Pictures: Henry Eldon
Henry Eldon was one of the first to notice that something was wrong.
One day in August, he says a window from the crumbling Kernow Audio and Sound building on Mina Road in St Werburghs, besides Sonni’s cornershop, had “smashed onto the pavement”. Henry used a drone to take pictures of the building from above to find out what had happened. They revealed that the roof had partially collapsed.
“It has obvious signs of structural failure. It looks like it will collapse imminently,” he says. “This is a huge concern to the public. The council has been given plenty of warning of this, yet seems to be avoiding the landlord. It is burying its head in the sand.”
The Kernow Building, which has been derelict for upwards of 20 years, is among dozens of properties owned by the notorious landlord Mushtaq Ahmed.
Land registry records showed that Gracewell Limited, of which Ahmed is the sole listed director, owned 19 properties in Bristol as of May 2023, including at least two empty buildings and two vacant plots.
In 2021, Bristol City Council issued the 66-year-old a community protection notice demanding he clean up the Kernow Building, along with the former Gainsborough pub site in Lockleaze and a site at Leinster Avenue in Knowle West. In February 2022, he was fined almost £6,000 after taking no action.
A year later, the council announced it was investigating the property boss “for a breach of a previous legal order”. In March 2023, the authority fined him £10,000 for failing to comply with the community protection notices and remedial orders relating to the three buildings.
The Cable understands Ahmed had complied with the court order to clean up the Kernow and the other two buildings, and painted out tagging on the Kernow on a number of occasions after receiving requests from the council to do so. It’s not clear though how the council will respond to force the landlord to act after the collapse of the roof.
‘This is a huge concern to the public’
The dilapidated building had been causing local residents distress for years even before its roof caved in.
“I got a lot of emails and phone calls from constituents about the Kernow building,” says Tim Wye, a local Green councillor. “It is an eyesore and looks rubbish. Residents find it thoroughly frustrating because we’ve got a housing crisis and there’s this dilapidated building there.”
Shelter estimated that 3,207 people were homeless in the city in 2022/23, up from 3,119 in 2021/22. Meanwhile, government figures published in October 2023 revealed that there were 5,000 empty properties in Bristol.
The Kernow isn’t just contributing to the housing crisis, Wye says, it also attracts anti-social behaviour. “If the place looks neglected, then it becomes normalised and people start treating it worse. You get fly-tipping, tagging, drug-dealing. All of this follows on from having an area that looks unkempt.”
Anne Devereaux has lived next door to the Kernow Building for 34 years. “I don’t know how many times I have caught men urinating against it [the Kernow] or fighting,” she says.
And in July a council surveyor found signs the derelict building could be impacting her home. “I’ve got damp, which he believed was coming from that building [the Kernow] into my backroom. He was very concerned that it was affecting my building.”
Anne adds that there was “an explosion of rats” when the Kernow Building’s roof collapsed.
‘Somebody put themselves at risk’
For years, local residents have pleaded for the council to step in and somehow clean up the Kernow Building, seemingly to little avail.
Now that its roof has collapsed, however, the council’s building control team can get involved. Building safety laws allow local authorities to deal with a building or structure which is in a dangerous condition.
If the council thinks a building is in a dangerous condition, it can apply for a court order requiring the owner to make the building safe, or to demolish it altogether and remove any rubbish resulting from that. Bristol City Council took another property owner to court in 2023 to order him to make the former Grosvenor Hotel building opposite Temple Meads Station safe or demolish it.
The law also states that if a property owner were to refuse to comply, the council could make the building safe itself and “recover the expenses reasonably incurred by them”.
It appears Ahmed has put up metal fencing around the Kernow Building to make it safe. However, the property is once again plastered in graffiti – suggesting people are still able to access the site.
“They’ve tagged where the roof collapsed and where the wall is unsound,” says Lesley, a local resident. “Somebody clearly put themselves at risk climbing up there.”
Councillor Wye says “significant concerns over public safety” remain over the Kernow. “It’s got some ropey Heras fencing, but kids can still get into the site and potentially hurt themselves,” he tells the Cable.
In a statement, a Bristol City Council spokesperson said the council’s dangerous structures team was “aware of the site” and “monitoring the situation”.
‘Do something positive’
Many local residents want to see the Kernow taken off Ahmed. Lesley would like to see Ahmed “forced to sell” the Kernow “at a sensible price”, adding she “would like to see some social housing and perhaps some retail units underneath”.
Wye wants to see Ahmed “do something positive” with the building. “I almost don’t care what it is – retail, flats – just get it into some kind of use for the local community,” he says.
Failing that, he wants the council to issue a compulsory purchase order (CPO) – a tool enabling the council to forcibly buy a property.
The problem is that the council has to present a very robust case to the government to CPO a building. Government guidance says a CPO should only be made where there is “a compelling case in the public interest” and “reasonable efforts” have been made by the council “to negotiate the purchase of land by agreement” with the property owner.
One way a council can demonstrate that a CPO is in the public interest is if they can show that acquiring it would help them regenerate a wider area.
A report issued in 2022 approving the CPO of the Gainsborough pub at a cost of roughly £600,000 said the council needed to buy the building because it was inside the Lockleaze Regeneration area. The council will build 47 homes on the site. The council could try to make a similar case that CPO-ing the Kernow would help it regenerate Mina Road or St Werburghs more broadly.
In a similar vein, government guidance says the council would have to say where it would secure the funding to buy the building. For instance, if the council wanted to buy the building to demolish it and build homes on the site, it would have to show how it could tap into funding for development from an agency like Homes England.
CPOs can also be very costly. There are lots of administrative costs and the property owner could fight the CPO in the courts, potentially resulting in legal costs.
Then again, not doing anything about the Kernow comes at a cost to the council too. “We have a tiny enforcement team,” Wye says. “This is just a drain on resources that could be spent elsewhere.”
Councillor Wye is calling for a change in national legislation to make it more difficult for property owners to allow buildings to degrade. “There’s too many landlords land-banking these properties,” he says. “It’s just too easy for people to get away with it.”
The Cable has approached Ahmed for comment.
