It’s Sunday evening and more than 100 worshippers are attending Mass in Westminster Cathedral, the UK’s largest Catholic church.
But while the sound of choral music and the soothing words of the liturgy echo around the 130-year-old building, the scene outside is far from holy.
For in one of the church’s exterior alcoves on Ambrosden Street, little more than 30 feet from the main altar inside, the Daily Mail watches as a topless man in tight khaki trousers and matted dark hair greets another individual whose rolled-up tracksuit bottoms expose hideous cuts and scrapes up his legs.
The topless man hands over a small package of what looks like white powder. The other pays with a single £10 note.
Westminster Cathedral is not only the most revered site of Roman Catholic worship in the country and the place where Boris and Carrie Johnson married in 2021, it also lies at the heart of the capital’s most famous district, the so-called London Heritage Quarter, which includes Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament.
In recent months, however, the cathedral and its grounds have been overrun with petty criminals pushing a range of Class A drugs – including cocaine, heroin and the synthetic drug known as ‘spice’ – to a growing community of local vagrants for as little as £5 a hit.
In an appalling escalation of this already grim story, we can reveal that there have even been reports of drug deals taking place inside Westminster Cathedral itself, with one regular worshipper reporting a ‘brazen’ exchange that occurred in a pew during Mass last week while horrified members of the congregation looked on helplessly.
This was confirmed by a private security officer hired to patrol the surrounding area, from Victoria Street all the way down to Pimlico by the Thames.
Two men are seen on the steps of Westminster Cathedral, an area known to be frequented by drug users, with dealing happening in broad daylight
Westminster Cathedral is the most revered site of Roman Catholic worship in the country (stock photo)
A young woman appears to set up a pop-up shop to do deals on the steps of Westminster Cathedral
‘There are deals going on inside the cathedral, in the pews and in the quiet side-chapels too,’ he says.
‘That’s simply because we have a presence on the streets now – along with Police Community Support Officers – which makes it more difficult to deal outside.’
The fact that drug deals are being conducted so openly in and around the cathedral has understandably shocked worshippers, who are appalled at the ‘desecration’ of a sacred site.
And the phenomenon is all the more concerning because there are two schools – St Vincent’s Primary and Westminster Cathedral Choir School – located within the cathedral’s grounds.
The proliferation of drugs has led to episodes of shocking violence and anti-social behaviour, including reports of drugged-up vagrants defecating in the street.
It’s no wonder visitors to Westminster Cathedral and people who live in its shadow – where two-bedroom flats can cost as much as £4million – now fear for their safety.
This week, we saw several drug dealers operating around the cathedral, with numerous sales being made every hour to a steady stream of buyers, the vast majority of whom appeared to be vulnerable and homeless.
Our photographer took pictures that show emaciated people, many with caps pulled down low over their faces and carrying plastic bags, exchanging small packages, typically while facing the cathedral walls in an attempt to go unseen.
In recent months, the cathedral and its grounds have been overrun with petty criminals pushing a range of Class A drugs (stock photo)
Pictured: A lady mourns at Westminster Cathedral in central London, following the death of Pope Francis
Westminster Cathedral (pictured) is located within 500 yards of five organisations that work to combat homelessness including Passage House, a shelter with 37 beds (stock photo)
Far from being the sort of high-level transactions conducted by drug-dealing king-pins in the back of blacked-out Mercedes, these small-time exchanges smack of a desperate search for a dangerously cheap hit by addicts who have fallen through the cracks of society.
Data from Parliament’s public accounts committee released earlier this year found Westminster to have the second highest homelessness rate of all the London boroughs, with more than 7,500 people of no fixed abode.
About 500 of those are thought to be rough sleepers, a predicament often associated with drug-taking and anti-social behaviour.
One of the main reasons that Westminster has been so badly affected is due to the concentration of homeless shelters and charities in the area.
Westminster Cathedral is located within 500 yards of five organisations that work to combat homelessness including Passage House, a shelter with 37 beds.
A large percentage of the people hanging around the cathedral are believed to be recent arrivals to the UK.
A trio of homeless individuals told the Daily Mail they had arrived from Eritrea six months earlier and had previously been sleeping rough near Heathrow airport.
One of the three men admitted that drugs were being dealt ‘everywhere’ around the church and, gesturing towards the front gates, described a hidden corner on private property to the rear of the cathedral as a particularly popular exchange point
A picture of the late Pope Francis is displayed in Westminster Cathedral on May 9
Dozens of migrants are pictured sleeping rough outside Westminster Cathedral in April of this year
Migrants sleep outside overnight by Westminster Cathedral in central London
As the conversation came to an end, another man offered us ‘snow’ – the street name for cocaine – observing that it was ‘easy to get round here’.
The cathedral has responded to the growing drug problem in its precincts by beefing up security, with four guards now patrolling the entrance and its surrounds during opening hours.
