The property billed as the most expensive council house in Britain, which sold at auction for just under £3 million, has been taken over by squatters.
The Grade-II listed London building went under the hammer at a Savills auction on Monday morning, fetching £2.96 million from an anonymous buyer. The empty property was being sold by Southwark Council to raise funds for 20 modern council houses.
But before the sale could be finalised more than 20 protesters from the community group Homes For All occupied the building at 21-23 Park Street, Borough. (PA)
Chilli sauce fouling the air
A chilli sauce maker has received a battery of complaints for allegedly fouling the air around its Southern California factory.
The city of Irwindale has applied for an injunction to stop production at the Huy Fong Foods factory, claiming the smell from the plant is a public nuisance.
Residents have complained of burning eyes, irritated throats and headaches and some people have had to leave their homes to escape the smell. (PA)
Roman eagle unearthed
An “exceptional” Roman sculpture of an eagle clasping a serpent in its beak has been discovered by archaeologists in the final hours of a dig at a London building site.
Experts have declared that the object, which was found in the City of London before the site’s redevelopment into a 16-storey hotel, “the finest sculpture by a Romano-British artist ever found in London”.
Archaeologists also unearthed foundations of a mausoleum on the east London site and believe that the statue, dating from the first or second century AD and made from oolitic limestone from the Cotswolds, once adorned it. The sculpture came out of the ground “covered in soil and unrecognisable” in September in the last few hours of an excavation that had lasted several months. (PA)
Farmer’s field mowed secretly
Austrian police are seeking witnesses to the theft of huge amounts of grass, mowed secretly from a farmer’s field.
A farmer reported the field mowed and the grass gone near Liebenfels, a village about 120 miles from Vienna.
He estimates it is worth around £3,000 as fodder. (PA)
War Bible to be returned
A soldier is to return his grandfather’s Second World War Bible to him after carrying it in his body armour during a six-month tour of Afghanistan. Corporal David Coles (pictured left when the pocket Bible was blessed by Padre Martin Sheldon in Camp Bastion) arrived safely home in Cambridge with his “treasured possession”, which he will hand back to 95-year-old Alfred Henry Collins, who was given it in 1941 after joining the RAF Police. Cpl Coles, 31, who normally works for 156 Provost Company, Military Police, in Colchester, Essex, said: “My grandfather has a strong faith and wanted me to take his service Bible with him. “I have kept excellent care of it, because it’s a treasured possession of his. It’s been in my body armour, in a special pouch in my day sack. I’ve tried not to carry it too much to avoid damaging or losing it.”