The Rainham volcano: a waste dump is constantly on fire in east London. Why will no one stop it? | Waste

One afternoon in July 2011, an 11-year-old boy named William Knowlden was out cycling with friends when he came upon Arnolds Field, an expanse of green land in Havering, east London. The site spans about 17 hectares, or 24 football pitches, and around its perimeter runs a wooden fence, with two access points through which vehicles can pass. Arnolds Field rises much higher than the surrounding land. Its surface is lumpy and undulating, like a blanket thrown over a heap of cuddly toys. The land is overgrown. It has been decades since animals grazed there, and few people have set foot on it in recent years. But every so often, it is mistaken for a safe place to explore.

As Knowlden descended a hill, he lost control and was thrown over the handlebars. When he came to, he was lying in a small crater and his feet were covered in a powdery residue that resembled ash. He felt a sharp pain in his left foot. When Knowlden’s friends arrived, they removed his shoes and peeled back his socks. One foot was pink and swollen, the skin blistered and shiny; the other was blackened and charred. Patches of skin hung off, revealing layers of fatty tissue. “It looked like it had been eaten by maggots,” Knowlden recalled. “Like pure, pure flesh.” In hospital, doctors informed Knowlden that he’d suffered third-degree burns in his right foot. They were baffled. With thermal burns, there should be an identifiable source of heat, like an open flame, but Knowlden and his friends hadn’t seen anything like that.

In the years following William’s accident, his mother, Nicola, became fearful that there might be something seriously wrong with Arnolds Field. Smoke would occasionally rise up from it, and a strange smell, like burning plastic or rubber, would engulf the neighbourhood. “I was like, ‘Oh my God. What on earth is over there?’” she told me. She wasn’t alone. Around 2014, fishers at a lake next to Arnolds Field became suspicious when the fish started mysteriously dying off. One local woman, Barbara Thwaites, told me that around this time, she had started to have respiratory problems. When her husband suffered severe respiratory collapse and died, she grew even more suspicious. “I knew something was going on there, but I didn’t know what,” she told me. After her son’s accident, Nicola Knowlden says she wrote an email to the council, urging them to investigate, but never heard back. (Havering council says it has no record of this email.)

Nobody knows exactly what lies under Arnolds Field, though there are rumours: ammunition from a nearby former airfield, animal carcasses from the foot and mouth outbreak, hazardous waste from the London Olympic site. Like all waste, whatever is under Arnolds Field generates heat as the organic materials decompose. Fires have been burning underneath the site for years – in 2023, a thermal imaging drone identified a patch of ground that was 176.4C – while surface-level fires have become more common and more violent. Since 2018, the fire brigade has attended nearly 200 fires at the site. “When it comes to May and the phone rings, everyone rolls their eyes because we know it’s Arnolds Field,” Paul McClenaghan, borough commander for Havering for the London Fire Brigade, told me.

The worst fires last for days, spewing huge plumes of smoke that engulf the area. Rainham, one of the most deprived suburbs of London, lies 500 metres to the north-west of Arnolds Field. “There are days when I feel like someone is sitting on my chest, like I can’t get a full lung full of air,” Coral Jeffery, one 78-year-old resident, says. Each new fire stokes local people’s fears that they are being exposed to harmful pollution. Between 2006 and 2017, rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a severe lung condition, have been rising faster in Rainham than in other parts of the capital, according to an analysis conducted by an academic at University College London in 2022. Knowlden, who is now 22, fears the worst fires are to come, which is why he’s saving up money to move away. “One day it’s going to go up and they aren’t going to be able to control it,” he told me.

One group of volunteers, Rainham Against Pollution, has approached the European court of human rights for support in pressuring Havering council to clean up the land. Yet the council argues that because the land is private, it is the owner’s responsibility to address the problem. A second campaigning group is mounting a legal challenge to the council’s decision not to formally designate the land as “contaminated”. Margaret Mullane, who was elected the new MP for Dagenham and Rainham in July 2024, has vowed to stop the fires once and for all. “Launders Lane has been a public health threat to Rainham residents for too many years,” she told me. But a solution seems a long way off.

