Making Flats Unfit

The refurbishment of windows at Crescent House, the largest building on the Golden Lane Estate, is now going to involve making the gas fired heating systems of of residents unworkable.

The Loss Assessors have seen a resident survey organised by the Cresent House Residents Group which shows this affects 61% of all residents who heat their homes with gas fired central heating. If a private landlord were to remove the heating from a flat the flat would immediately become statutorily unfit. Yet the Corporation of London appears to think it can do this with impunity.

The City of London proposes to remove the flues of all gas boilers as part of its window upgrade scheme because the flues stick out of the flats, often through windows or the panels alongside them. They feel they are entitled to do this, and it appears they can’t be bothered to design the new facades to accommodate existing flues. Without flues the central heating in around two thirds of the flats in the building cannot work. And the Corporation of London has published NO PLANS TO REPLACE THE REDUNDANT HEATING !

Residents who are concerned about this have asked what they are supposed to do and have been told that ‘options are being examined’ – that’s Guildhallspeak for ‘we dont know’. The huge cost of replacing heating system for council tenants will bump up the cost of the window replacement programme. Leaseholders will have to meet the unexpected costs of a replacement heating system fuelled by electricity from their own pockets. For both tenants and leaseholders the running costs of an all electric system will almost certainly be two-to-three times higher than gas, whether the preplacement systems uses electric storage heaters or electric boilers and the existing water-filled radiators.

https://www.checkatrade.com/blog/cost-guides/gas-vs-electric-heat-cost-which-is-cheaper/

The Corporation of London have not told residents what is coming their way, merely leaking out the information during the summer of 2023 via a hand-picked Resident Liaison Group who are sworn to secrecy. The Loss Assessors, on the other hand, are keen to spread the bad news to all resdients on the basis of ‘forewarned, fore-armed’.

Getting a Good Night’s Sleep

The City of London Corporation has been replacing light fittings the Golden Lane Estate. You might hope they would follow their own Listed Building Management Guidelines and make the new ones match the new ones as closely as possible.  But no………

You might also expect that in a residential building they would fit new lights that work appropriately.   Wrong again……….

You might expect the City of London would source fittings that do not shine right into residents’ bedrooms. Not a chance…..

The Loss Assessors have conducted a survey of the largest building on the Golden Lane estate – Crescent House, with 210 flats. The original  recessed lighting – set into recessed cups in the balconies – was designed to ensure indirect light without glare. This was to improve visibility as your eyes ado no need to adjust as you move past bulbs. And it was designed to avoid light from the balconies going into This is because the flats in the building have clerestory windows – high-level windows, often around the rooms, that make the small flats seem much larger and more spacious than small flats usually do.  These high-level windows are not just on the outside but run through the interiors so that light floods from one room to another and the bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms seem much more spacious.

Unfortunately when the City of London Corporation gets to work it also means that there is lighting of stadium brightness in residents’ bedrooms.  The Loss Assessors have been talking to residents and have been shown a wide range of ingenious devices for keeping the light from the clumsily specified fittings out of their bedrooms. The fact that these DIY solutions are so numerous all over the building shows how widespread the problem is; but of course the housing managers for the estate rarely ‘walk the job’ so appear not to realise that just picking any old light fitting from a catalogue is the way to sleepless nights.

Here are some of the arrangements residents have been driven to to keep their bedrooms form being brightly lit all night.