Residents say their once-beautiful Croydon road is blighted by rubbish with huge piles of waste dumped in front gardens and illegally fly-tipped on the street. Black bin bags, broken pieces of wood and cardboard boxes can be seen piled high or tossed in bushes and on pavements as you walk along Gonville Road.
The street in Thornton Heath is lined with 19th-century terraced houses and sits just off the main road into the neighbourhood. While many residents believe the road was ‘once a nice place to live’, they now say it has become overrun by a pervasive fly-tipping culture.
While those dumping the rubbish, or leaving it to accumulate on properties, are to blame for the recent phenomenon, many residents feel that Croydon Council’s response to fly-tipping and environmental concerns is lacking. In particular, they point to the council’s ‘non-existent’ enforcement as the reason the issue is persistent.
Fly tip near L&Q Housing on Gonville Road
(Image: Harrison Galliven/LDRS)
One terraced house has its entire frontage filled with overflowing black bin bags and assorted household items. Alongside these items, there is also a large amount of food waste and even a food delivery driver’s carrier bag. While this rubbish is not illegally fly-tipped as it is contained within the boundary of the property, locals say it constitutes an environmental problem.
According to neighbours, this particular build-up has been there for over a year and has begun to attract more foxes and rodents to the area. When the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) visited the road this week, the occupant of the property was not in.
Neighbours told the LDRS that the rubbish piled up when the interior was being refurbished but it has remained in place since then. A neighbour living close to the property told the LDRS: “This whole street has become like a garbage dump. It used to be a beautiful street.
“These houses were built in 1835, and many people like us have spent a lot of money doing them up. Now it looks grubby; people don’t care any more.”
Fellow Gonville Road resident Ron Middleton also feels the road has suffered over recent years due to fly-tipping. He said: “Whenever people move in, whatever is left behind, they chuck out on the streets. That’s normal around here, but when you try to tell them, they get really aggressive.
“I saw a lady dragging two mattresses out of her house when I was working, and she took them around the corner. The following day, I was walking past and noticed that [someone] had tried to burn the mattresses.”
Ron Middleton says the fly-tipping ‘reflects badly on the people that live on the road’
(Image: Ron Middleton)
Ron, who has lived on the road since 2013, says the pavements are often littered with rubbish up and down the road at all times of the day. He told the LDRS he recently tripped over a bin bag on the pavement when walking late at night.
He pointed to a persistent build-up near the road’s junction with Thornton Heath Road. The shrubbery backing onto flats owned by L&Q Housing is often the target of heavy fly-tipping, despite the presence of a dummy camera and fly-tipping sign in the area.
Ron’s frustration led him to email the council about the state of fly-tipping on the road. Despite raising these issues with his local councillors and even Mayor Jason Perry, he feels the work to clear the streets remains slow and ineffective.
He said: “I email the council a lot. Their response was that they have teams that go around looking at the severity of the issue and find the priority spots. I asked them for a timetable or rota system. They told me they had people coming around, but it turned out they didn’t have any evidence of this team. If you look generally around Thornton Heath’s streets, there’s so much stuff dumped. It’s unbelievable.”
Ron’s local councillor and Leader of the Labour opposition, Stuart King, told the LDRS: “We reported this to the council back in November and are appalled that the situation has been allowed to worsen, despite our efforts to get the council to act.” He added: “It is yet another example of the Mayor’s failure to tackle environmental problems like this, which sadly are all too prevalent across our borough.”
Last Summer, Thornton Heath town centre was the subject of one of Croydon Council’s ‘Blitz Cleans’. The Blitz Clean scheme targets hotspot areas flagged on the council’s Love Clean Streets App, which allows residents to report rubbish.
Following weeks of cleaning, Croydon Council addressed antisocial behaviours such as graffiti, fly-tipping, and illegal parking. Yet, according to Ron, these schemes fail to address the root cause of fly-tipping in the area.
He said: “The reason they’re doing a Blitz Clean is because they have ignored the weeks of cleaning. There was a time when there was not a cleaner in this area for months.”
Residents have said the overflowing rubbish has begun to attract rodents to the area
(Image: Harrison Galliven/LDRS)
Others have blamed Croydon Council’s record on legal enforcement against those who keep its streets dirty. In 2022/23, Croydon was judged as having the second worst fly-tipping prosecution record in the country by the Department of Food and Rural Affairs. Its record has recently come under fire from Croydon’s Labour opposition, who introduced the Love Clean Streets app under their tenures.
Councillor Rowenna Davis has been campaigning against large fly-tipping hotspots in her Waddon ward. She told the LDRS: “Fly-tipping is gross, unhygienic and illegal. We see mums pushing prams by piles of infested waste, attracting rats and all sorts.
“What makes this worse is that Croydon has no enforcement for fly-tippers – which means criminals can come and dump their rubbish here without anyone batting an eyelid. The Conservative Mayor promised to clean up Croydon, but then he axed the officers that used to pursue fly-tippers.
“So now people are paying to clear their rubbish responsibly, whilst criminal fly-tippers are getting rewarded with free rubbish collection at the expense of the taxpayer. Other boroughs have private companies come in to do enforcement, and that is paid for by the money they collect in fines. Why can’t we have something like that? Probably because the Mayor spends more time passing the blame than he does fixing Croydon.”
On X, Croydon’s Conservative Cabinet Member for Finance, Jason Cummings, noted that the council’s previous Labour administration had also made cuts to the council’s enforcement team.
A recent Freedom of Information Request by TOG24 revealed Croydon had more fly-tipping incidents than anywhere else in the country, with 38,163 reports made between 2023 and 2024. The council was also found to have spent over £1m clearing up illegally dumped rubbish over the same period. Croydon Council was approached for comment but failed to respond in time for publication.
Matt Foreman, Executive Director of Customer Services at L&Q, said: “We are working closely with the local authority, other partners and neighbouring properties to try to tackle the ongoing issue with fly-tipping in the area.
“We recognise the inconvenience it can cause residents and the detrimental effect it has on the local neighbourhood, and we are committed to finding a long-term solution. We have installed new signage to deter fly-tipping, and we are currently exploring improvements we can make to the communal area outside L&Q homes to help tackle fly-tipping.”
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