In spring 2024, I met the members of Rainham Against Pollution. As we drank beers in a run-down pub near the train station, an acrid bonfire smell hung in the air, and the season’s fires were only just beginning. “There is no regard whatsoever for a single person who lives in this area,” Mark James, the group’s leader, told me. “It’s like living with a volcano,” said Sue Ospreay, Havering’s 63-year-old deputy mayor. “It erupts and then you have two, three, four days of hell.” Ospreay, who is a supporter but not a member of Rainham Against Pollution, fears what the smoke from the constant fires might be doing to her grandchildren’s lungs. “It’s too late for us, but I am thinking about our children and their children,” she said. “This is our Erin Brockovich moment.”

For a long time Arnolds Field was nothing more than an unloved patch of unused land. In the 1960s, gravel pits had been dug there and in subsequent years, once extraction was complete, the ground was poorly restored. The soils were too thin, so the grass was patchy and uneven, and there was rubbish scattered across the surface. For a time the land was used for grazing cows, but eventually it was deemed unsuitable for livestock and was more or less abandoned.

It wasn’t until 1998 that the trouble really began. In September, a company called North London Developments bought Arnolds Field and successfully applied to Havering council for permission to turn it into a legal dump. The plan was to deposit hundreds of thousands more tonnes of inert waste, after which the company would level it off and replenish the topsoils. The height and the shape of the land would remain the same but the quality of the soil would improve. Then it would be used for farming.

The reality was very different. By January 1999, dozens of tipper lorries were hurtling through Rainham every day, on their way to Arnolds Field. Unlike the lorries that would regularly collect gravel from local pits and transport it to construction sites, these ones were not emblazoned with a company name. Their trailers had high metal sides so you couldn’t see what was inside. Steam or smoke would sometimes seep out, and the smell could be horrendous. “Some of them made you heave as they drove past,” Jim Catlin, a local fisherman, told me.

Whatever they were carrying, the lorries would empty their load on Arnolds Field, and giant earthmovers and bulldozers would bury it. Activity continued after dark. Terry Evens, 86, whose house overlooks Arnolds Field, remembers being woken on many occasions by the screeching of brakes and the muffled sounds of pistons. In the morning, his window sills would be covered in black dust. Rumours spread that the dumping was connected to a transnational crime syndicate. “There was no way I was going to approach the lorry drivers to ask what was inside,” Catlin told me. “I’d be in the Thames right now!”

The waste business is lucrative, and is often exploited by criminal organisations. It’s expensive to dispose of waste legally. By burying it under private land or industrial plots, criminal groups can undercut legitimate disposal companies and still pocket large chunks of the money. The results for public health can be devastating. Perhaps the most notorious case is in the Campania region of southern Italy, where the Camorra mafia has made enormous sums by illegally burying millions of tonnes of toxic waste, which has polluted the soil and the water table. Much of this toxic waste has also been burned. The result is that in one area north of Naples, dubbed “the triangle of death”, cancer rates are far higher than in the rest of the country.

By the summer of 1999, so much waste had been dumped on Arnolds Field that it was unrecognisable. A giant sloped embankment had been built up along one side. These are common around gravel extraction sites, because they prevent noise and dust from escaping, but locals feared it was meant to conceal whatever was going on inside. In some areas on the site, they could glimpse new mounds of rubbish and soil rising high into the sky. They were increasingly worried that the waste was hazardous and would pollute the local waterways. They demanded that Havering council stop the lorries from coming, and remove any illegal waste they’d already dumped.

