Cathall

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cathall is a Community-based Housing Association housing estate of the Cathall ward, Leytonstone, East London.

Cathall estate was built in 1972, consisting of two 20-storey towerblocks and a huge maze of 8-storey flats. It became one of Britains poorest areas with extreme levels of poverty and crime.

The most notable murder was that of a 19 year old woman: "In terms of utter ruthlessness, the killing of Cassandra Higgins ranks high on the list. A Jamaican visa overstayer, she was certainly no angel. Still, her demise was shocking by any standards. The nineteen-year-old was stripped naked by five Rude Boys in an eighteenth-floor crack-house on the Cathall Road Estate in Leytonstone, east London. Then, to the horror of those who looked on, she was thrown out of the window 160 feet to the ground. Higgins’s death, in September 1993, was thought to have been the result of a rudie drug deal double-cross on her part. The brutal murder was witnessed by several people, but true to form the mouths of those assembled were welded shut by the force of the posse code: ‘See and blind, hear and deaf’; in fact, not one person was willing to go to court to testify against the killers."

All neighbouring high rise estates (Oliver Close estate, Boundary Road estate and Livingstone College estate) have now been demolished, only one high rise estate in Waltham Forest remains, Northwood Tower.

In the late 90's, the esate began to be regenerated into a low-rise housing estate by the Waltham Forest Housing Action Trust and Community-based Housing Association. Similar Housing Action Trust schemes were set up across Waltham Forest and Tower Hamlets in East London, Brent in West London, Liverpool, Hull and Birmingham. Cathall is well known in Waltham Forest for it's swimming pool.

• Hornbeam Tower

• Redwood Tower