Potted Plants

It may have once been a grand building but number 101 in a certain road is now far from its best.

It stands at the western end of a terraced block just on the fringes of the city centre. It has not always been an end property. A stray bomb or an enthusiastic town planner dictated that the rest of the row was toppled and in order to support what was once a party wall a climbing frame of substantial steel girders was erected.

Someone had a sense of humour or none at all to paint the buttress a gawdy purple. In itself a bit of an eyesore but even more so against a lilac coloured rendered finish behind from ground level over the full height of three storeys plus an undercroft.

I must have driven past 101 at least once if not more every day when my office was in the central city area but I cannot recall what form of business last occupied the expansive floor area. I have vague recollections of signage for a record shop, vinyl albums and singles, but cannot be sure.

The combination of a building that resembled a vivid blob of lurid colours and the economic recession did not assist in securing any new occupants until, out of the blue, a tenant expressed an interest to take up residency for an initial six months and paid the full amount of rent up front.

The owner could not believe his good fortune and felt optimistic that a corner had been turned for the good in the viability of the premises.

The deal sounded too good to be true and in my experience that is usually the case.

Some four months into the letting the building was raided by the police who discovered a very large and evidently clinically operated drugs factory. To the passer by in the street there was nothing to suspect any illegal activity behind the vertical blinds of the frontage windows. To the helicopter of the constabulary and its heat detecting camera the building had produced a classic profile and cluster of temperatures used in the hydroponic growth of cannabis plants.

This was in spite of the best efforts of the cultivators to screen and lag the exterior of the building in tin foil to prevent detection from the air.

There may also have been a tip off about what those in the know described as a very distinctive odour from the crop, somewhere between a sweet almost sickly smell to one of fish.

The growing process also relied on a good nutrient base and plenty of water. The upper floors were laden with a thick bed of soil directly on the old floorboards and with a sprinkler system beneath an array of heat lamps. Water,  not absorbed by the fast growing foliage percolated through the structure saturating everything in its relentless gravity influenced journey to the ground.

The undercroft took on the form of a glassy surfaced lake of slightly peaty coloured liquid. The water had no escape from this point and just stagnated and spawned fungul growths , mould and spores which started to eat the building from the inside out.

It was a complete mess, an organic petrie dish on a massive scale.

When the owner was eventually allowed to return and start to tackle the dilapidations and dereliction the scale of the task became evident.

As a conservative estimate, based on the number of waste skips which shuttled back and forth, some 14 tons of the guts of the building had to be removed. This included a mulch of sodden plasterboard, mushroom covered pitch pine boards, old service installations and the remnants of the internal fittings, so distorted and decomposed that their actual form and function could only be guessed at.

Much of the debris was recovered from the undercroft where, like the water, it had made its own way with the implosion of the structural framework.

Prior to the arrival of the skips the owner had shovelled up and bagged the soil and growing medium from the former operation. A few dessicated cannabis plants also made their way into the mix. The contents of the hundred or so green polythene garden bags resembled the best quality composts, packed with vermiculite, light and full of goodness.

The temptation was too great for the owner and he recouped a good proportion of his enforced costs for remediation of the property through the sale of the bagged up material. It went like stink to local gardening enthusiasts, allotment holders, those with window boxes on the seventh floor of an inner city tower block, into planters in town gardens and the sensory gardens of local charitable concerns. Over the ensuing months the police received information from a variety of anonymous sources about the large scale cultivation of strange, almost fern-like plants in the most unlikely places around the city centre. 101 had wreaked its revenge.