Jeffrey Tucker was elected as a local councillor for Rainham and Wennington ward in May 2002. Almost right away, he started receiving calls about Arnolds Field. “My phone was hot,” he told me. In spring 2003, Tucker met John Reilly, the landowner and director of North London Developments, at Arnolds Field. Reilly greeted him politely and offered him a tour of the site. It was a mess, with litter strewn everywhere and rubble poking up through the ground, according to Tucker’s former secretary, who was also in attendance.

Reilly led them into a small cabin, where Tucker raised his concerns. Reilly was friendly, and asked whether Tucker had a favourite charity to which he could offer a donation. The former secretary says she told Tucker not to accept the offer, and left the cabin. Moments later, Tucker wandered out holding an envelope containing a cheque for £3,000, made out to a local primary school. (When I put this to the school, I was directed to Havering council, which said: “We are not aware of, or able to comment on, something that allegedly happened in 2003 involving a former ward councillor and who was not in the administration at the time.”) Tucker told me that it did not occur to him that Reilly might want something in return for the cheque. He had visited Reilly to get “some sort of compensation”, believing it was “the “least he could do as a newly elected councillor”. He continued to pass on the residents’ complaints to the council, he said. (Reilly did not respond to requests for comment.)

In April 2004, Havering council’s planning committee met to discuss complaints about Arnolds Field. Three months later it issued an enforcement notice to North London Developments, requiring it to stop importing and spreading any further waste materials, and to remove excess illegal waste. After some legal back and forth, in November 2005, an agent from the Planning Inspectorate, a central government body, upheld the notices and required that all unauthorised material be removed from the site within 12 months.

But just before that deadline expired, Reilly dissolved the company. In 2008, he transferred ownership of the land to himself personally. Havering council told me that it sought legal advice about whether to prosecute Reilly for failing to comply with the enforcement notice, but had decided against doing so. Instead, they attempted to negotiate with him. The illegal dumping seems to have continued for the next six years.

Meanwhile, residents were growing increasingly concerned about the strange activities that seemed to be going on at Arnolds Field. As they would discover, they had every reason to be.

In the early hours of 12 February 2011, an officer at the Metropolitan police received a call from a man who claimed to be on Arnolds Field. He was a security guard and he said that a group of armed men had arrived to conduct a robbery. The call dropped and when it reconnected the man informed the officer that the robbers had gone and he no longer needed assistance.

Over the next 10 days, the police conducted aerial surveillance of the area. In the early morning of 22 February, a group of officers arrived to do a ground search. In one corner of the site they found an illegal dump, strewn with car batteries, kitchen stoves, carpets and piles of rubble. When they inspected the other side of Arnolds Field they found something more surprising. Along a muddy pathway, concealed behind the sloped embankment, there was an array of generators and mobile cabins, including a canteen and sleeping quarters. In one office, guarded by dogs, there was a Kalashnikov rifle, a handgun, two sawn-off shotguns, ammunition and petrol bombs. There was also tens of thousands of pounds in cash and, oddly, hundreds of high-wattage lightbulbs.

That final discovery started to make sense when, in one of the mobile cabins, the officers found concealed trap doors. They had stumbled on a cannabis factory, housed in interconnected shipping containers. Through a maze of underground passages they discovered two more cannabis laboratories with about 1,000 cannabis plants. The police arrested 10 individuals on-site, including Reilly. In September 2011, Reilly pleaded guilty and received six years in prison for the production of a controlled drug and a further six for the possession of prohibited firearms. (The other men who had been arrested were acquitted; they insisted they thought they were working at a legal landfill site rather than a drug factory.)

At the beginning of 2012, after complaints from Rainham residents, the Environment Agency commissioned an engineering company to assess Arnolds Field for contamination. The company dug 35 pits, each about 4 metres deep. They found landfill waste – including mattresses and pieces of furniture – at each one. They didn’t find any hazardous waste, but there were elevated levels of lead and benzo(a)pyrene, a potent chemical that causes cancer, in the soil – a sign that something toxic might have been buried elsewhere on site. (McClenaghan, the local fire department commander, believes that in some places the waste reaches 12 metres – about four storeys – below the ground, well out of reach of the 2012 survey.) The engineering company noted that the land was so warm that it melted the winter snow.