Parishioner Ethal Bram, 79, who attends Mass weekly, admitted she ‘wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest’ if there were drug deals occurring inside the cathedral.
‘I’ve seen people walking up to the altar and shouting down the microphone,’ she says. ‘I’ve seen people walk in the church just aimlessly wandering. Not sure what they’re doing but again I wouldn’t be surprised if it was drug-related. It is sad because it is a place of reverence.’
This observation was echoed by 53-year-old Martino Junior Jose, a Dominican cleaner at the cathedral, who says homeless people ‘gather in the church together’.
‘They have left messes in the toilet,’ he adds, ‘and I have had to ask security to remove the people. But what can you do? You cannot prohibit them from using the toilet, especially if you don’t catch [them doing] anything unlawful. It’s a public place, after all.’
Clare Rewcastle, 66, who lives in a mansion block that overlooks the cathedral on Morpeth Terrace, says the drugs problem in the area ‘has hit like a truck’ and warns that the ‘relevant services and authorities need to wake up’.
‘A lot of the problem goes back to the de-policing of the area over the past decade,’ she says.
A large percentage of the people hanging around the cathedral are believed to be recent arrivals to the UK (stock photo)
‘A number of police stations have closed down, including Belgravia and, of course, Scotland Yard [has been relocated]. Compared to the late 1990s, there has been virtually no visible policing in the area. This drugs problem started last year and exploded this summer.
‘Being next to the church, we have over the years been fairly tolerant of the odd vagrant looking for kindness around the cathedral door but this has hit like a truck and people are in the most appalling state of sickness, confusion and dying before our eyes.’
According to one private security officer responsible for moving on vagrants who gather on the cathedral steps, police have arrested the three primary dealers – who are well-known to the authorities – on numerous occasions, ‘only for the courts to let them out 48 hours later when they return to their old ways’.
Evidence of such rigorous policing, however, is hard to come by, as the Met refuses to release data on arrests in the area.
But the Daily Mail discovered that just one set of legal proceedings is pending for the offence of drug dealing around Westminster Cathedral.
Glen Bahadur, 63, was apprehended outside the Grade II-listed Clergy House beside the cathedral on May 16 this year for possession of cannabis and an offensive weapon, in this case a knuckleduster.
In the circumstances, it comes as no surprise that an employee of the neighbouring St Paul’s bookshop told us she feels intimidated: ‘The quantity of homeless people around the church this year is the most I have ever seen.
‘I often see weird behaviour and it scares me. This is by far the worst I have seen it in my 19 years of working here.’
According to one private security officer responsible for moving on vagrants who gather on the cathedral steps, police have arrested the three primary dealers (file photo)
One problem for the police, admits a local PCSO, is that ‘the bigger players rarely carry drugs on them. They rely on others to do the petty dealing’.
Naturally, this makes stopping the problem at source much harder. On nearby Carlisle Place, we spoke to the mother of a three-year-old boy whose husband serves in the Armed Forces and is stationed at the barracks off Vincent Square, a little over five minutes walk away.
‘There are people doing drugs in the middle of the day,’ she said.
‘I even sent the police a picture of a man dealing drugs from the doorway of the barracks. But the police are doing nothing. There’s screaming in the middle of the night and it echoes down the street. The constant beep of stolen Lime bikes. We’re going through a living hell.’
But by far the worst incident this mother has seen came while walking past the old Telephone Exchange, a three-minute walk from the cathedral steps.
A man ‘clearly under the influence of something, dropped his pants in broad daylight and [went to the toilet] on the pavement’.
Becoming increasingly upset, the mother, who wishes to remain anonymous due to her connection with the military, adds that, days earlier, an individual had broken into the barracks’ communal laundry room and defecated in the tumble dryer.
‘Barracks are run down around the country, and the security isn’t great,’ she says. ‘Someone just waltzed in and did that. It’s unspeakably horrible.’
Local Labour MP Rachel Blake chaired a meeting of furious residents on July 23 and followed up with an email to constituents, seen by the Daily Mail, in which she admitted: ‘It is quite wrong that residents are having to live like this and that you should have to continue raising the matter with public bodies.’
She also promised to formulate an ‘action plan’ in consultation with Westminster City Council, the police and ‘local partners’.
Westminster Cathedral told us it ‘takes seriously any allegation of drug dealing within its premises and urges anyone who witnesses such activity to report it immediately to our security team or the police’. But it remains adamant that ‘our team has received no direct reports of drug-dealing inside the cathedral’.
Meanwhile, the drugs trade outside continues largely unhindered.
‘As usual,’ says a 70-year-old local man called Bart, ‘the safety and well-being of the majority has been sacrificed by a minority of crooks… But without any help from the authorities, ironically, all we can do is pray.’
– Additional reporting by Rachael Khan-Hill and Dunya Simoes
