One of South London's oldest Turkish restaurants is being fined £2.5m over a misplaced vent

Dear Londoners — apologies for coming to you a little later in the day this week. We needed to spend some extra time making our big story watertight, and that meant waiting for a few phone calls to come through. We'll be back at the regular time for your next Monday briefing, promise. That aside, welcome to October. The trees outside our office have begun to turn gold and orange, and it tends to be dark by the time I leave in the evenings. There's something sad about the end of summer, of course, but there's also something thrilling about the transition into a new season — particularly when this means that The Londoner is approaching its 1st birthday. But more on that in good time...

We also wanted to thank you for your reception to our recent stories. Commenter Joseph called our weekend read about a company known as the "grim reaper" of London pubs "excellent", while Penny and ?'s comments on our culture edition pretty much made our week:

As always, we love it when you leave feedback on our stories (or send us an email), and we're so glad to have one of the nicest discussion spaces on the web (no mean feat in 2025).

Big story: The community Turkish restaurant facing a £2.5mn bill for an illegal vent

Topline: A beloved community Turkish restaurant in Lewisham is being taken to court after the council leveraged a “draconian” law to hand them a £2.5m fine over a minor planning dispute about a ventilation system.

Context: A longstanding New Cross institution, Meze Mangal was one of the first Turkish restaurants south of the river when it opened over 25 years ago. But now the restaurant’s owners, Ahmet and Sahin Gok, are facing prosecution by Lewisham council under the Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA), usually used to prosecute those profiting from serious money laundering. The crime in question? Failing to get proper planning permission for the support structure used to hold up their new ventilation system. The amount initially being demanded by the council was £2.5m — though that figure is reportedly set to be reduced to around £450,000 on appeal.

The timeline: Back in 2014, the Gok brothers were told by Lewisham Council that they needed to install a new ventilation system after a single neighbour complained about the smell of their food coming from their restaurant. But installing the new ventilation shaft required the addition of a small support structure at the back of their restaurant. They claim they did not know the structure would require planning permission to be built until they were later notified of the breach by the council. When they tried to apply for retrospective planning permission, it was rejected by the council and a planning enforcement notice was taken against them. 

In 2020, they were told the case had been dropped, but then eventually were told the case had been reopened. In March 2023, they were convicted in their absence (the duo tell me they missed a court date as a result of the medical needs of their ill father, who later died). That conviction has allowed the council to pursue a POCA prosecution against the brothers, which allows them to claim any revenue made in the last six years as a result of the legal breach, a figure the council initially calculated to be £2.5m.

Confiscated passports and frozen bank accounts: One particularly baffling aspect to the case is the fact that the brothers have seen their passports confiscated by the judge in their case in order to stop them fleeing the country. They also had their restaurant’s business accounts frozen as a result of the case, losing them thousands of pounds in income. 

Speaking to the brothers: When The Londoner visited the restaurant last week, the Gok brothers seemed despondent. “They made us into criminals, as if we’ve done something wrong,” Sahin told The Londoner. “I don’t want to stay here anymore. Mentally, I’m just finished.” The confiscation of their passports has been particularly painful as it meant they missed the funerals back in Turkey of two of their uncles, one of whom they were supposed to be pallbearers for. “If I tell my family my passport has been taken because of this they don’t believe me,” he said. Over the weekend they launched a GoFundMe to try and help fund their legal fight, which has already raised over £11,000.

Council Christmas parties: For the brothers, a particularly frustrating aspect to the case is the fact their restaurant is hugely popular with the very same council that is now taking them to court accusing them of benefitting from the “proceeds of crime”. They say the restaurant has hosted parties for council staff as recently as last Christmas, long after the council had begun their prosecution.

“Maximise Income”: The case has sparked concerns with local campaigners that POCA prosecutions may be getting used as a tool to raise revenues for cash strapped councils, with little to no safeguards on whether the prosecutions are truly in the public interest. Staff at Brent council, which is also increasingly using POCA prosecutions, previously told a magazine aspects of the law were “draconian” (though notably, this did not stop them from continuing to use it).

Two years ago, another business just a short walk away from Meze Mangal, KJ Building Supplies, faced a similar council POCA prosecution over using its driveway to store small amounts of sand, timber and other building materials. That case was eventually dropped after a community campaign. A job advert for an officer in the Lewisham council’s private housing team seen by The Londoner advertised how the officer would need to “maximise income for the borough in respect of the proceeds of crime” for the council as a key responsibility.

What the council said: "We always try to resolve cases informally, and prosecution is an absolute last resort. The vast majority of the hundreds of planning enforcement cases are dealt with by us in this way," a council spokesperson told The Londoner. "In 2019 the restaurant owners said they would remove the extraction system once their planning appeal had been dismissed. However, the restaurant continues to operate with the illegal extractor eight years after this case was opened. Had the extraction system been removed at any point during that time then no further action would have been necessary.

"The Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA) has arisen because they have been found guilty by the Court of a criminal offence. The Court ordered confiscation of passports because the defendants did not turn up at Court hearings," they added. "This was a matter for the Court and we had no involvement. Similarly, the financial investigation and penalties are guided by the rules set out in the Proceeds of Crime Act and the decisions of the Court."

