On a sunny day in June, Sue Chandlers was watching the children playing outside through the window of her nursery when, suddenly, they bent over, clasped their hands to their mouths, and started to cough and splutter. Some seemed to be choking. The teacher on duty called the children over, struggling to speak herself.
For a split second, Chandlers stood there, confused. Then she smelt it. As the smoke crept in through the open window, her eyes watered and her nose burned. She rushed the children back inside, closing all the windows. She handed out inhalers to the asthmatic children. It was hot in the classroom, and the smell of smoke lingered. The children would be stuck inside for the next few hours.
Chandlers Chatters nursery sits to the west of Arnolds Field, on the edge of Rainham, a suburb where East London meets Essex. Historically known for its marshes, fishing industry and mediaeval church, Rainham boasts children’s parks, the river Ingrebourne and a nature reserve.
Compared to other nurseries around London, Chandlers Chatters is situated in a nature hotspot. But the air isn’t any cleaner out here. For over a decade now, a massive, illegal landfill site just under a kilometre away has been intermittently on fire, spreading foul smoke and noxious fumes over the area.
It’s a strange story that I’ve been investigating for over six months now – a tale involving underground drug bunkers, AK-47s and a community that feels it’s been ignored by the authorities because it’s happening in Rainham rather than Hampstead or Wimbledon. “It would have been sorted a long time ago, if it happened somewhere like that,” one resident tells me. And she’s probably right.
The fires seem to have begun in 2004, when nine were recorded by the London Fire Brigade (LFB) at the site. Since then, they have more than doubled, with over 19 fires having already been recorded in 2024 so far. In 2022, there were a record 46 fires. So frequent are the fires that the site on Launders Lane has been called “the Rainham Volcano” by the local press.
For residents like Chandlers, who live and work close by, the fires are devastating. Even a small fire can produce smog that reaches as far as the nursery; given smoke can travel ten metres per second, the fumes can potentially reach the children in roughly one and a half minutes. “You can’t always see it,” says Chandlers, “but you can always smell it.”
No one is quite sure whether the dump, which is estimated by the fire brigade to reach around 25 feet below ground, is self-igniting periodically or is constantly on fire below the surface. The 40,000 cubic metres of unregulated landfill includes everything from plastics to asbestos-containing materials. The billowing smoke plumes it produces have been seen from the M25 and are a regular sight and smell in neighbouring towns and villages.
Since the fires began, the fire service has attended over 150 incidents at the site using more than 4,275 firefighters. They regularly require fire teams from all over London, taking manpower, water pumps and engines from stations as far as Brixton, an hour-and-a-half drive away.
According to a press officer for the LFB, it’s not uncommon to use resources from multiple stations for a fire of this size. What is unusual is how often the firefighters have to keep going back.
‘Nobody knows all of what’s down there’
Arnolds Field was supposed to be a public park. How the former quarry came to be a huge illegal dump over decades is the result of dodgy dealing, council negligence and outright criminal activity. During these years, the land has been the site of a cannabis farm protected by trapdoors and dogs, and an unlawful landfill for all kinds of building, industrial and domestic detritus. Now, it is a major toxic health hazard, and a fire risk so dangerous that firefighters are no longer able to go on-site to extinguish it.
Havering Council has so far failed to stop it, claiming that because the dump is on private land, it’s not their jurisdiction. They maintain this argument even though they granted planning permission on the site in the 1990s, and, according to UK law, are responsible for enforcing these agreements. Even now, when dangerous carcinogenic substances have been found in the burning ground, the council insists there is “no public health risk”.
Yet the same council issues statements telling residents to close their windows at the height of the summer, and warns asthmatic, elderly and vulnerable people not to leave their homes. With no resolution in sight, the smoke still rises.
Two years ago, a firefighter attending an incident at Arnolds Field injured their ankle on the uneven ground, according to a response to a Freedom of Information request seen by The Londoner. Gas cylinders have exploded among the piles of rubbish after being exposed to heat. As a result, the fire brigade is now restricted to hosing the field down from the roadside, which is why it often takes a long time to get the blazes under control, and also why the A-road adjacent to Arnolds Field is often closed.
