Not all publicity is good publicity.

By publishing this news on this site, you have drawn the attention of the political police in the Met to an issue which was up until now simply a matter between Ramparts and the local council.


The police will certainly exploit this as an opportunity you have presented them.

Doh....

" People are also asked to refrain from pissing in the street which actually seems to be the core complaint of the neighbour who got the council involved!"

I think that the reques of not pissing in the street is a reasonable one, you can not really blame someone for asking that, and in fact people already should know that you can not do that unless it is in your own house.

People should know that most political squatters are in fact from upper class families who play at being radical revolutionaries for a few years before getting a proper job. Look at all the revolutionary squatters from the late 1960s like Richard Branson. In a few years time these so called revolutionaries will be in very high paid jobs and wont give a a damn about the so called causes they once campaigned about. In the late 1960's it was the Vietnam war, now its the Iraq War. Both lost causes!

Sure you are not being a bit paranoid?

hey
so i'm kinda concerned about what the legal psition is on all this ,
as someone who's involved in putting on a benefit party in a few weeks time
and who also owns sound equipment , what powers does this noise abatement
order give the cops to stop the party and/or is it likly they would try to seize
the sound system ....... any info anyone ?

The rampARTs abatement notice prohibits the recurrence of "loud music" amounting to a statutory nuisance. There is no simple definition of such a statutory nuisance and proof requires expert evidence that the noise is unreasonable and causes substantial interference to normal domestic activities or represents a threat to health. The factors taken into consideration in judging whether there is a statutory nuisance includes the frequency and duration of individual occurrences, loudness, time of day/night, as well as the length of time the nuisance has been caused (weeks/months).

The rampART is better sound proofed than most pubs and most previous complaints have been about people hanging around outside and have no relation to music from inside. One of the neighbours is musician that does band practise in his bedroom with the windows open and the rampART has been unfairly blamed for this noise. Only last saturday the council turned up in the afternoon to say there had been a complaint that afternoon and yet no event was taking place!

The rampART notice provides no guidance about times or unreasonable levels which obviously makes it hard very hard for anyone doing events at the rampART know when they are breeching the notice. Most notices issued to nightclubs for example would define conditions in terms of level of sound and/or time limitations or in terms of work to be carried out to mitigate against noise. The failure of the notice to clearly define what constitutes a breech provide good grounds for appeal.

Enforcement and succesful prosecution for a breech of the current notice would problemmatic but it would be better to simply avoid annoying the neighbours in th first place.

Use some soundproofing and board over the windows if they are being smashed. You can get someone to use a decibal meter to test the noise levels outside too.

Seems American 'Anarchist' can't read - or can be bothered. He makes similar pointless ill-informed comments all over the news wire (is it just me or is indymedia swamped with such idiots these days?).

As the above post says, the rampART windows have all ready been sound proofed and are now being bricked up in order to increase the noise attenuation and address the problem caused by the kids smashing the windows.