29
Feb
2016
By Calvin at 12:23 GMT, 9 years ago
Some of you may have wondered where I’ve been these last few days since my news page has been somewhat absent of news!
Well, at the moment, I’m doing a little work for some residents living in an apartment block in West London. The apartments occupy the upper floors of a mixed development where the dwellings sit on top of both private and commercial car parking and some shops. You enter the car park from the back of the development and from inside the car park there are a few accessed controlled doors giving access to and from the residential floors above.
Originally, the car park had a big pair of automatic gates to keep the trespassers out, but one day a commercial decision by the freeholder to remove those gates changed the lives of the residents overnight.
Once the gates were removed there was nothing to prevent the local vagrants from getting into the car park. Subsequently a couple of the residential access doors were forced and rough sleepers and drug users got inside the common parts of the dwellings. There hasn’t been any burglary to note, but the warm landings and carpeted floors have provided a great place to sleep, loiter, take drugs, urinate, smoke and drink etc on an almost daily basis. The residents have had to employ private security patrols and are at their wits end about what to do.
If I ever get to meet the freeholder I do hope their spokesperson doesn’t use the phrase ‘unintended consequences’ to me. To do so would be an insult to the intelligence of everyone that lives in the building. It would have been obvious to anyone with half a brain that to remove these security gates would be like ‘opening the floodgates’!
Mine and the residents’ task now is to convince the freeholder to put the gates back and re-secure the car park in such a way as to benefit both the residents and the commercial units.
This is a really tough challenge and I’ll let you know how we get on.
In the meantime, if any of you - apartment residents, Neighbourhood Watch groups or police - are dealing with similar issues at the moment do please take a look at the police Secured by Design New Homes 2014 document, which spells out what you should be doing to secure these types of underground/under-croft car parks (Section 38).
