Lorraine Byrne scrubs and scrubs the walls, but the black mould keeps coming back. She lives in a damp and cold two-bed council flat with her husband and four children on the Nags Head estate in East London.
Last winter she moved the chest of drawers in the bedroom where her three eldest children sleep, and mould covered in fluff stretched up the unit. “I just want to know that my kids aren’t suffering from breathing in those damp spores,” Byrne, 38, says. “There’s only so much you can do. We can mask it but it’s still there. It’s in the air. It’s in the walls. It’s like one of those horror movies.”
Byrne’s neighbours face similarly dangerous living conditions – black mould causing respiratory problems, slugs coming through the floors, crumbling staircases and mice. Their housing association Peabody, a non-profit claiming to “create affordable homes
