A COMMUNITY activist whose tireless work has cleared drug dealers from her estate had her home targeted this week by arsonists.

Silla Carron, who lives on the Castlehaven estate in Kentish Town, had a playhouse in her front garden burnt to the ground in a fire that caused serious damage to her flat and others in her block. 

Flames licked up the side of her home when arsonists struck at about 6am on Wednesday last week.

“I was woken up by my neighbours,” Ms Carron said. “One had just finished a night shift and was coming home and saw the blaze. They banged and banged on my windows.”

Ms Carron has made national headlines over the past decade for her work in clearing the estate of drug dealing and drug abuse. Her campaigns included tidying the estate up – she got funding for new security gates and play areas, including a crazy golf course –  and increasing police patrols. 

The fire on the Clarence Way Estate

She won a Pride Of Britain award from the Daily Mirror for her efforts, and the BBC later hired her for a reality documentary, The Estate We’re In, in which she was sent to other areas to help tenants improve their living conditions.

She believes she may have been targeted because of her work. “It was either someone out to have a pop at me as I have a bit of reputation or it was someone targeting the estate as a whole,” she said.

Arsonists had poured what the fire brigade say was an “accelerant” – a highly flammable liquid such as petrol – through an open window of the wooden playhouse.

She said: “We’d had it for 18 years. We first bought it for my granddaughter Lauren, and we’ve looked after it carefully ever since. It had a TV and a sofa inside, a small toy kitchen range. Her father is a roofer and he’d recently put a new roof on it. The kids loved it.”

The fire caused extensive damage –  breaking windows in the block and causing serious smoke damage, both inside and out.

Ms Carron added: “It was fierce. Our neighbours had to be evacuated, and it was lucky I was sleeping that night in my sitting room and not my bedroom, as the smoke filled it and I could have been seriously injured.”

Police are investigating the blaze.