Tenants on the Pleydell Estate are sick of broken lifts

AN 80-year-old wheelchair-bound woman and her pensioner husband are threatening to carry out a sit-in in the Town Hall offices until their lifts get fixed after they endured further misery on their Old Street estate this week.

Barbara “Zebra” Anner­eau says she and her 78-year-old husband Jim are both in poor health but are unable to attend “essential” hospital appointments because of repeated lift failures on the 16-storey Pleydell Estate.

Mrs Annereau, who lives on the 12th floor and moved into the estate with her parents when she was 15, said: “It was lovely when I first moved in. This is the third lot of lifts we’ve had here – they’ve got smaller every time. Now the lifts are breaking so often I’m getting frightened to go in them in case it breaks and I’m in it.”

The lifts in Grayson House have simultaneously broken down three out of the last seven days, according to residents, with many being fixed only to break again within hours, if not minutes.

Barbara and Jim Annereau

Mrs Annereau, who used to work at the Filmer’s Box factory in Wenlock Street, said it was “disgusting” the estate would be forced to live with faulty lifts for roughly another three years.

Last month the Tribune revealed Islington will only start a procurement process to renew the lifts in 2025 – which typically takes a year – leaving tenants scratching their heads over why housing bosses waited for the lifts to catastrophically fail before putting plans in place.

“I’d like them to come and live here,” Mrs Annereau suggested.

“They’d have to walk up and down the stairs when the lifts are broken: they’d soon get fed up. I said we should all get ourselves down to the council building and sit there until something’s done about it.”

Both Mr and Mrs Annereau have had falls recently. She needs to visit Bart’s Hospital each week for heart medication, alongside UCLH, while he visits Eastman Dental Hospital and Moorfield’s for chronic health conditions.

Fellow tenant Clara Watson, 45, has sciatica and cannot use the stairs, while her two grown-up children have multiple sclerosis and are unable to visit her due to the constant lift breakdowns.

The view from top floor

She said: “The lifts clunk, bang and don’t move properly. I feel trapped and it’s scary – they are a death trap. We shouldn’t have to beg for a basic standard of living or waste our time and resources trying to make council heads listen when really they should just be fixing it.”

At a recent tenant meeting with Islington’s new lift manager, Larry Hutchinson, he admitted their lifts were the worst in the borough.

According to council guidelines, lifts should be replaced within 20-25 years. The lifts on the Pleydell estate are 28 years old but won’t be replaced until they are more than 30 years old.

A council spokesman said lift engineers made a recommendation in 2022 that Pleydell’s lifts be re­newed – four years before they are expected to be.

A request for a borough-wide log of all lift breakdowns was not met – officers did not explain why. A request for the details of a borough-wide lift renewal programme also was not provided. No explanation was given, although he said other blocks had been prioritised as historically they had higher numbers of breakdowns.

Councillor Una O’Halloran, executive member for homes and communities, again offered apologies to tenants.