She told the local paper she has to step over the rubbish to reach the actual bin. About four people from the council have been round and taken photographs. “It is like a museum,” she said. “I feel like I have artefacts in my garden.” Her housing manager’s line was that these things take time. A year, she suggests, is taking the mic. City of York Council has been asked for a response, which is the civic equivalent of putting the kettle on and hoping the foxes finish first.
This is the British fly-tipping model in miniature. First someone leaves a mattress because a collection slot is three Thursdays away. Then someone else sees the mattress and decides the garden is now a tip. Then the foxes open the food bags, which is nature’s way of writing a strongly worded email. Then officers arrive with cameras, which is enforcement as a hobby.
I have some sympathy. Councils are short of crews and long on process. A communal garden is nobody’s and therefore everybody’s, which in practice means it belongs to the person with a broken wardrobe and a dark evening. I have less sympathy for a system that can photograph a chest of drawers in January and still be living with it in September. If the artefacts are catalogued, they are not a surprise. They are a filing system with slugs.
If you are not waiting for the museum to close, Amazon will sell you heavy duty rubble sacks. They will not summon a crew. They will at least pretend the chest of drawers has a future other than the lawn.
I do not expect York to declare the garden a scheduled monument. I do expect another photograph, another promise that these things take time, and another fox with a clearer diary than the housing team. Remember that the next time someone says the report has been logged. Logged is not lifted.
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