Enduring trauma, and a struggle for justice: one year on from the Barton House high-rise evacuation

On 14 November 2023 an east Bristol tower block was evacuated over fears it could collapse, making national news. A year on, residents tell the Cable about the disruption to their lives, the ongoing impact on their wellbeing and their children’s – and how a community has been left traumatised.

Barton House residents Nosa, her youngest daughter Liina and campaign leader Fadumo Farah (credit: Jack Witek)

The Big Story 13th November, 2024

Priyanka Raval

“’You need to get out immediately, the building is going to collapse! Out, out, out!’ We were scared, very scared, we went out with no bag, just like that,” Nosa, a Sudanese mother of four living in Barton House, remembers.

She is recalling 14 November 2023, and the shock evacuation of her council-owned tower block home. Without warning, residents were told to leave the building by council staff, amid alarming, chaotic, and sudden warnings about the building’s safety.

Frightened and distraught, residents left their homes, past a baying press gang in the courtyard, uncertain if they’d ever return.

That night, residents were sent to a nearby GP surgery, and a local mosque, to be processed, before being moved to hotels across the city in the early hours of the morning.

Many spent the winter months in disused, unclean hotel rooms, segregated from paying guests. Families were crammed into single rooms, all the while expected to pay full rent on their homes.

“The Holiday Inn was awful. The kids were getting sick, vomiting all over. The food was disgusting,” Nosa recalls. An outbreak of norovirus swept the hotel, with some children hospitalised.

By the end of February, Bristol City Council declared Barton House safe to return to, following surveys and structural repair works. But residents were unconvinced, unable to square the urgency of the evacuation with these reassurances of safety.

“Even now, I can’t sleep,” Nosa says. “I tell my daughters to sleep in their joggers, just in case. Yes dear, we live on the eighth floor, and I need to know we can get down fast if anything happens!”

For residents, trust in the council, already thin, is irredeemably broken – not least due to evidence of longstanding inaction. The council first received warnings in August 2022 about structural risks at the tower, which it decided “could be mitigated”. But a different surveyors’ firm reviewed the report and sounded the alarm last November.

“They don’t care about the residents of Barton House,” Nosa says. “I have never trusted the council, not before the evacuation happened, and definitely not now.”

From the residents I’ve spoken to, stories like this are common. Many can’t sleep, and live in a state of hypervigilance. I’ve seen packed bags by the door ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

Depression and anxiety are rife. Residents have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Refugees, having fled from war-torn countries, have been particularly triggered. Their trauma has been compounded by dire living conditions in the tower block.

I speak to Nosa in her cramped children’s bedroom, where her four kids sleep in two bunk beds. She says requests for somewhere bigger, to allow her now-teenage children some privacy, have been denied.

“There is mould here by this bed,” she shows me. “The fifth floor stairs are flooded, water everywhere.”

Over and over, people show me damp and mould, draughts from windows that do not fit properly, peeling paint, broken boilers, overcrowded bedrooms. The lift is regularly out of action, and water pours through the ceiling on the stairwell.

Residents’ plight didn’t start with the evacuation. The council’s own documents mention “significant and repeated leaks” at the block, resulting in disrepair claims from people on upper floors before its roof was replaced in 2022. Many describe the events of the past 12 months as simply a continuation of the neglect and disrespect repeatedly meted out to them by their landlord.

Over this past year reporting on the Barton House scandal, we have repeatedly heard residents say: “We are treated like second class citizens.”

Unsafe return

As dire as life in the hotels was for many, the prospect of returning to Barton House was worse. But residents who were reluctant were warned they would be making themselves intentionally homelessness if they refused to go back.

National campaign group Tower Blocks UK, visiting at the time, said the council’s conduct appeared to be “discriminatory and coercive”.

My daughter’s behaviour changed after the evacuation – she doesn’t talk as much. She was happy before.

Muna, Barton House resident

Residents returned to find their homes with new reinforced beams, and as many as seven fire alarms fitted in each flat. Meanwhile ‘waking watch’ fire-safety officers patrolled the floors at night. But these safety measures served to put some people further on edge.

Others describe coming back to find their homes in disarray following intrusive surveys and structural repair work carried out on the building.

Kubra had a brain tumour at the time of the evacuation and was undergoing chemotherapy. She returned to a cement-covered carpet, which took days to clean, she says.

Another woman, 26-year-old Ramla, shows me a picture of her pristine Barton House apartment from last year, before the evacuation. She was pregnant, raising two children, and had clearly put her heart into nesting.

Six months later, Ramla returned with a newborn, and with postpartum depression, to find her home trashed.

Somali mother Mona says that when she complained about the state of her flat, a council housing officer told her, “You should be grateful to have a roof over your head!”

