Estate is kept awake by the sound of late, late football

Published: 25 June, 2010

• RESIDENTS of Spa Green estate found the front-page story (MP Jeremy Corbyn hits out at 3am noisy drunkards, June 11) particularly poignant as few of us had had much sleep that morning thanks to a group of adults (certainly not children) using the ball court in the middle of an estate of 129 homes.

They had been playing football and cheering loudly until well after 3am.

A significant difference between the torment of Mr Corbyn and that of Spa Green estate residents is that there is no applicable licence to restrict or revoke for an unsecured football pitch in the middle of an Islington Council estate which is open 24-7 – no licence required.

If late-night licensed entertainment is not acceptable in a densely populated area such as Islington, football and cheering are certainly not acceptable in the middle of a solely residential estate, but it is nonetheless an all-too-regular occurrence.

On this occasion police did eventually turn up and moved them on. We finally got some quiet at about 3.15am (before we all had to get up for work as usual on Friday morning), but on June 14 football and cheering went on until 1.15am.

We call all the numbers, including the Homes for Islington anti-social behaviour line, Islington’s noise patrol and, when all else fails, the police .

Sadly, even after long waits for responses from these agencies they elicit an ephemeral effect at best and we all live from night to night in dreams of sleep wondering if it’s about to kick off.

The vision for the ball court on the estate was to provide a safe place for our children and young residents to play, but most of the problems we experience are from the area being used by people who in the first instance do not live on the estate and in the second are not children or young people.

Our playground-ball court is old and, despite several interim repairs (all paid for with tenants’ rent and leaseholders’ service charges), is not sufficiently robust that it can be locked. Residents who have volunteered to close the pitch at 9pm have been verbally abused and threatened and on one occasion a resident’s car was badly vandalised.

Resolving the issues by securing the ball court involves a lot of money, and while it is proposed that only estate residents will foot the bill it is ultimately an unlicensed facility for the borough’s all and sundry over which residents have no jurisdiction or control.

Understandably, residents are not happy with this proposal; especially when, far from keeping children amused by day, it is keeping both young and old awake at all hours of the night.

No change in licensing laws is going to help here, but more prompt and decisive responses by the authorities would go a long way.

LUCINDA BOWERS
Resident board member, Spa Green Management Organisation