Merry Christmas, you're evicted
A festive tale of a landlord making all his tenants homeless. Plus: Scroll down for a preposterous property of the week.
Welcome to London Centric, where the responses to last week’s investigation into the unofficial Harry Potter shops spreading out across central London have continued to flow in. We have received some intriguing legal threats from the operator of several of these shops, who says the piece is highly defamatory. London Centric stands by its reporting, which can still be read here, complete with additional comment from the owner.
I’m now working on a quite extraordinary follow-up to the original story after new information came to light — please do consider signing-up as a paying subscriber if you want to support dogged and curious investigative journalism about the capital. This kind of work takes time and money.
Meanwhile, on the day that the government pledges to enormously increase housebuilding and rents continue to go through the roof, scroll down for a story about a new approach to mass evictions which could be coming to your corner of London very soon.
Scroll to the end for the main story.
Young man, there’s no place you can go.
The world’s oldest YMCA branch is in a state of civil war, after trustees of its parent charity announced it will shut down its main site near Tottenham Court Road tube station, having already secretly sold the property to a billionaire property developer.
Members of the Central YMCA who set up a website to coordinate opposition to the closure told London Centric their site was blocked from being accessed over the club’s internal WiFi network, suggesting it may have been done on purpose. A part-time employee who set up a petition opposing the closure was also allegedly warned about his behaviour on social media.
A spokesperson from the club confirmed the protest website had been inaccessible on the YMCA network but insisted it was accident: “No action whatsoever has been taken against the website, and there is no intentional block in place, it is simply a case that all insecure sites are caught in our firewall”.
The YMCA — yes, they’ve heard the song — is a global collection of clubs providing a variety of services including gyms, sporting activities, educational classes, and training opportunities to people around the world, as well as occasionally accommodation.
The central London YMCA branch is where it all began back in 1844. Its current venue is spread out across multiple floors of a concrete tower block on Great Russell Street featuring dance studios, workshops, and a swimming pool that was refurbished only six months ago at substantial expense. But the club’s parent charity, which has recorded hefty losses of several million pounds in recent years, said the site will close for good will close in early February. The trustees blamed demographic changes in central London as fewer people live nearby or commute in, increased maintenance costs on the building, and a shortage of members to cover the bills.
The charity said it can better serve its outreach purposes by working from smaller sites in Kings Cross and Moorgate. Members who want to use a different YMCA swimming pool are also being advised to travel 16 miles to the outdoor Hampton Pool in South West London.
One person involved in the campaign to stop the sale said the YMCA management failing to recognise the importance of its location: “It’s a bit like saying the British Museum should sell its building and move out of London because then it can put more things on display.”
It’s unclear whether the central YMCA can still be saved, as the trustees ensured the sale of the club’s building was completed before the closure was announced. It was bought by a company controlled by Asif Aziz, the billionaire property developer who already operates the windowless underground Zedwell hotel in the building’s former car park. To bring multiple London Centric stories together – in a way that reflects the hidden networks behind much of central London’s property ownership – Aziz’s company also owns the Trocadero, making him the landlord of one of the unofficial Harry Potter shops featured in last week’s edition.
Preposterous London property of the week.
A bargain at just £24m, this newly-listed penthouse flat called “The Astor” overlooks parliament and comes with three bedrooms plus an annexe for staff. The Rightmove listing (and do people with £24m to spare really use Rightmove?) emphasises that the main room used to be the “directors’ dining hall” but neglects to mention who those directors were. That’s possibly because the building used to be the headquarters of defunct British manufacturing giant Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and potential purchasers may not want to think about the fertiliser deals that were done in their dining room.
London Centric investigates: The former payday loan boss evicting his tenants at Christmas.
A multimillionaire property developer is kicking out 80 tenants at short notice in one of the the worst mass evictions recently seen in London — with residents informed of their impending homelessness in an email that ended “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year”.
Henry Smith is the former owner of a payday loan business which repeatedly engaged in “unfair behaviour” while lending tens of millions of pounds to some of the poorest people in British society. He is also the boss of Aitch group which has built dozens of projects across the capital from Wimbledon to Chingford.
Vive Living, an apartment block Smith owns in Deptford, promised to help young professionals who could not afford to buy a property “join the new generation making London renting a lifestyle choice”. Instead, more than a hundred residents of the flats have been told, just before Christmas, that they have two months to vacate their properties. The residents believe their story is part of a wider wave of evictions as landlords across the capital rush to kick out existing tenants before renters gain new legal protections early next year.
Marilize Sage, who has lived in a two-bed apartment in Vive Living since 2017, told London Centric: “I suspect they are doing this to get rid of the current tenants and they think they can make more money.”
Asked if she had a message for Henry Smith, she said: “It’s not just about the money, it’s people’s lives.”
A spokesperson for Smith’s Aitch Group insisted the mass eviction is “to facilitate the refurbishment of the building”. They emphasised the no-fault eviction notices are legal because all the tenants have been given until February to find a new home: “We are working with residents to assist them with their relocations.”
