The Prince Charles Cinema landlord and his cockroach-infested "worst place to live in Croydon"
Asif Aziz is feted for philanthropy and owns much of the capital's West End. Residents of the businessman's south London housing complex are more concerned about infestations.
Asif Aziz is the man dubbed “Britain’s meanest landlord” who has become a regular in London Centric as we try to shine a light on the webs of power, influence and money that define the modern capital. The Prince Charles Cinema near Leicester Square claims Aziz is trying to “bully” it out of its building, while his business has also played a key role in the closure of the world’s first YMCA branch near Tottenham Court Road.
But we’ve also received a lot of emails and WhatsApps from people who don’t normally benefit from being a high-profile cause célèbre. They are the residents renting Aziz’s properties across suburban London, who have tales of unsanitary conditions and complaints about a landlord who appears to have stopped caring about their welfare.
London Centric asked journalist Lizzie Dearden, the highly-experienced former home affairs editor of the Independent, to investigate. She’s more used to reporting on complex terror plots and far-right activism — but what she found reveals an important new aspect to the ongoing story of Asif Aziz and his role in London.
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Gotham comes to Croydon: “It’s HELL. DO NOT MOVE HERE.”
By Lizzie Dearden
In Christopher Nolan's film The Dark Knight Rises, the Delta Point building in Croydon doubles as Gotham City Hospital, where Gary Oldman's police commissioner is rescued by Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character from the forces of supervillain Bane.
Shortly after it served as the filming location for an on-screen dystopia, the former BT office by West Croydon station was converted into more than 400 flats by a company controlled by billionaire landlord Asif Aziz. A decade later, its residents say they are living in a real-world hell, paying for the privilege of occupying cockroach-infested housing while the profits flow into the bank accounts of a company located in a tax haven.
Aziz has increasingly tried to portray himself as a major philanthropic figure in the capital, posing with mayor Sadiq Khan after funding London’s first Ramadan lights, winning praise for subsidising hundreds of young Muslims to attend university, and paying for interns in the offices of a growing number of MPs and news organisations.
Aziz says his charity is dedicated to “improving the life chances of people who, purely because of the circumstances of their birth, have been disadvantaged”.
At the same time he is also the landlord of hundreds of flats his Criterion Capital company has built in the capital’s suburbs within the shells of old office blocks. They contain many disadvantaged Londoners who are living in miserable conditions — such as young children waking to find cockroaches in their ear, or people who complain the water supply has been switched off to individual flats.
One of these buildings is Delta Point, which looms over West Croydon’s bus and railway stations. The 14-storey block, advertised under Criterion Hospitality’s “Dstrkt” housing brand, is dominated by a large bright pink sign promising “clean, safe and secure flats”. The company’s website describes its founder’s vision: “Focusing on providing what really matters to tenants is Asif’s number one priority when developing in the private residential sector.”
When London Centric visited last week residents laughed at this claim, reporting that poor maintenance and vermin are widespread. Despite this, rents have been rising at a rapid pace.
One housing review site branded Delta Point the worst place to live in Croydon, warning: “DO NOT MOVE HERE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Bed bug and cockroach infestations weekly, leakages, clogged drain pipes and blocked toilets … it’s HELL. DO NOT MOVE HERE.”
Standing inside the building’s lobby Sadie, a 38-year-old mother who has lived at Delta Point since 2023, told London Centric she has been complaining about a cockroach infestation in her flat since she moved in to find “loads of them, just crawling around”.
Despite emails and calls to the building managers, a pest control team was not sent in until a year later, after one of the insects crawled inside her ear and had to be removed in hospital.
“I was sleeping, and then all of a sudden I heard this horrible sound,” she added, putting her hand to her air and making a crunching noise. “I woke up and it was uncomfortable. I had to Google what to do because I couldn't get it out – I tried with the earbuds and all that but I couldn't move it.”
Sadie, who like the other tenants in this article asked to be identified by a pseudonym, said she had to go to Accident and Emergency for the insect to be “suctioned out” by medics, who confirmed it was a cockroach: “They gave me antibiotics, because when they scanned my ear they saw that it was really red. The doctor said it was trying to bite my eardrum or something like that.”
Shortly after the incident, Sadie’s 10-year-old son also found a cockroach in his ear but she managed to remove it without medical intervention.
“That's when they sent someone to actually use some chemicals to kill all of them, after a year of us fighting,” she said. “I had been complaining and they didn't come, it was only after the hospital that they did something. We had arguments with my neighbours because they thought cockroaches were coming from mine, I thought they were coming from theirs – everyone was complaining about cockroaches.”
Sadie has no choice but to remain living at Criterion Hospitality’s Delta Point, where she was placed by a Croydon council as emergency accommodation after fleeing domestic violence and becoming homeless. The council said it is "aware" of the issues at Delta Point and said the intermediary agency who provided the housing had been responsive: “Repair issues have been resolved, and they are addressing any remaining concerns. We will continue to check the accommodation before offering it to tenants.”
