A Waterloo woman has been left at her wits’ end by people pooing outside the bedroom window of her council flat.
Lisa Bizimana, an NHS mental health nurse who lives on the Dodson and Amigo estate with her three children, said the disgusting problem had been going on for about three years.
She lives on a ground floor flat near a busy road, with a small patch of garden outside fenced off at knee height.
Someone or a group of people have been using the grass outside to poo, roughly every week or sometimes every two weeks, Ms Bizimana said.
Her bedroom, bathroom and toilet all have windows directly overlooking the foul mess, and her kitchen windows are a few metres away on the same side.
“I have to keep all these windows closed because of the flies. I can never open them because the poo is fresh,” Ms Bizimana said. “I have to think about the hygiene when I’m sleeping, when I’m cooking – it’s disgusting.”
She complained to the council in May and wants them to put up a higher fence to put off whoever is doing it. Nothing has been done since then, she said, and the dirty culprits continue to poo outside her window. The estate cleaner is not cleaning up the mess, she said, meaning she has to do it herself.
She has also installed a movement-sensitive light outside her front door, but it has not deterred the people using the garden as a toilet. There is a CCTV camera on the building opposite that could possibly be used to catch the people in the act.
Southwark Council did not comment when contacted.
It is unclear who exactly is pooing in the garden, which is also often used as a rubbish dump by passers-by. Some of the estate’s residents claim it could be linked to a nearby crack den, that they is often raided by police, only for users and dealers to return. Police did not comment on whether this was true.