It seems reasonable to expect that, at this point, Havering council or the Environment Agency (EA) might have conducted further investigations and proposed a plan to address any possible contamination of the land. This is not what happened. A spokesperson for Havering council told me that the council never received a copy of the engineering company’s report, and that, in any case, an investigation into illegal dumping on Arnolds Field would be led by the EA. A spokesperson for the EA said it has no record of ever commissioning an engineering company to investigate the site, and that ultimately Havering council is the lead authority on regulating the site. (These responses – each organisation claiming to be unaware of basic facts regarding the site, while also disavowing responsibility – are characteristic of the saga of Arnolds Field, and reveal why local people are so furious about the situation.)

Even after Reilly’s operation had been shut down, fly-tippers continued to carry out illegal dumping on Arnolds Field. In May 2014, the EA appointed a dozen officers to dress in camouflage and hide in bushes with binoculars in the roads leading to the site. They caught three men using a forklift truck to remove the giant concrete blocks that the agency had placed at the entrance to stop vehicles going into the field. The men were later convicted, having dumped about 20 tonnes of household and commercial waste on Arnolds Field.

In March 2017, through his lawyer, Reilly – who was still in prison – put Arnolds Field up for auction. Jerry O’Donovan, an Irishman living in Upminster, a wealthy town a short drive away from Rainham, was one of the bidders. A broad-shouldered man in his 60s, with a friendly smile and a powerful voice, O’Donovan owns a company that rents out construction equipment. O’Donovan was aware of the chequered history of Arnolds Field, but he told me he had assumed that the site had been cleaned up following Reilly’s arrest. He was looking for a big parcel of land where he could build warehouses to store his inventory; Arnolds Field seemed ideal. He instructed his solicitor to commission the standard conveyancing searches from Havering council, and these made no mention of contamination. He assumed the land had simply been excavated and filled with clean earth in the years after Reilly’s arrest. “You either buy it or you don’t buy it at auction, you don’t get time to go digging holes,” O’Donovan told me.

The report from the council did, however, specify that the land was designated greenbelt, meaning it is protected from most forms of development. This would prevent O’Donovan from building warehouses unless he could convince the council to make an exception. Somewhat astonishingly, O’Donovan says he missed this crucial point. In September 2017, his company bought the land for £440,000. With exquisite understatement, he told me: “It’s looking like it could be a costly mistake.”

Over the past few years, the fires on Arnolds Field have intensified. In May 2020, one particularly fierce blaze required 70 firefighters from seven fire stations to extinguish it. During the worst fires, the sky darkens. “You smell the fire, and feel the intense heat, and you think, ‘Oh shit, we’re going up again,’” says Ospreay, Havering’s deputy mayor. “It’s like hell,” she said. “You are in this sweltering bunker and you can’t see or breathe.” Residents suffer nausea, chest pains, bleeding noses. Mark James, a teacher who has lived in Rainham since 2009, experiences crippling headaches. Smoke and fumes fill the corridors at his school. “It’s absolutely unbearable,” he told me. Sometimes it is necessary to close the A1306, a busy road that runs alongside Arnolds Field and connects east London to the M25, because it is hard for drivers to see through the thick smoke. At Chandlers Chatters nursery, roughly a kilometre from the edge of Arnolds Field, Sue Allen, the manager, often has to rush the children inside and close all the windows and doors. This now happens at least six times a summer, Allen says.

