81-year-old with knee replacement has to climb stairs to 13th-floor flat

An 81-year-old woman has been forced to regularly climb up the stairs of her housing block to her 13th floor flat due to persistent lift failures. The resident said she was worried about how she would be able to continue living in the block after she had a knee replacement operation in May last year.

Catharine Purdy, 81, has lived in 63-162 Fellows Court for over 30 years. The council tenant said the Hoxton building has suffered from poor maintenance by Hackney Council for years, leading to her often needing to climb multiple flights of stairs to reach her flat on the 13th floor due to the block's lifts intermittently working.

Ms Purdy told MyLondon: "I think the communication is completely zero, 'Don't worry, it will get sorted.' That's all the answer you get."

She added: "People can accept that something is wrong, but they need to know what the plan is to repair it. We need an overall plan. Is this building coming down? Do I have to move? I’m 81 and I have just had a knee replacement so I need to have a bit of security to know how long I can stay here."

During a MyLondon visit, two paramedics called to the block said they would have to carry a resident who was reliant on a wheelchair down the stairs of the building due to the lifts being out of operation. Ms Purdy added that since she moved into the block, the drains of her bath and bathroom sink have never been able to efficiently drain.

She said: "The water doesn’t go out of our bath, you just wait and wait and wait. You can't have one bath after another too quickly… You have to wait sometimes about an hour, it depends."

Ms Purdy added: "Sometimes I work on it. Last night I was plunging it and the hand basin."

The resident said she has regularly called the council repairs team about the issue, but an officer arrives with just a plunger to attempt to resolve it. She said tenants are facing multiple problems relating to the pipes of the building, including her friend Emiko Soekawa’s radiator previously being out of use for nearly a year.

The tenant said "We had a major leak about ten years after I had arrived and it was all down the stairs and down the corridor."

She added: "The key problem is the increased anxiety of every single resident. People are saying water has been running for over a year. What is happening underneath this building?"

David Coleman, 44, has lived in the block for 10 years. He said the issues with lifts in the buildings has become so frequent that faults occur nearly weekly.

He told MyLondon: "It's diabolical. Residents did put a sticker on here saying that the lift was not working. It's still not working but they have removed the sticker for some reason."

The resident added that tenants had expressed safety concerns for the building after panels on the walls in communal corridors of the block were removed by a council contractor in 2019 following inspections from London Fire Brigade. However, no replacement panels have been added and the walls in the block remain bare with exposed holes.

A letter from Hackney Council to residents last month seen by MyLondon stated that the panels were removed as a safety precaution after the Grenfell Tower fire. It said that work was planned for summer this year to upgrade the communal corridors of the block.

Kain Roach, Operations Director at Hackney Council, told MyLondon: "We are aware of the issues at Fellows Court and as we have told residents there we are doing all we can to fix the issues they have raised. However, some of the core issues leading to the problems they are facing take time to fix."

He added: "We fully understand the concerns residents are raising, how frustrating it is and the impact it is having on their quality of life. We want to reassure them they are not being ignored. Unfortunately some of the issues are taking longer than we hoped."

Mr Kain accepted that the authority may not have communicated with residents on issues in the block as regularly as it should have. He added that tenants would be informed as soon as possible on the work that was being undertaken to resolve the block’s issues.

He said: "However, while we recognise that this block is experiencing a high number of leaks from the heating system pipework, any suggestions that we are not dealing with leaks as they occur are untrue. To try and minimise the impact that these leaks have until the system is replaced, we are making every effort to carry out preventative works where possible."

Have a story you want to share? Email joseph.coughlan@reachplc.com.

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