Often, the fire brigade is there for more than five hours. In July this year, firefighters had to work overnight to put out the blaze. In September, they attended a fire on one part of the landfill one day, and had to come back to put out another fire on a different part of the site the next. Sometimes, there are as many as 70 firefighters and 14 fire engines.
Neither the council, environmental investigators or fire brigade know why the dump ignites, although the LFB believes the fires are likely caused by the buildup of heat from the rubbish. “We can’t know what’s under there because it’s too dangerous to even go on the site,” a spokesperson says. Ben Vaughan, a spokesperson for Havering Council, agrees: “Nobody knows all of what’s down there,” he says. “No one has gone deep enough to know.”
Last year, the council commissioned an investigation into the soil at the dump, but investigators only went as far as five metres underground. The investigators were also limited in where they could take samples — “steep gradient changes” made many areas inaccessible.
‘Not nice substances’
One thing Havering Council does seem able to state with some conviction is that there is “no public health risk” and “no significant effect on air quality” in the area. A press officer says this is because air quality monitors installed near the site last year show relatively low averages of PM 2.5 and PM 10 pollution levels. ‘PMs’, or particulate matter, are harmful to humans because they can be breathed in through the nose and lungs.
In recent months, however, the council has admitted the monitors show pollution spikes during and after large fires. Internal emails from 2021 obtained by The Londoner also show that council staff suggested that increased levels of PM 10 and PM 2.5 pollutants captured by the monitors may be linked to the fires.
In one email, a Senior Public Protection Officer writes to a colleague: “There are no significant peaks during this period of monitoring, but there are elevated concentrations, shown as hourly means in the range of 35-43 μg/m3. Taking into account that the annual mean at the station is below 20 μg/m3, these concentrations are considered relatively elevated and could potentially have been caused by the fires in Arnolds field”. The officer goes on to say that the legal limit for these pollutants is an annual average of 40 μg/m3, and has not been breached.
Last year’s investigation into the soil at the site drew attention to ground gases as a risk that could cause explosions and wildfires. It also concluded that there is potential for these gases “to migrate through the waste mass material on site and to vent to the atmosphere”. The report suggested that the site be covered to trap the spread of these gases.
Ian Williams, a professor of Applied Environmental Science at Southampton University, told me that “burning landfills always pose a health risk.” I sent him some information about the fires in Rainham to get an expert opinion, although he hasn’t examined the site himself. “When plastics are burned in an uncontrolled fashion, potentially toxic gases can be released into the atmosphere,” he told me. “These are not nice substances and you would not want to be breathing them in.”
And yet, thousands of local people in Rainham clearly are breathing them in on a regular basis, including the children in the nearby nurseries. How dangerous these fires are depends on how close people are to them, Williams says. “A kilometre is a short distance from pollutants generated by a fire,” he explains. “They can travel tens to hundreds of kilometres from their source.” The playground outside Chandlers’ nursery is less than a kilometre away — and hers is not the only one.
Rebecca Stewart also runs a nursery in the village. Like Chandlers, she wants the children to experience the outdoors — she even secured an allotment for them. Not far from Arnolds Field, the little patch of land Stewart tends to, even in her own time, is a great place to learn about nature. The children make the trip in all weathers, although the sunny days are the nicest.
But, again, being just a kilometre from the site, the allotment is becoming more difficult to visit. Stewart is asthmatic, and so are many of the children. “I can taste the smoke in my mouth,” she says. “It makes me breathless. I can’t get any air into my lungs. If it’s like that for me, I can’t imagine what it’s like for the little ones with asthma.”
Half of the toddlers in Stewart’s group are from low-income families, some of them living in hostels or flats without gardens. Nursery provides a rare opportunity to be outside. “They start climbing the walls when we have to keep them in,” she says. “All they want to do is go outside. It’s not fair.”
