The people who collect the bins in Tower Hamlets are on strike. Reportedly not so in Camden, though they might as well be. For three years now, I have rented an apartment in NW6 – formerly of Dusty Springfield fame, now just of dust and dirt.
Mill Lane, where I reside, has been turned into a dumping ground. Besides my downstairs neighbour who treats her front porch like a skip and seems to have hoarded the entire British Museum (perhaps there’s our culprit?), people have taken to dumping all manner of crap on the street as though no one will notice. Indeed, it seems no one does.
If dog fouling were an Olympic sport, Mill Lane’s dog walkers would be bringing home Gold. Coming home from the office on Monday night, I had to dodge a turd the size of Brazil. (It was still there at the next day, glistening in the autumn light.)
Has the council become so lazy, so complacent, so utterly callous towards their own residents (who pay one of the highest rates of council tax in the country) that they will simply leave the flies and cockroaches do their work for them?
Truly it isn’t their job to clean up after dog walkers — I am well aware. But there need to be stricter penalties for those who let their dogs leave foulings enough to serve a fertiliser for the entire Amazon Rainforest. Monday’s incident was not a one-off.
The same goes for those who take out their trash by the ton on a daily basis (honestly, what are they doing?). If the council won’t take these offences seriously, who will? I don’t pay over £2,000 in council taxes every year to have a pavement that’s s**t-stricken.
Because the council has been so careless, so wilfully blind to the revulsion overspilling from the street, it has allowed all sorts of antisocial behaviour to proliferate. I am frequently awoken on a weeknight by the sounds of juvenile delinquency (it may just be drunk youths and not a real threat, but it is not pleasant when I need to be up early). Our local garden centre got burgled three weeks ago. If the street looks abandoned, people will treat it as such.
Different postcode, different planet
I walk up to Hampstead village on a weekend, and it’s like stepping into another world. The streets are so clean I could eat a meal off them. The pavements are immaculate. The whole vibe is quiet and wonderful.
NW6 may not be as posh as NW3, but it’s not so exponentially less charming that our streets should be left so rotten. The decline of Mill Lane, in particular, speaks volumes. Once a shopping street linking West Hampstead to Kilburn, it’s now an artery for rubbish and high-speed car chases. There’s a string of shutdown shops near West End Green more depressing than Sophie’s Choice. They’ve all shut within the year the street went from gross to filthy.
This isn’t unique to Camden of course. In Fulham too, the contrast between one side of Wandsworth Bridge Road and the other is like night and day. It’s not like one side is poor and the other is rich: it’s Fulham, for crying out loud. It’s all blue blooded as hell. The councillors on one side take themselves seriously; the others, clearly, do not.
For those running Sands End as for those running West Hampstead, it seems littering and dog fouling are now on par with shoplifting: like security personnel at checkout, they now view this as normal, something not worth their effort, undeserving of their time.
I’m reminded of a scene in Devil Wears Prada where Anne Hathaway asks Meryl Streep what she can do to help. The answer feels apt right now. "Your job," Streep sighs in tears.
