Elderly residents – some as old as 101 – have been essentially left stranded in their homes for almost three weeks after both lifts serving their upmarket apartment building in Bristol broke down.
People living in the Lakeshore building next to the Imperial Retail Park in South Bristol said one lift has not worked for years, and the other broke down on the middle weekend of November, meaning they have to go up and down the stairs in the eight storey building. They include many elderly residents, including disabled people and residents in their 80s, 90s and even one lady who is 101.
The management company has told Bristol Live that one of the lifts will be fixed ‘today’ (Friday, December 6), and said they ‘apologise for the inconvenience caused’, but people who live there say the issue with the lift is the latest problem with the building and they are so frustrated with the management company that they are close to applying to the courts to oust the firm and legally take control of the building themselves.
Edmund Haydon, a 84-year-old forces veteran, lives on the sixth floor and said he has been struggling to get out of the building since the lifts stopped working. “I can come down the stairs not too bad, it takes me a while, but it’s getting back up again, especially if you’ve got shopping,” he said.
“I’ve lived her almost nine years and I’ve never known one of the lifts to ever work. We only use the other one, and that stopped working two weeks and four days ago,” he said, when Bristol Live visited the building on Thursday this week.
On that day, December 5, a sign outside the lift on each floor promised the work to fix it would be done on November 30. It wasn’t, and residents got in touch with Bristol Live in large numbers.
“There’s people living higher up than me in this building, and while it’s not too bad for the youngsters, there’s parents with pushchairs and prams, and people in wheelchairs. They are all stuck, pretty much,” he added.
The situation became so desperate that Age UK Bristol intervened and contacted RMG, the management company that runs and maintains the building. “Mr Haydon and our office have spoken to the managing agents multiple times and have been given multiple dates for the repairs to be done – none have been met to date,” a spokesperson for Age UK said this week.
“Mr Haydon, and many other similarly physically-challenged residents, are therefore having to climb six flights of stairs each time they have to enter or leave the property, with no end to their ordeal in sight,” they added.
Among those stuck is Doris Brady, 101, who has lived at Lakeshore with her 86-year-old husband John Dold for 13 years, ever since the former Imperial Tobacco HQ was converted in the early 2010s.
John said he can remember when one of the lifts did work, but it had been out of action for years. The breakdown of the second lift has impacted the couple. “It’s had a dramatic effect on us. I’m dependent on it to get out of this building, to go shopping, to go to the doctors. It takes me about half an hour to get down the steps and even longer to go back up,” he said.
Read more: Bristol Live reporting the issues at Lakeshore
- July 2017 – Residents of landmark Lakeshore development in Bristol say living there is ‘hell’
- May 2019 – Homeowner urges action over leaks in ‘amazing’ south Bristol building
- March 2023 – Boiler breakdown at landmark Lakeshore development leaves residents frustrated
- March 2023 – Award-winning Lakeshore flats left without heating and hot water for several days
Mr Dold can only move around with the aid of a wheeled walker, so going up and down the stairs means a painful task of lifting it up each step. It’s something he has only tried when absolutely necessary these past couple of weeks.
“I have had to rely on the generosity of friends and neighbours. My wife has carers who visit four times a day, but either of us getting out to a doctor’s appointment is impossible at the moment, we’re almost housebound,” he added.
In a statement, a spokesperson for RMG blamed difficulties in obtaining the parts needed to fix the lift. “We would like to clarify that we have not had a lift out of action for ten years. The development has two lifts and it is recognised that one of the lifts has been out of action for some time and that the second became inoperable two weeks ago,” they said.
“In that time, we have been working with the contractor to obtain the relevant parts, which due to the age of the lift has taken longer than expected. We are pleased to advise that the part has been sourced, and the contractor is on site today (Friday, December 6) to fix the lift.
“We recognise the concern that this situation will cause some of our customers and apologise for the inconvenience caused,” they added.
Some of the residents of the 270 flats own their apartments outright, some are rented out, others are in a shared ownership agreement with the developers Urban Splash, and others, like Mr Dold, are in a shared ownership set-up with a housing association. But all residents pay around £3,600 a year maintenance to RMG to pay for work on the building. RMG told residents the most recent maintenance budget for the whole building was more than £1.1 million a year.
Back in 2017, Bristol Live reported that residents described living at Lakeshore as ‘hell’. At that point, the building was a five-year-old residential conversion which had been designed by the then mayor of Bristol, George Ferguson’s architect firm Ferguson Mann, and won a series of awards.
Even then, residents complained the building was falling into disrepair, and seven years on, there are moves from residents to take over the maintenance themselves. After the boilers broke down leaving residents with no hot water and heating in the winter of 2022-23, Elspeth Allen began a drive to sign up residents to a scheme to come together and take on the building themselves. Under ‘Right to Manage’ legislation, if a majority of the residents living in a shared building agree, a residents’ company can take over the management of the building.
“We had a huge issue with holes in the roof that was flooding the communal areas and some of the flats, and they still haven’t been completely fixed,” said Elspeth. “We are quite close to getting the 50 per cent we need to begin the legal process to take on the management. One lift never works, the other is constantly breaking down. There are huge issues all around the building and we are paying thousands a year for it,” she added.