‘No public health risk’
After last year’s soil investigation, Havering Council announced that “the site is not contaminated land” and concluded that there was “currently no evidence to suggest that the fires significantly spread contaminants to neighbouring properties”. Confusingly, however, the council also advises residents to “remain indoors and close windows” during fires. It maintains that the risk from smoke inhalation is low, but then suggests people take steps to protect themselves from “any harmful smoke and other irritants and pollutants” — irritants such as the strong hydrocarbon odours that investigators discovered at the site, perhaps. This has a gasoline-like smell and can penetrate deep into the lungs, with the potential to cause fatal poisoning.
The investigators uncovered that the 40,000-cubic-metre mass of burning materials is made up of everything from household electrics to building cladding. Some of the most bizarre and dangerous items include: tarmac, coal, foam, netting, materials used in cement production, hessian fabric, car registration plates, carpets, and crisp packets (best before: 2011). While it may seem obvious that these materials could produce any number of issues if they catch fire, local authorities determine threats to health using legal limits and guidelines that are often incomplete and outdated.
For example, Havering Council insists Rainham air quality does not breach UK legal limits, but scientific consensus and UK law differs on what might constitute a public health risk. Many harmful substances found in illegal landfills do not have legal limits in the UK: some polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons like benzo(a)pyrene, for example, can cause cancer in humans and are often found in landfill sites. The soil investigators found double the recommended limit for benzo(a)pyrene for public open spaces in some parts of Arnolds Field. While the council argues that the field isn’t a public space and therefore has different limits, in legal terms, these are merely guidelines anyway. There are no statutory limits for PAHs.
In one air quality report produced for the council, investigators experienced frequent problems when trying to measure how dangerous the levels of some pollutants were — because not only are there no guidelines, these levels aren’t even monitored across the country. The report states that higher levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in September 2023 were likely caused by the fires that happened around the same time. PCBs, like PAHs, can cause cancers. But while they are banned in the UK, they are not monitored across the country, meaning any assessment of how high or low the levels are compared to other places where measurements are taken, in the report’s own words, “should be treated with caution”.
Most scientific evidence shows that fires, especially ones from landfills, cause risks to human health. This is especially true for vulnerable people. As Havering Council itself said earlier this summer, “individuals with heart or lung diseases such as asthma should ensure they have access to their medication and seek medical advice if their symptoms worsen”.
‘Ancient history’
In the course of reporting this story, I have repeatedly pushed the council about the health risks that the fires might be creating for local residents and have struggled to get a satisfying answer. They are often cagey and legalistic in their responses. Spikes produced by the air quality monitors could be caused by traffic on the adjacent road, they say, and anyway, the numbers don’t breach legal limits.
Council spokesperson Ben Vaughan says that the council technically has no obligation to undertake any of this monitoring because Arnolds Field is private land, but it is still doing so because it realises that residents are concerned.
The land is indeed private. Since 2017, it has been owned by a man called Jerry O’Donovan through his company DMC Services (Essex) Ltd. But many people would argue — as Rainham residents do — that the council is still responsible for enforcing planning restrictions on private land, and therefore remains responsible for the action it did not take to stop the dump from being built in the first place.
Havering Council leader Ray Morgon tells me that he wants to deal with “the current problems in front of me, not ancient history”. He claims that his administration, the majority of which is made up of the Residents Association Party, “inherited the problem” from the Conservatives, who lost control of the council in 2022. Morgon points to the air quality monitoring, the soil testing and the meetings the council now has with residents as proof of a more proactive approach than their predecessors, under whom the illegal dump was built.
Yet whether Residents Association or Conservatives, the fact remains that Havering Council has been at the centre of this story since the start. While Morgon and his political colleagues may represent a new era, the organisation and its staff do not. The planning officer who first allowed the site to be dumped on legally in the 1990s, for example, is still at the council. So are many others who have been involved with the site and its concomitant issues for years.
According to Morgon, “the Environment Agency has the greater powers to deal with this issue”. According to Vaughan, the mayor of London’s office should be helping with the issue. He believes they would surely be dealing with it “if it were somewhere else in the city”. The council’s official line is that responsibility rests with the landowner and, in August this year, they started legal action against O’Donovan to hold him accountable for public nuisance, which he is appealing.