Firefighters can offer only limited help. The land is unstable, and as the waste burns, it compresses and creates cavities, some deep enough to swallow a person. “You’ll be walking across what you think is solid ground and whoosh, you’ll be gone,” McClenaghan, the fire department commander, told me. Plus, there’s no knowing what dangerous items may be lurking underground. In May 2020, a gas canister exploded and flew through the air, narrowly missing a firefighter’s head. McClenaghan now forbids firefighters from entering the site. “For me, it’s a case of: how could I sit in front of their families and say I put their loved one at risk to that level over a pile of rubbish?” he said. His firefighters spray water on to the fires from the roadside or from extended ladders placed around the perimeter of the field. Vast areas of the site remain out of reach. (The local fire brigade does not have direct access to aerial firefighting equipment, such as helicopters.)

Many local people believe the fires would have been stopped a long time ago if they were happening elsewhere in the borough. Havering is home to some of the most expensive neighbourhoods in England, including Upminster and Hornchurch, but it also contains very poor areas. “We pay our council rates but the council doesn’t listen to anyone in Rainham,” says Norman Kalar, who runs a local newsagent.

Because much of the waste is buried, fires can smoulder underground for years, emitting fumes all the while. Since moving to Rainham to be closer to her family, Lucy Wilson, a 35-year-old support teacher, has been suffering severe migraines. She says that her two children, aged three and 12, have developed asthma. Half of the 30 or so Rainham residents I spoke with told me they had developed an unshakeable cough. Six of them suffer from one or more respiratory conditions, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

One day last year, I met Karina and Gary Falzon, whose 12-year-old son has an extremely rare type of kidney cancer. Zain has lived within a mile of Arnolds Field his entire life, and his parents believe that environmental pollutants from Arnolds Field may have played a role in his illness. When I visited the family, Zain had recently finished a round of chemotherapy and was playing video games. An air filter hummed in the corner. It was a baking hot day but the windows were closed. Zain wasn’t allowed outside because Arnolds Field was alight and he is extremely sensitive to the smoke. “My eyes start to become itchy and I constantly rub them, and it’s hard to not rub them because I’ve obviously got no eyelashes so it doesn’t filter it out,” he said.

Gary and Karina worry constantly about Zain’s two younger sisters getting ill too. In the bath and when they’re tucking them into bed, they scan their bodies, checking for symptoms. The family house is up for sale but nobody wants to buy it. According to Sharon Sutton, the officer manager of Smartmove, a Rainham estate agent, many families in Rainham are trying to sell their homes, but there is little demand from buyers. “Why” she asked, “would people want to move to the area if there’s all this news about a toxic smoke that’s killing them?”

To Rainham residents, July 2022 was a warning sign. That month, a fire that began in a back garden tore through 17 houses in Wennington, a village two miles south-east of Rainham. Residents stood in the street, with ash-stained faces, as their homes burned down. For many in Rainham, Arnolds Field seemed like an even more disastrous accident waiting to happen.

Mark James, the teacher, had recently started a Facebook group for local people to vent their frustrations. After the Wennington fire, he arranged a crisis meeting at a nearby social club. “The residents of Rainham have been far too tolerant for far too long,” James said to a crowd of about 200 angry attendees. Not long afterwards, James, Coral Jeffery and Shaun Newton, a retired civil servant, formed Rainham Against Pollution. When the group met with the chief executive of Havering council, he told them that O’Donovan, the owner of Arnolds Field, was the one who was responsible for stopping the fires.

At first, O’Donovan was reluctant to meet with Rainham Against Pollution. He describes himself as a private man, who doesn’t communicate well in person. But social media was rife with vitriol towards him. There were unfounded suggestions that he and his family were criminals with connections to Reilly. There were rumours that he wasn’t cooperating with Havering council to stop the fires. Some local people had allegedly threatened him. Two of the diggers on his yard in Upminster were set on fire, and O’Donovan suspects angry residents were to blame.