Online reviews of Delta Point suggest the problems are longstanding. The block is ranked the worst place to live in Croydon on the Home Views website, while review sites are littered with former residents sounding the alarm. One calls it “the worst building ever I have lived in”, while others warn “do not move in here even if it's your last option” and “avoid this building like the plague”.
Several residents spoken to by London Centric reported past or ongoing cockroach infestations, including a woman with a three-year-old daughter.
“About two weeks after I moved in, I saw my first one,” Rebecca said. “That was in 2022, and when I contacted [Criterion Hospitality] they said ‘oh, we don't have that problem’ so in other words, I must have brought them in from where I’d come from. But I’d never had cockroaches.”
Rebecca said a professional company was sent in after she went down to Delta Point’s reception “every day to get them to do it” but she fears the notoriously resistant insects will return.
She is more concerned about her water supply, which was recently switched off by the building managers following a dispute about alleged overcharging — a pattern of behaviour reported by other residents.
“My water was off for about three days, there was no drinking water and no hot water,” Rebecca said. “They said I was in debt but I wasn’t. My meter has been broken, it's been broken since I've moved in and I've contacted them for years about fixing it and they haven't come.”
Rebecca said she had to move in with her mother while the water was cut off, and that a payment of £100 was demanded by Criterion Hospitality to switch it back on. Her water meter has still not been fixed, and her oven has also been broken for a year.
While London Centric was speaking to the mother, another Delta Point resident arrived in reception searching for the concierge to report another flat had seen its water supply stopped.
“They turned the water off, they do things like that to people,” said the man, while a different resident said he recently heard of an elderly woman in the block losing her supply.
Asked whether the building fits Criterion Hospitality’s online description of “high spec” flats with “exceptionally clean, tidy and safe” shared spaces, the man laughed.
“I’ve lived here for two years and I’ve never seen all the lifts working,” he said. “The concierge is never there, we are supposed to have them 24 hours a day but they are never there. As soon as you come in you can see it’s not luxurious, far from it.”
Criterion Hospitality is currently advertising several flats for rent in the building, ranging from £1,350 a month for a one bedroom flat and £1,700 a month for two bedrooms, hailing the block as “one of Croydon's most iconic looking buildings” with a 24 hour concierge service.
A nurse leaving the building described how she and her colleagues frequently struggle to access the building in order to care for a disabled resident, having to “ring and ring the bell” because reception is not always staffed.
No one is present at the front desk when London Centric arrives, but about half an hour later a concierge appears and is immediately approached by residents with different complaints.
On one side of the reception area, a broken lift is emitting a continuous beeping noise. A sign taped on a nearby door apologises for the inconvenience and thanks residents for their “understanding and cooperation”, directing them to lifts on the other side of the building. Only two lifts are working to serve the 404 flats.
Matthew, who has lived at Delta Point for four years, said its management had worsened in recent years: “There have been big problems. The lift isn’t working, the cleaning is a problem. Even if you complain, everything stays the same.”
Working out exactly where the buck should stop is made more difficult by the web of offshore companies that link the property to Aziz and his London property empire. While it has been widely reported that Aziz’s Criterion Capital owns Delta Point, land registry documents show that property’s freehold is held by an offshore Isle of Man company which does not have to declare its true beneficial owner.
Siobhain McDonagh, the Labour MP for Mitcham and Morden, has questioned this opaque structure in parliament on behalf of constituents living in another similar converted office block operated by Aziz’s company in her constituency.
In 2023, she urged the government to create a public register that identifies the beneficial owners of offshore shell companies, telling parliament that Aziz and his family managed a large property portfolio through “dozens of companies on the Isle of Man”.
She told London Centric that she had been receiving a “steady stream” of complaints from residents of Criterion’s Britannia Point in Colliers Wood for years, including issues with broken lifts and heating.
“My understanding has always been that Mr Aziz and his company own [the buildings], I’m not aware of any change,” McDonagh said. “We would expect that in our capital city, you would automatically know who actually owns a building.”
Criterion Capital did not respond to a request for comment asking to formally confirm that Aziz controls the Isle of Man trust that owns Delta Point. The company also did not offer any response to the residents’ concerns about housing conditions contained in this article.
Interest in Aziz has spiked since his recent battles with the Prince Charles Cinema and the YMCA, as campaigners succeeded in shining a light on one of the West End’s biggest property owners. And his story, spanning both prominent public philanthropy and a property business that seems to leave angry tenants in its wake, feels typical of some of modern London’s elite. Yet the businessman, like many of the capital’s most influential characters, remains unknown to most Londoners.
He also seems to shrug off public criticism. As Aziz told an interviewer last year: “The greatest lesson I've learned is that I will continue to make mistakes until the day I die, and I continue to persevere.”
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This is wonderful - and I still think it is sad that your influence is half because you do such a good job and half because in this city of more than 10 million people you seem to be the only one doing this kind of work. The. Only. One.
Thank you Jim for doing a fantastic piece of investigative work. If only more journalists were motivated to work in this way - or indeed ALLOWED to - the world would be a better place.
Best wishes for all your future vital 'lifting the carpet'.
Ann Eastman