A video shows children’s toys and family possessions have been discovered untouched and rotting on an abandoned housing estate by an urban explorer.
Sean Piper, from Kent, England, stunned TikTok users after he found the Mayron Grove estate in Woolwich, London, and posted the footage to the social media site saying it looked like ‘the end of the world’.
The video, which has over 20,000 views, shows the exploration of the housing estate which has 172 dwellings spread across 16 blocks of flats.
On the estate, old children’s toys like stuffed rabbits, play cars and rocking horses can be seen rotting and collecting dust.
He told NeedToKnow.co.uk that wandering around the estate was a very eerie experience. It reminded him of scary movies like 28 days later or even video games like The Last of Us or Resident Evil.
The estate has been abandoned since 2010 and it took Greenwich Council a year to move everyone out, so obviously they do have housing reserves.
They slowly began offering one-off payments to residents, as well as reduced rent rated in new build apartments.
The plan was to demolish the buildings and build new luxury apartments, 165 in total to be built, to be a mixture of private and council flats.
However, plans hit a gridlock, and following a fire in one of the flats in March 2023, the buildings have since been fenced off and set for demolition.
The flats have been sat empty and open to the elements, for people to explore, and many residents took the moving opportunity to have a clear out of their possessions, so many things were left inside, like kids’ toys, televisions, shoes and clothes and even a couple that were completely furnished still.
Upon visiting the area, Sean felt as though he’d gone back in time, and got a eerie feeling from the start.
He said that it wasn’t fenced off when he went and even the car parks were very derelict looking. The lamp posts had broken lights, it was a ghost town, and he said the properties were almost all open, either by a door or window. They were metal sheeted so extremely dark inside, and wandering around inside with a torch provided a creepy atmosphere.
He said that some of the flats were fire damaged and had signs of squatters inside with soiled mattresses on the floor, bags full of old beer bottles and cigarette butts and needles on the floor.
What a waste. The council should be really ashamed and they should be fined every day until they either demolish the flats or renovate them if they can. After all, this could be supplying housing for so many desperate people, and yet the councils keep bleating on that they don’t have any housing stock, well this is probably why – disgraceful.
And you can guarantee that if they do knock it down and rebuild, it certainly won’t go for our own homeless.
This was likely a perfectly good council estate that probably wasn’t up to code, which could have been brought up to code, but instead, councils insist they build on every scrap of green land that we have.
This is a disgraceful waste of once decent social housing left to rot for the pursuit of profit and greed, and this happens a lot because councils are creating social cleansing whereby they uproot people on these estates that have likely lived there all their lives so that they’re disjoined from a community, friends and family.
They tell us that they have a housing shortage, they don’t have a housing shortage, just an out-of-control immigration policy.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 