Fan of true crime? Then this column is for you. Rather than some cold case told through yellowing newspapers and sepia photos, this one is still happening. And just wait for the plot twist! But first let me outline the key facts; your challenge is to decide who’s guilty.
Our crime scene is a redbrick townhouse built in the last years of Victoria – tall, battered but undeniably handsome. It’s in Bowes Park, on London’s northern outskirts – the kind of neighbourhood that on a Friday afternoon offers nice cafes, a community-owned pub and some WFH dads wandering the streets scavenging for ciabatta sandwiches.
Now look closer. Outside our house is a jumble of bags and trolleys and suitcases, while, despite the late-October chill, the front door is wide open.
Knock at the very first room, and you meet our victim. Eunice Osei is a proud, reserved woman, but give her time and she will say: “I’ve not been treated fairly.” Then she’ll cry.
The crime is her room, a tiny hutch crammed with a kitchenette, toilet, bed and flimsy chipboard furniture. Clothes, kitchen utensils and suitcases are stacked so high against the grimy windows that light struggles to enter. We are swathed in murk, with nowhere to sit and hardly anywhere to stand. For three years, this holding pen has been her home.
By a combination of ingenuity and greed, a family home has been broken down into 11 such cells. It’s become a house in multiple occupation, or HMO.
In a property-obsessed country, the HMO is one of modern Britain’s primary fixations. Two decades ago, newspapers told stories about couples snapping up buy to lets; today, YouTubers effuse about how renting out HMOs brings “passive income” – easy money, no sweat. And in the fetid imagination of the racist right, HMOs are the natural habitat of black and brown people fresh off the boat.
Osei comes from Accra, Ghana, but she’s been in London for 20 years – and she never used to live like this. She volunteers at a church, and wakes at 5.30 most mornings to take two long bus rides to work as a cleaner for Network Rail. She is one of those invisible people on whom Britain depends for its health and hygiene and safety, while expecting them to eke out an existence on minimum wage and food banks.
After splitting from her partner, Osei spent some time homeless before moving to this house. I can’t say she lives here, since it is no life. She doesn’t allow visitors, won’t tell even close friends about her room. Why not? “I’m ashamed.” More tears. I wonder why she’s talking to me, until I hear her repeat. “Please, help.”
Osei talks of cold and damp, and mould so fierce it’s wrecked the Sunday best she kept for church. This spring she came back from a break to find mice everywhere. She shows me a mouse splayed out at the bottom of a toilet bowl, tells me how they’d chewed through the pipes, yet the landlord held out against repairs. She’d flush the toilet and the bathroom flooded with human waste. For this, she pays a rent of £1,147 a month – before bills.
Who’s the criminal: her landlord? Yes – literally. Andreas Stavrou Antoniades bought this house in 1990. How much he paid isn’t recorded by the Land Registry, but going by the local market then it wouldn’t have been much over £100,000. Just over 10 years later, he applied to split it into an HMO. When Haringey council refused, he just bulldozed the law. Without an HMO licence, he rented the rooms illegally.
“He shouted a lot,” says his repair guy, Christo. “He never wanted to fix anything.” The 2010s were a boom time for such sharks: low interest rates made it easy to amass homes, while George Osborne’s welfare cuts drove London’s poor into the depths of the rental market.
Antoniades boasted to Eunice of letting out 130 rooms at a time, and accounts at Companies House put his portfolio at about 20 houses in north London, worth over £20m (which, if anything, looks an underestimate). Several properties do not appear on the local HMO register, suggesting they are also illegal. This is a business model: analysis of government data by Generation Rent suggests that more than one in four HMOs in England that must be licensed are instead illegal.
Haringey took Antoniades to court three times over the 2010s. Each time, it won, but to a big-time crook the fines were tiny: £20,000 in 2015 – or less than two months’ rent from just one of his bigger houses.
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But how did Eunice end up renting from this villain? Haringey council placed her there. Nor is she alone: up the stairs lives Fabian Cameron, who says that last year he was called up by an officer in Haringey’s private rental team and told of “a very nice room”. He only discovered the truth later.
In one part of Haringey civic centre, officers chased a serial lawbreaker through the courts; in another, they sent him business, most of which will be paid for by the public, through universal credit. Indeed, Haringey even acted as a direct customer to Antoniades: data I have seen under freedom of information shows that since 2018 the borough placed 16 households in temporary accommodation with a man who experts I’ve consulted agree would have failed any meaningful test of being “a fit and proper” landlord.
Correspondence from other council officers states that Antoniades or his representatives applied for an HMO licence last November. The application means the HMO has in the last year stopped being criminal – but the licence has yet to be granted and the house is still not on the HMO register.
Antoniades died earlier this year and Eunice’s house is now in the hands of his executors. A representative sent a short statement that reads in part: “Contractors are currently working there with good progress and [the] local authority is fully aware and monitoring the works in this and other locations.”
The crime against Eunice is of making her life almost unlivable. What makes it so characteristic of modern Britain is how far the guilt spreads. Yes, there’s private-sector villainy, but there’s also public-sector complicity, by a council into its second decade of austerity. Then there are the courts, whose punishments are little more than “the cost of doing business”, as Al Mcclenahan of Justice for Tenants puts it. There is Margaret Thatcher’s right to buy and the failure to build enough social and affordable housing, nodded through again by housing secretary Steve Reed, as I wrote here last week. Even the best achievement of this government, the renters’ protections that gain royal assent next week, will be somewhat blunted by the lack of new money to enforce the new law.
If we want to see who’s guilty for the injustices described above, we could start by looking in the mirror. After all, there’s plenty of blame to spare. It’s a crime, truly.
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