Arnolds Field, it seems, is always someone else’s problem.
The drug bunkers
The other protagonist of the site’s history is John Joseph Reilly, a now 59-year-old Irishman. It’s Reilly who really took the site to ruin, and it’s the council who let him do it.
In the 1990s, the former quarry Arnolds Field was owned by a company in St Albans called Gibson Trading Ltd. The business applied to the council for permission to turn the site into a legal dump with the condition that, after it was levelled off, it would be made into a public park.
Between the agreed dumping in 1996 and a council stop notice in 2004, the site went from legal levelling-off to illegal dumping. Havering told the company that now owned the land, North London Developments Limited, that it had to stop or it would be forced to take action against it. This was Reilly’s company, and he launched an appeal. The appeal went to the secretary of state, who ordered Reilly to turn Arnolds Field into the community woodland agreed in the original planning application within one year.
In 2012, eight years after this decision, Reilly was sentenced to 12 years in prison for building a sophisticated network of subterranean drug bunkers. Officers who raided Arnolds Field found large shipping containers buried into the ground and hillside filled with active cannabis factories, alongside 297 cannabis plants. The underground drug labyrinth was hidden behind trapdoors and elaborately protected with guard dogs and petrol bombs. Police also found a Kalashnikov rifle (also known as an AK-47), two shotguns and three handguns.
At the time of his imprisonment, the Metropolitan Police conducted a financial investigation into Reilly, finding substantial cash in various bank accounts and ownership of a luxury Jaguar. Records showed he had tried to buy another farm in a remote area of Essex where, a policeman said, they believed he was trying to build another “substantial cannabis factory”.
But, as the stop notice from the council and secretary of state show, between the years 2000 and 2012, Reilly wasn’t just growing drugs and storing illegal weapons — he was also illegally dumping waste on the site.
Throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, Reilly and his wife Bernadette set up a string of companies. These businesses had short life spans: they were registered, used as assurance for loans and then went into liquidation with unpaid debts. They had names like ‘Skip to It’, ‘Express Auctions’ and ‘Seconds UK’. It’s possible that Reilly used them as a smokescreen to profit from illegally dumping — and allowing others to illegally dump — on Arnolds Field.
After Reilly was imprisoned in 2012, the Environment Agency convicted a couple of other people for illegally dumping on the site, and this seems to be the point when all the agencies involved decided that Arnolds Field was no longer their problem.
Coral Jeffrey, an ex-councillor for Rainham and author of Rainham: Born and Bred, says she remembers when the site was still supposed to be a park and the Forestry Commission came to plant baby trees to test the soil. “They all died,” she claims. “The commission came back and put red marks on them. Then they took them down.”
In August this year, the council had a “productive meeting with the landowner for Arnolds Field” and says that “hopefully” this would lead DMC Services to submit a formal planning application to remediate the site. While reassuring, it’s a familiar circle of planning applications, stop notices and promises with still no assurance for residents that the fires will end. Locals, who do not trust the council’s data, continue to measure pollutant levels with handheld devices. The LFB has attended further fires.
In a new development, three local mothers are taking legal action against the council. Their group, ‘Clean the Air’, has engaged the prestigious law firm Mishcon de Reya to challenge the council’s decision not to designate the site as contaminated. Plagued by the fumes entering their homes, the ash that settles on their windows, and the smell of burning plastic that hurts their throats, the people of Rainham are tired of the constant arguments that fail to result in any substantive change in their circumstances.
“The only people that have actually helped us are the fire brigade,” says Shaun Newton, a member of Rainham Against Pollution. “But they joined the service to save people’s lives, not to put out a burning heap of rubbish.”
On especially hot days, Shaun and other locals bring the firefighters cold drinks and snacks to keep them going while they hose down the site from the roadside. The community gathers by Arnolds Field, watching the great clouds of toxic smoke, trying to remember if they left their windows open and whether they should run home to close them.
You can share the online version of this story to spread the word about what's happening and Rainham and let your friends know about The Londoner.
Comments
Sign in or become a The Londoner member to leave comments. To add your photo, click here to create a profile on Gravatar.
