Tag: waterside

Update on Islington Wharf

Islington Wharf latest letter

You may have seen the previous blogs and the summer follow up.

This week we got the above PDF email/letter from Waterside places.

It seems there was a lot of support for the latent defect work but not enough to make it so. Although the actual figures don’t seem to add up or they were looking for 100% of residents to get in touch?

As you can imagine this has caused a lot of distressed. I made my position clear.

I said No to access to my flat before I got the answers back from Waterside places. They had planned to use the shared garden as workers yard for 2 years. Because of that I stuck to the original date sent off my reply 5 days before the original deadline to make sure its was registered.
Waterside places did push the deadline back and I engaged with them over email saying I will change my vote to yes if they can insure garden access throughout the 2 years. They never confirmed this over the multiple emails and because of this I had no real choice.

I had a lot of problems with the whole thing but Waterside places never made clear the garden position. The committee also made clear that if they could confirm the garden, most residents would change their position.

The engagement with the residents I feel has been mishandled (maybe deliberately?). The options on the table were poor then follow ups have been slow and brief.

Of course I do honestly feel for all the flats which are heavily affected by the latent defects. Its awful news, but something else will happen as the latent defects are clearly there and the court case with Laing o’rourke did end in a settlement. Still love to know how much?

Waterside places break all their promises and things haven’t even started

Islington Wharf

Waterside places the owner of Islington Wharf, the organisation trying to fix the latent defects (they call it resident issues) in the cheapest way possible. They recently posted out forms/contracts to gain our consent for access to our apartments.

The form will give the go ahead with their poorly thought-out plans to take over the garden for 2+ years, have access to our flats and much more.

Here is the letter I got in my postbox, its part of about 9 pages. But most of it is the times of when flats are scheduled.

ISW contact 1ISW contact 2

Note a few things, the date of the letter is 10th August but they want a reply by the 21st August.  Imagine if you are renter, and having to contact your landlord who may not even be in the same country or its all done via a 3rd party like a agent. This could take a long time and who knows what happens if the landlord wants one thing and the renters want the opposite?

There is the minimal of actual detailed information on what will happen. For example what if we have a 2nd Covid19 lockdown, how much noise could result of the work, would we have to lock our things away, etc, etc, etc…. They have requested access to my flat for 4 months next year but its not clear exactly what will happen except this outline. No deadlines or real details.

The test window in the garden
The test window in the garden with the UV screen

On top of this our many questions haven’t been answered. For example the sample window in the garden Waterside places admit isn’t right and they promised to replace it with a new sample. Of course this hasn’t happened. The effectiveness of the actual film is questionable, let alone if it doesn’t peel or scratch when the window cleaners come to clean the windows.

Theres also a real concern that the film is so dark that looking through it at night will be like pretty much block out the view, especially at night when you have internal lights on. The right thing to do would be to trial it in someones flat (committee members have offered) and then people could really make a decision (they blame Covid19 for not doing this) However we have to make a rushed decision based on information we don’t actually have access to, which will affect not only the next 2+ years, our health (imagine living on a building site for 2+ years), our security, our privacy, flat prices, etc.

Will I be signing the agreement?

Not a chance!!!!

I want the changes to happen (I was working in my flat while it was 31c the other day!) but the way its been rushed upon us and the circumcises is criminal. This should go down under how not to conclude an operation like this. Its almost laughable but its really not!

I find the threat at the end interesting too.

ISW contact 3

To be fair I’d rather take my chances with the management company (Revolution) because at least we can actual talk through the issues one by one and not be tied to the clock of Waterside places who just want to get phase 4 done and whip their hands of everything.