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With Lambeth Council and Thames Water seemingly incapable of attending to the sizeable water leak that had been escaping from the abandoned Carlton Mansions building on Coldharbour Lane, the Fire Brigade have stepped in to divert the flow.
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Called in by a member of the public on Tuesday night (who got a little carried away and described it as a “burst water main”), the Fire Brigade decided to take a closer look, forcing an entrance via the gate by the side of the building.
They discovered that the water was bubbling up at ground level right next to the brickwork, so they weren’t sure if it was coming from below or – more worryingly – higher up in the building.
Either way, there’s a good chance that the four month old leak might have caused some damage to the building, particularly after the recent cold snap.
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Fire Brigade officers decided to at least stop the water flowing along Coldharbour Lane, and put down a couple of sandbags to divert the stream into an adjacent drain (see above), although the leak has not been repaired.
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Back in September 2014, Lambeth Council forcibly evicted tenants from what was one of Brixton’s longest-serving housing co-ops, insisting that they had to be made homeless so that work could immediately start on the building.
Since that date, the building has remained unoccupied and, judging by their lack of concern over this issue, uncared for too despite the leak being widely reported by many people.
Some local cynics have even suggested that Lambeth would be quite happy to see the building fall down, given its somewhat ‘inconvenient’ presence in context of the major redevelopment that is planned for the area.
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We took a quick look around outside the building last night (well, the gate is still open!) and saw that the ground floor and first floor windows had been sealed off to prevent the return of squatters.
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Read more:
Discuss: Carlton Mansions co-op in Brixton [In-depth thread on urban75 with over 800 replies]
Photo feature: The last days of Carlton Mansions, the evicted housing co-op in Coldharbour Lane, Brixton