Your news briefing

🐘 Thanks to our readers, we heard the news that beloved Elephant and Castle institution Kaieteur Kitchen had been locked out and facing eviction from their restaurant, alongside three other restaurants, over unpaid electricity bills. The dispute is particularly controversial because a permanent new home for traders like Faye Gomes, who runs Kaieteur, was a key part of Southwark Council’s deal with developers for the demolition of the old Elephant and Castle shopping centre. Developer Get Living placed the old traders in Castle Square, a temporary site that traders say has massively reduced their footfall. They also claim that their managing agent Savills refused to give them any details about electricity bills until 2024, when they asked them to pay for the last few years of arrears upfront (in Gomes case it was some £12,000, according to London Centric). Southwark News went to a protest last week held in solidarity with the locked out shopkeepers.

🍺 The iconic McGlynn’s pub in King’s Cross is being saved; and its new owner is none other than Peter Doig, one of the 21st century’s most celebrated artists (and currently the focus of an exhibition at the Serpentine). The three storey pub shut back in September 2023 after the tragic death of its beloved landlord. Since then, its future was up in the air, until news broke that it had been sold in April to an unnamed owner. But after analysing local planning filings, the Camden New Journal found out that the new owner seems to be Doig — once a local to the area — and his partner Parinaz Mogadassi, who founded the legendary Tramps gallery in New York.

✉️ Haringey Council has been forced to apologise after government inspectors found that the council’s social care team had more than 1,100 unread emails in its official inbox, including hundreds of vital police reports, as per this BBC report. The Local Government Ombudsman, who handled the investigation into the council, cited cases where vulnerable adults were left with life changing injuries after the council failed to lead interventions. 

Quick hits: Two masterpieces by Hogarth in St Barts’ Hospital are opened to the public for the first time, why a Tory Assembly Member defecting to Reform is bad news for the party and more than 400 people arrested at pro-Palestine Action protest over the weekend. 

Got a story for us to look into? Please get in touch at editor@the-londoner.co.uk.

In case you missed it…

• On Saturday, we published our investigation into Linea Homes, a developer that claims to save London pubs, but is linked to the successful, and attempted, closure of some 28 boozers across the capital. Its targets include some of Peckham, Wimbledon and Camden’s most iconic boozers.
• Friday saw the publication of our latest culture edition, where we took you through the capital’s best church cafes, a guide to the London Film Festival and a review of the latest Tate Britain exhibition. If you, like one of readers, are “looking for a date spot” to take your “anarchist bible study crush”, then this could be one for you!
• Our Wednesday feature was a profile of Kollier Din-Bangura, the homeless artist of Mayfair beloved by everyone from the King to Naomi Campbell. 

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Wining and dining

With endless offerings and non-stop openings, we all know that deciding where to eat and drink in the capital can be fraught. We want to make it easy — so every week we’ll give you our insider guide to the city’s best spots. 

One perfect meal: Every Londoner has a preferred falafel spot. A highly personal and subjective judgement, the anointing of a favourite place must consider a few vital factors: not too far from either workplace or house; has a great selection of salads to choose from; uses externally crispy, internally fluffy fresh falafels; is contained within a flatbread of excellent stability and flavour. Near The Londoner’s office, there are a few places that tick these boxes, but one that I visit more than any other: the modestly named Food Works Turkish Kitchen. Here, the chilli sauce is homemade, the pickles are plentiful and the bread used for the wrap is the kind of pillowy, charcoal-tinged flatbread usually served as a side accompaniment to a cold mixed mezze. If you’re feeling chickpea-d out, they also have an excellent veggie adana shish. This faux industrial decor doesn’t exactly make this appropriate for a special date night sit-in spot, but as a lunch taken to eat in nearby St James’ park, it can’t be beaten. 

One perfect drink: Okay so this one does feel a little like cheating, but given our weekend read was literally about pubs in the capital, it would be remiss of us not to include one of them as our recommendation for this week. So if you want to help support the Trafalgar in their dispute with Linea Homes, or just find yourselves in South London and want to visit a CAMRA award winning pub, pop over to the backstreet boozer near South Wimbledon station, and enjoy a cheap pint of craft beer and a venue that as our weekend read put it “cherishes the history that bleeds into every chair and table, every pane of its stained glass windows, while still managing to adapt”.

Have a perfect sandwich you think we should check out? Want to recommend your favourite pub? Let us know in the comments.

Our favourite reads & watches

Heavy horses help rewild Tooting Common with wildflowers — BBC London, Alice Bhandhukravi and George Tryfonidis

Ahead of a rewilding project on Tooting Common, Wandsworth council have deployed Clydesdale horses to ready the ground — a more sustainable choice than tractors, which compact the soil.

Inside the Tony Blair Institute — Peter Geoghegan and May Bulman, New Statesman

We missed this one at the time, but for those who want to know more about the capital’s shady industry of lobbyists and think tanks, this New Statesman exposé into the dodgy affairs of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, and the tech moguls secretly driving the non-profit’s supposedly objective AI evangelism, is a must read. 

To Do List

1. Head to the Courtauld Gallery to see American Still Life, a retrospective of 20th century painter Wayne Thiebaud. It’s a vision of mass-produced Americana made intimate (find out more in this Observer review here).

2. Catch two of this century’s most exciting authors in conversation, as acclaimed American novelist, essayist and short story writer Lynne Tillman talks about her new collection to Brian Dillon at the London Review Bookshop.

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From the archive

Now it’s known for being one of the most expensive and architecturally beloved estates in London, but this BBC piece from 50 years ago documents the outrage of wealthy Barbican Estate residents left with less facilities than neighbouring council estates.