It seems this community – many of whom are refugees, non-native English speakers, and from ethnic minorities – are expected to simply take what they are given. The residents of Barton House have endured a litany of injustice, for which there has been no formal apology, no accountability from the local authority.

A tireless leader

Fadumo Farah meets me in Cafe Conscious, a community hub round the corner from the tower that proved vital in the aftermath of the evacuation. Fadumo, a Barton House resident and member of community union ACORN, has been the tireless figurehead of the campaign for justice for the building’s tenants.

She’s assembled a table of mothers to speak to me about their experience of Barton House. A mother of two herself, Fadumo has always sought to put mothers and children at the forefront of the campaign.

I meet mothers of children with acute special needs who tell me of the distress the evacuation caused, forcing changes to routine.

Other young children have developed behavioural problems, or started bed-wetting again. One mother, Muna, tells me her child became non-verbal after they were forced to leave their home.

“My daughter’s behaviour changed after the evacuation – she doesn’t talk as much,” Muna says. “She was happy before.”

Amina’s child, meanwhile, has autism and couldn’t adapt to life in the hotel. “My son has sensory overload, and the environment was too much for him – the noise, the smell, the chaos,” she says. “The food was horrible, and he wouldn’t touch it.”

The emergency accommodation that Amina was offered was at Cribbs Causeway, miles away from her son’s school in Whitehall, and she doesn’t drive. She says her family were left with no choice but to move back to Barton House – an option a number of people ended up taking despite the building not having yet been declared safe.

“We were there for months while everyone else was gone,” she recalls. “Any little noise made me alert, I was always on edge.” Especially terrifying for her were the new fire alarms, which would be tested at night.

At the café I also meet Ramla for the first time. She’s 26 but looks much younger. Her son plays on her lap as she talks while Fadumo translates from Somali. Her eyes seem vacant.

The way they speak to people is if we have zero brain cells – just because some of us don’t speak English, it doesn’t mean we are completely stupid

Fadumo Farah

Ramla was new to Bristol at the time of the evacuation. She didn’t have many friends and her husband was often out working.

While in the hotel, her son developed acute gastroenteritis and was taken to hospital. She showed me a video of her son – malnourished, stick-thin, vomiting.

The trauma of her son’s illness, and returning to a ruined apartment, has caused her mental health to deteriorate, she explains. She begins to panic whenever there is a storm, fearful that Barton House will collapse.

Next month, she says, she’ll return to Kenya with her children to be with her mother, leaving her husband behind.

‘I fear something bad is going to happen’

Sada, meanwhile, has been living in Barton House for eight years with her two children. On 14 November last year, she was in her apartment when she received a call from her son’s support worker.

“She called me and said she’d heard online that the building was collapsing,” Sada tells me. “I panicked. I thought I was the only one left in the building and that everyone else had evacuated.

“I honestly thought the building was on fire. I saw people running, and I ran down to see what was happening,” she adds. “Even now, every time the school calls me, I get that same feeling of fear, like something bad is about to happen.”

Her son Hassan is seven years old, autistic and non-verbal. The week before the evacuation he’d had surgery on his ear, and the family felt they had no choice but to take the emergency accommodation in Cribbs Causeway.

“I even had to take £40 taxis every day just to make sure Hassan got the food he needed from home,” she tells me.

When they returned to their flat in Barton House, two beds had been broken and the TV had fallen on the floor. Council-contracted surveyors had also damaged the vinyl flooring, Sada explains. Fadumo helped her speak to the council to fight for compensation. After much back and forth, Fadumo managed to help Sada secure new flooring and £2,000 for the damage.

Sada becomes emotional when telling me about a recent fire alarm test – the lift was broken, and they live on the 11th floor. “I had to carry my son down all 11 flights of stairs. He has high sensory overload, and that whole experience was so traumatic for him. I can’t put him through that again.”

The trauma felt by residents as a result of the evacuation is intense and ongoing, evidenced by medical documents written to support bids for priority rehousing.

One letter from CAMHS, the children’s mental health service, describes how a child experienced hallucinations and began to self harm due to high anxiety and low mood relating to the trauma of the evacuation. Residents hoped such evidence would demonstrate why they deserve to move. But the council, which faces extreme pressure on its overwhelmed social housing list, has not responded by giving them the highest priority banding.

The political priority on human life

“I cannot help but see this as part of a larger, ugly pattern of bias against minority communities that has been allowed to go on unchecked,” Fadumo recently wrote in a letter to the council. According to her, around 90% of Barton House residents are from ethnic minority backgrounds.

“The way they speak to people is if we have zero brain cells,” Fadumo says of the treatment some Barton House residents have experienced. “Just because some of us don’t speak English, it doesn’t mean we are completely stupid.” Recently she and others made a presentation to the council about racial disparities in Bristol’s social housing.