He wanted to set the record straight, and in May 2023, he sat down with James, Jeffery and Newton. He handed them paperwork containing his plans for Arnolds Field. He wanted to convert a small part of the land into a depot for his vehicles and machinery. He would also remove all of the waste that had been buried, and the fires would stop. Around the rest of the land, he would plant hundreds of trees and bushes, and open it up as a public woodland. O’Donovan believed this work would take a decade and cost up to £20m, which he would fund through loans and investors. In return for their money, investors would take shares in O’Donovan’s companies and be rewarded with dividends.

To enact the plan, O’Donovan needed to persuade Havering council to make an exception and permit him to build on greenbelt land. He was seeking pre-application advice, whereby the council advises on a proposal before the developer submits a formal application. But, he said, Havering council was being puzzlingly unresponsive. At the meeting, he handed around a timeline that detailed dozens of emails and letters sent to the council’s planning department, to which the council had either not replied or replied very slowly. It also showed that, in 2021, Havering council had suggested a pre-application fee that was more than five times the original price quoted a few months earlier. (A spokesperson for Havering council told me that the higher fee was for an additional service.)

By the end of the meeting, while some members of Rainham Against Pollution were still furious at O’Donovan, all were convinced that the council bore far more of the blame. In their view, as the council failed to stop Reilly from illegally burying waste in the first place, the fires were their responsibility – and they were essentially ignoring the problem. “It was disgraceful,” Newton says. “How many times do you keep asking questions that they don’t answer?”

So much of the inaction and local fury about the fires on Arnolds Field revolves around a single, highly contested word. If the land were formally registered as “contaminated”, the council would be legally required to ensure it was cleaned up. (If the current landowner or the entity responsible for contaminating the land could not do it, the council would have to step in, and then try to recoup the costs afterwards.) But – maddeningly, in the view of campaigning groups – for a private site to be designated as “contaminated”, it is not enough to merely show evidence of contamination. You must also have evidence that the contaminants are seeping out of the site and harming the public or the environment. And proving causation in cases like this is not straightforward.

It was not until 2022 that the council finally began seriously investigating these questions. One part of these ongoing studies involved measuring the levels of PM2.5, a type of air pollution that causes cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, around Arnolds Field. When the surface vegetation is burning, the levels of these particles in the air are as bad as anything in London, says Timothy Baker, a scientist at Imperial College London who monitors the data. But when you average these levels out over 24 hours, which is the time period for which the WHO provides daily recommended thresholds, they rarely – only during the most tenacious fires – exceed those limits. (The WHO does, however, say that repeated exposure to shorter spikes is dangerous.)

Yet the results of the council’s investigation into PM2.5 levels are at odds with another study, conducted by Elizabeth Cooper, a lecturer in health, wellbeing and sustainable buildings at UCL. Over nine days in November and December 2022, when the Arnolds Field surface vegetation was not burning, Cooper reported that the average levels of PM2.5 in a street bordering the field did exceed the maximum 24-hour exposure recommended by the WHO.

Havering council has also tested for ground contaminants. In September 2023, an engineering company dug a series of trenches to a maximum depth of 5 metres and found dangerous concentrations of arsenic, lead and benzo(a)pyrene in the field, as well as evidence of asbestos fibres. The council commissioned a review of the prevalence of certain types of cancer, linked to air pollution, in Rainham between 2011 and 2020. The report, published in summer 2024, concluded that the incidence of lung, brain and haematological cancers (ie leukaemia) were no higher in residents living close to Arnolds Field than in Havering and England more generally. (The council has also commissioned a study to measure the levels of dangerous pollutants such as lead and mercury in the air, though this has not yet been published.)

In July 2024, as fierce fires once again raged on Arnolds Field, Havering council made an announcement that horrified, but did not surprise, many residents. It would not be formally designating Arnolds Field as “contaminated” land, on the grounds that it is “not open to the public” and there was “currently no evidence to suggest that the fires significantly spread contaminants to neighbouring properties”. (Meanwhile, the council continues to advise residents to “remain indoors and close windows” during fires.)

