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It all started with an unexpected email into The Londoner’s inbox, back in early September. Attached was a picture of a cheap-looking pleather man-bag, alongside the opening line: “I am writing to you as a resident of the Loughborough Estate in SW9.” The estate, it explained, was falling apart thanks to its management group, despite receiving millions of pounds from both tenants and Lambeth council to maintain things. And the man-bags were part of a set of gifts bought for tenants using £374,000 of that money — even as rubbish piled up in the streets and rampant disrepair was going ignored.
“It’s hard to believe that it's allowed to happen and the result is that people's lives and living conditions are in an incredibly dire state,” it read. “There are elderly and vulnerable residents with no hot water, people who've had sewage flooding their homes, mould and pest infestations.”
Though the Guardian had published an initial article in February on the plight of tenants on the estate and their attempts to oust their estate management, our emailer was adamant that there was “more to unearth”. It was enough for me to start digging. But when I first started looking into the story, I had no idea it would spiral into a saga of alleged assassination attempts, ambulance call-outs and barrels of chemicals that risked a “catastrophic and potentially fatal” explosion.
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