in just 18 months. And from Bradford and Huddersfield to Reading and Clacton-on-Sea, communities across the country have seen an alarming rise in this peculiar type of vandalism.
So what on earth links them all? That is the question being asked by residents, councillors and police officers, as well as an army of armchair detectives online.
Splattered across the windows and brickwork in dozen properties in the road in Walthamstow, east London, are slashes of vivid red paint
One house even has the word ‘brothel’ daubed across its front, despite there being no evidence that it is anything but a regular home
And they have come up with a wide range of possible explanations, including that it is a bizarre social media trend, a ‘very bad’ imitation of the Bristol street artist Banksy, or an isolated incident that spawned a wave of copycat crimes.
However, as the Mail has discovered, the real reason could be far darker. Are these, in fact, the actions of organised criminals from the shadowy Chinese underworld?
Prior to 2023, there were few if any reports of red paint being splashed on properties in the UK. Then, in August that year, an apartment block in Huddersfield was daubed with red and black paint and the words ‘Brothel 3’.
Police were called, but with no way to identify the culprits the case remained unsolved and the residents were left to wash off the paint.
Then, eight months later – in April 2024 – a Thai massage parlour called Yonlada was targeted in another part of the West Yorkshire town. This time only red paint was used, splattered apparently randomly across the parlour’s sign and brickwork.
But locals quickly linked it to the previous case, sparking suggestions it had been targeted because it was a brothel.
The parlour’s horrified manager Nena denied the rumours, saying they were ‘simply not true’.
She told local news website Yorkshire Live: ‘I didn’t even know what the word [brothel] meant until I read the comments online. I had to Google it.
‘There is nothing of that sort going on here. I have been the manager here for around five or six years and I’ve never known anything like this to have happened.’
Again, no one was caught and the motive remained unknown.
Then, between September and November last year, two apartment blocks in Bradford were targeted. Both were splattered with red paint and daubed with the word ‘brothel’ – or ‘borthel’ as it was spelled on one – alongside what looked like mobile phone numbers in black spray paint.
West Yorkshire Police ruled out the theory that the attacks were linked – a view quickly dismissed by those affected. Retired engineer Andrew Mitchell, 67, who owns a flat in one of the blocks, told the BBC at the time: ‘It’s a strange one, isn’t it?
‘You look at the lettering in both incidents and it’s very similar writing. I mean, two incidents where red paint’s thrown and the word “borthel” is used. Not linked? There’s got to be something there, hasn’t there?’
Despite CCTV footage of two masked men vandalising one of the buildings, the culprits were not identified and the mystery rolled on. In London, meanwhile, cases had started to spiral, with more than a dozen recorded incidents dating from November 2023.
That month, two properties in West Hampstead, north London, were defaced with red paint and tagged with the word ‘brothel’.
This was followed just four months later by an attack on two houses in neighbouring Kilburn, when the misspelled word ‘broethel’ was spray-painted across their frontage.
This year, the attacks have continued at pace.
January saw a Thai massage parlour, a pub and four homes vandalised on the bustling shopping street of Ealing Broadway in west London.
That same month, a karaoke bar and ‘Japanese gentlemen’s club’ – also known as a strip club – was splattered with red paint
in St John’s Wood, north-west London, and four weeks later a row of houses in Leytonstone, east London, was doused with red paint and motor oil.
A council official attempts to remove red paint from a property on Chingford Road in north London
Shopfronts in Bradford were vandalised in November last year
One east Londoner, who asked not to be named, told the Mail he and his partner were left with up to £15,000 of ‘extensive’ damage to their Victorian property. ‘We are fortunate as we have insurance. But for people renting or, if you are a new homeowner, this could be devastating,’ he said.
Then came the attacks in Walthamstow, which happened over two nights, with the culprits spray-painting cars and homes on March 13 before attacking them again five days later.
Distressed families say they have had to clean their homes at least twice trying to get it all off, while children thought that the red paint was blood.
Some residents also received paint-splattered anonymous letters claiming there was a ‘brothel’ on the road, despite there being no evidence this was true.
‘For the families and residents living nearby it’s terrifying, as well as for those in the properties,’ one victim told the Mail. They added they had CCTV footage showing three to five men walking ‘brazenly’ down the street with paint at around 2.30am on one of the mornings but, again, there was no means of identifying them.
Labour MP for Walthamstow Stella Creasy has already raised concerns with the policing minister, Diana Johnson, and asked for assistance investigating this peculiar crime wave
CCTV footage of a hammer-wielding gang targeting Londoners’ homes with red paint. In one video, the gang can be heard speaking Mandarin with accents associated with northern China
Then there came a breakthrough. At the end of last month, a gang of masked men attacked a house in Acton, west London, by dousing it in red paint, smashing the windows with a hammer and spray-painting the word ‘brothel’ on the pavement outside.
This time the gang was caught on CCTV – and they were recorded speaking Mandarin.
The language they were speaking is key to understanding what might be behind the attacks, as Oliver Chan, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Birmingham, points out.
‘Red-paint splashing has long been common in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and parts of South-East Asia with strong Chinese communities,’ he told the Mail.
‘It goes back as early as the 50s, where Chinese criminal gangs – so-called triads – dominated societies or underground businesses.
Red-paint splashing is a common initial warning to those who’ve fallen behind on their debts. Then, if nothing more is done, there are escalations.’
Even in recent years, he adds, the problem has grown in the region. In Hong Kong alone there was a 55 per cent increase in recorded cases of ‘red-paint vandalism’ from 2017 to 2021.
Hong Kong may be a long way from Huddersfield, Bradford or London, but as Dr Chan points out, as more residents of Hong Kong move to the UK through the special British National (Overseas) visa, it is possible that those with links to established Chinese gangs are using traditional methods to operate here.
He says: ‘This vandalism is not being done for fun and is clearly a warning of some kind, so it’s not a massive leap to suggest it is linked to war between rival gangs.’
None of this, of course, will be reassuring to the residents of Walthamstow.
Local Labour MP Stella Creasy has already raised concerns with the policing minister, Diana Johnson, and asked for assistance investigating this peculiar crime wave.
‘It’s deeply troubling that this kind of incident has been reported around the country, but there’s no central co-ordination… so residents in Walthamstow have been told the police won’t call on them for days despite this happening at a number of venues,’ she said.
A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police told the Mail that it is pursuing several lines of inquiry relating to the vandalism.
‘We are aware of a number of incidents whereby addresses have been criminally damaged with red paint in recent weeks,’ the spokesman said.
‘These incidents are being investigated to ensure all leads are explored, and support is provided to the victims of these incidents by pan-London colleagues.
Evidence, including anything that is flagged with a potential forensic value, has been seized and work is ongoing to identify whoever is responsible.’
No arrests have been made but the Met urges ‘anyone with concerns or who has information’ to contact them.
The main question then is if – and when – this will end. When I ask Dr Chan, he is far from optimistic.
‘The population of the Chinese community is increasing in the UK, which unfortunately may increase the presence of a criminal element,’ he says. ‘Especially when you talk about cities where there are more Chinese communities, such as London, Manchester and Birmingham. It wouldn’t be surprising to see more of this happen.’