Our city was ranked in 2017 by the Runnymede Trust charity as the worst major city for racial inequality. In 2020 meanwhile, a report by the Black South West Network found 24% of its homeless people were Black, despite only making up 6% of the population. Ethnic minority households are more likely to face overcrowding, poor conditions, and fuel poverty. Fadumo tells me that eight new families – all of migrant backgrounds – have moved into the block recently.

It’s clear that the Barton House crisis touches on many wider systemic issues. In 2017, the Grenfell Tower block in west London was consumed by a raging inferno that claimed the lives of 72 people, 18 of those children. Around 86% of Grenfell residents were from ethnic minorities.

Journalist and author Peter Apps wrote of the Grenfell tragedy: “It tells us the priority our political and economic system places on human life. Especially when those lives are likely to be of poor, immigrant, and ethnic minority backgrounds.”

Closer to home, in 2022, two serious tower block fires – at Eccleston House in Barton Hill and Twinnell House in Easton – also drew attention to problems with flammable cladding and other fire safety defects in Bristol’s council housing.

Social housing in Britain is in a crisis decades in the making. It’s no secret that while Britain’s towering council estates dominate city skylines, they’re largely neglected by the political class. Until disaster strikes – or it’s too late.

The 1950’s saw a national postwar push to build urban social housing, and the birth of our cities’ concrete skylines. Barton House, completed in 1958, is a relic of this era.

But many postwar tower blocks, once symbols of hope and affordable living, have gone to rack and ruin. As Apps explained in the Cable last year, that’s thanks both to questionable building choices and to decades of underinvestment, going back to the Thatcher era.

In recent years, Bristol’s local authority has been rocked by revelations about the condition of its existing homes, especially high rises. It was warned about “serious failings” by a government watchdog earlier this year, which found the council did not have a clear picture of the condition of its housing.

Councils and other social landlords are burdened with an ailing housing stock, no longer fit for purpose, in which our most vulnerable communities are left to make a home.

The fight for justice

At Barton House, the fight goes on, with the help of ACORN, an organisation that more than a third of residents are now paying members of, and which has been championing the residents’ demands since the evacuation.

For months, the group marched on City Hall, regularly disrupted council meetings and confronted then-mayor Marvin Rees, who left office in May, and former cabinet lead for housing Kye Dudd.

They’ve now sought help from the health justice campaign group Medact, which is producing a report into the devastating impact of the Barton House evacuation on residents’ mental health. This is expected to be presented to a full council meeting in December.

The Cable is now joining forces with Medact and ACORN – to support the campaign for priority rehousing allocations for residents, and to compile and highlight evidence of the impact the evacuation and conditions of the tower block has had.

Green Party councillors, when in opposition, backed Barton House ACORN members’ demands for rehousing, as well as a rent freeze for those staying in hotels during the evacuation. With the Greens now leading the council, as the largest group under the committee system it adopted in May, it is hoped the change of administration will mark a shift in how the council supports affected residents.

Responding to the points raised in this article, Barry Parsons, the chair of the council’s homes and housing delivery committee said: “Resident safety remains our priority, and we’re very conscious of the impact that the emergency request to leave Barton house has had on residents, along with their stay and alternative accommodation.

“For residents needing to access mental health support, culturally intelligent advice and guidance have been made aware from local organisations including Nilaari, the [Wellspring] Settlement, and Somali Resource Centre,” added Parsons, a Green councillor for Easton. “Before tenants were asked to return to their homes, a number of safety measures, including a centralised fire alarm system and fireproofing of the building steel frame were put in place, and all recommendations made in the survey reports were followed and completed.”

Parsons noted the extreme and rising pressure on Bristol’s social housing waiting list, which at the time of writing had more than 22,000 households on it. Of those households, 1,300 are classified as having the top-level band one priority, while more that 1,600 are living in temporary accommodation.

“This pressure on an already overstretched social housing system severely limits our options when considering requests to rehouse existing council housing residents,” added Parsons. “I’ve been clear that I support the residents’ campaign for rehousing, and while as committee chair, I don’t make decisions on individual cases, I will continue to advocate for Barton House residents.

“We need to make sure residents are involved in meaningful discussions about the future of our ageing estates,” he said. “We are carrying out condition surveys on all our homes that will inform those decisions.”

Looking to that future, it was announced recently that Barton House’s fate remains uncertain given its age and condition. Residents again face their lives being disrupted by surveys to decide what will ultimately happen to the block. Twelve months after being unceremoniously kicked out of their homes, their story – and search for housing justice – is far from over.

Note: Since this article was produced, Fadumo Farah has been elected as a Cable director by our members. This had no influence on the editorial team’s reporting of this story.