It is unclear why Aitch Group is rushing to refurbish the Vive Living apartment block on Childers Street, which is only seven years old. The building has no known structural problems and there is no record of planning applications for major works being submitted to the local council. When London Centric visited the flats it was clear they were fitted out to a high standard and showed little sign of wear and tear.
Residents suspect they are the inadvertent victims of a looming change in the law that is supposed to protect Londoners just like them. At the moment landlords can easily evict an existing tenant by starting a ‘no-fault’ eviction process. This is done by filing a ‘section 21’ notice, leaving tenants with a short period of time to find alternative accommodation. From early next year the ability to easily evict tenants without a legitimate reason is expected be removed. This policy was first proposed by Conservative prime minister Theresa May in 2019 and is finally working its way through parliament in the form of Labour’s Renters’ Rights Bill.
Yet the lengthy wait for the law to come into effect means many London landlords are using the time to kick out their tenants while they still can. No-fault evictions are already at an eight-year high, with one London estate agent telling London Centric that they have seen a sudden dash to evict residents and small businesses in recent weeks — which could push up rents as homeless households flood the market and compete for the remaining properties.
“Unfair practices”
Smith, who styles himself as an authentic East Ender, is keen to share news about his property development successes, such as a £330m development in Bexley or the redevelopment of the Regent’s Canal in Hackney close to Broadway Market.
However, he has not posted on his Instagram about his long stint owning a payday lender that overcharged customers for loans, took payments from their bank accounts without permission, and refused to discuss repayment plans for people in arrears.
At the peak of the financial crisis in 2009 Smith founded CFO Lending, which offered high interest rate lending to people who could not borrow money from mainstream lenders. It later collapsed following an investigation by financial regulators, which saw it ordered to return £34m to 97,000 customers after being found to have engaged in deeply unfair practices.
While Smith drove Ferraris with his wife around Europe, his payday loans company was sending threatening letters, reporting inaccurate information to credit agencies, and failing to check whether customers could afford their loans.
Soon after being humiliated in the press for his actions, Smith threw himself into high-profile charitable activity. A section of his corporate website is devoted to his fundraising activities — including sponsored trips to both the North Pole and South Pole. Separately, a professional PR company lists his charity as a client, describing how they were employed to “raise awareness and secure media coverage about London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s £10,000 donation and visit” to Smith’s charity.
“Mental drain”
Most property developers construct blocks of flats then sell them off individually to a mix of homeowners and buy-to-let landlords. In the case of the Deptford block Smith retained the whole of the Vive Living building through his Childer Street Property Ltd business so he could let out the properties through a so-called “build-to-rent” model. His company’s accounts value the block of flats at £40.5m and show how millions of pounds a year is taken out of the company and paid to a related business, suggesting Vive Living may be generating substantial cash from existing tenancies.
One person whose home is in the Vive Living block said their looming eviction, just a few months after signing a lease on the property that featured a break clause, was a “mental drain” that would cost them thousands of pounds in moving fees and other costs.
They had only recently moved into a one-bed flat costing £1,650 a month, bought furniture that fitted the flat, and were settling in for the long term with their partner. Now they are facing a rush to find a new home in a local area that is chronically short on property and at a time of year when people (including estate agents and letting agencies) are taking a break with their families.
“I’m not going to have a roof over my head”
Some tenants are so desperate they are considering the increasingly-common tactic of ignoring the section 21 notices, continuing to pay rent at the old rate, then waiting for a court-ordered eviction notice. These currently take as long as six months for landlords to obtain due to enormous backlogs in the court system.
Marilize Sage said managing the symptoms of her bipolar disorder has been difficult due to the stress caused by the eviction notice. She said she had always prided herself on being a good tenant who paid her rent on time but would now need to find £5,000 to cover the deposit, first month’s rent, and moving costs associated with finding a new flat in the local area: “The first thing that hits me is my anxiety. That leads to a manic phase, where I can do self-destructive things. All of this stress, it’s hard to describe how it feels to someone else. I’m sitting here thinking I’m not going to have a roof over my head.”
Like Sage, many of the soon-to-be-evicted residents at Smith’s Vive Living building have been in the block since it was completed. The homes, which include access to a co-working space and communal cinema, were marketed at young professionals who wanted a secure place to rent for the long term under the slogan: “Renters deserve better. Better homes, better choice, better service.”
The property’s website still boasts that residents would be able to “settle in and make the place your home” thanks to long leases that would feel like owning a property: “Forget scrabbling around for a mortgage on a home you’re not even keen on… join the new generation making London renting a lifestyle choice.”
Standing outside the block on Wednesday night, one resident facing eviction had a message for Henry Smith about his lifestyle choice in making people homeless at Christmas: “Have some decency.”
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Good Lord, your dance card is marked to the margins - no wonder you're stepping on so many toes. Do exercise caution dear boy, these types are not beyond the use of petty thuggery and lesser forms of intimidation if there's a chance their money may come under scrutiny. Anything else on their part is mere bluster.
I hear that A Christmas Carol is on at the Old Vic. It sounds like you’ve found someone who could do with a refresher.