‘It makes me want to cry’: inside crumbling courts as judges wrestle with rise in rent eviction cases

Blackpool’s central pier: the court in the town is a worn-out building that seems to match many of the cases that appear there. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

It is a February morning at Doncaster county court and a retired man is being led out of a courtroom wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. He has sobbed his way through much of a near 15-minute hearing, telling a district judge how his efforts at cardiopulmonary resuscitation failed to save the life of his ageing mother just four weeks earlier.

That personal tragedy compounded efforts to solve mounting financial problems that had worsened since his retirement – including more than £60,000 in mortgage and interest arrears on his £300,000 home, for which Leeds building society is pursuing him.