When he heard about the council’s announcement, Newton was “foaming at the mouth”, he told me. He considered quitting Rainham Against Pollution altogether. The stress was too much. But then he thought about his grandchildren, and their future. “I’ll be damned if they’re going to beat us,” he said.

Late last summer, when I met with Rainham Against Pollution a second time, Arnolds Field was ablaze again and morale was at an all-time low. The group was arranging a protest outside the town hall and discussing the possibility of withholding council tax in the hope of prompting action. Some of them had bought air-quality monitors to conduct their own investigations. The members were hesitant to speak on the record. Several had recently received anonymous sympathy cards through the post, with nothing written inside. None of them had suffered a bereavement, and they interpreted these letters as a threat, though they did not know who the sender could be.

One of the more promising avenues for residents is the work of another local environmental group, Clear the Air in Havering, which has asked a court to review the council’s decision not to designate Arnolds Field as contaminated land. A hearing is scheduled at the Royal Court of Justice in London for March 2025. Yet this only offers limited hope. Ray Morgon, the leader of Havering council, says that it is financially inconceivable for the council to take responsibility for cleaning up the land. The council recently secured £88m in government support, in effect to avoid going bankrupt. “At the moment, we are talking about saving £300,000 by closing some of our libraries,” he told me.

In Morgon’s view, it’s up to O’Donovan to submit a formal planning application and hope for the best. O’Donovan is reluctant, because the paperwork would cost him hundreds of thousands of pounds and he has been told by a senior member of Havering’s planning department that he’s unlikely to receive permission, given that Arnolds Field is within greenbelt land. Yet, O’Donovan points out, Morgon has recently declared his support for a huge datacentre and renewable energy facility, along with thousands of new homes, that would be built on a vast expanse of greenbelt land in Havering. If Morgon can get behind that, O’Donovan wonders, why not back his plans, too?

And so the residents of Rainham find themselves stuck in the middle of an apparently endless stalemate, in which everyone agrees that the situation with Arnolds Fields – constantly ablaze, polluting the air, soil and water, causing huge distress and ill-health – is unbearable and must be resolved, yet no one will accept responsibility for resolving it. The Environment Agency says the council is responsible. The council says the EA and O’Donovan are responsible. O’Donovan says it’s in the council’s hands. Ben Vaughan, a spokesperson for Havering council, told a journalist for the Londoner that “really the mayor’s office should handle it”. The buck is simply passed back and forth.

In late February, I visited Newton at his home, a short walk from Arnolds Field. It was one of the first sunny days of 2025. The air felt cleaner than the previous times I visited, but fire season was coming soon. Reporters were knocking on doors, asking how residents were gearing up.

Newton was building an Airfix model for his grandchildren when I arrived. Beside him he had his air-quality monitor, charged up and ready to go. He had been watching Toxic Town, a Netflix dramatisation of the Corby toxic waste scandal. The story follows a group of young mothers who band together to demand justice after their children are born with congenital disorders after inhaling airborne toxins. During the 1980s and 90s, the mothers discover, Corby borough council had failed to properly dispose of hazardous waste from the town’s decommissioned steelworks site. As a result, children were being born with missing limbs, or damage to fingers and toes. In 2009, after 10 years of campaigning, a high court found Corby borough council liable for negligence in handling the waste.

The series was a much-needed shot of inspiration for Newton. After nearly three years of fighting, he is the only member of Rainham Against Pollution left standing. James and Jeffery have taken a back seat because of health and personal issues. Newton often sits up until the early morning, scouring documents, filing freedom of information requests. He’s written to Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, and to Erin Brockovich herself, but has not heard back.

The hardest part, Newton told me, is feeling that so much of the damage is already done. Even if, by some miracle, his wishes were granted and someone were to start clearing up the land tomorrow, it would likely take another 10 years before the work is complete. During that time, Arnolds Field will continue to burn. What, he wonders, will the residents’ health be like then?