I don’t like living in Edmonton.

We have drug dealers a few doors down, and the police have been to their house on a number of occasions of late.  These dealers have even been clambering over back fences including ours to get into the house, and managed to break part of our fence while making the eight feet climb over.  I videoed one guy hopping over and breaking into the house in question about a week ago, and amazingly the police managed to come round and arrest him.  It hasn’t stopped others clambering over our tall fences since then.  We even had some young men scrambling over when they were being pursued by the police, earlier this month.

Though it sounds trivial, there’s a huge amount of rubbish that billows round our streets – and I mean huge.  It’s partly to do with many houses being let and sub-let to huge numbers of people and, as a result, the bins are overflowing long before the collection date.  And from March 2020 the collections will be every two weeks.  Goodness knows what will happen in terms of litter then.  In more affluent areas of our borough, where our decision makers live, and where it’s one family to a large house, they won’t need to worry about overflowing bins.  But in this cramped area, overflowing with people, it’s going to get pretty bad.

We have lots of prostitutes in Edmonton too, including at the end of our street.   Even by the standards of the many squalid parts of London we have a lot – so many in fact that it was the main story on BBC London news a few days ago.  At least it’s better than the usual headlines about gangs and murders in Tottenham (I live almost on the border with Tottenham).  I didn’t realise that pimps actually kept an eye on the prostitutes from a distance.  The BBC also said that although the last lot of twenty or so Edmonton prostitutes had all been sent back to Romania, the organised gangs swiftly replaced them with a new set of girls.  When you walk down Fore Street, you have to walk past quite a few prostitutes, and you have to walk quickly with your head down.  On more than one occasion they’ve moved repeatedly to block my path, or asked me if I want to sleep with them.

So if you fancy living in a crime-riddled, litter-strewn ghetto, if you want to be accosted by prostitutes, or if you want to be burgled (we have, twice) – and you have £350,000 to blow on a property, come to Edmonton.