Who is pooing on Carter Knowle Avenue?

The first time Charlotte Richardson noticed it, she thought it was just dog poo. A sloppy dollop of excrement had been smeared on the side of one of the green cabinets that contain phone and internet cables. But something was wrong. Some of it seemed to have been stuck on the box at about knee height, while the rest had fallen off onto the floor. “I thought: that’s weird,” she says. “Dogs don’t do that.”

That was about six months ago. Charlotte didn’t see any for a long time after that and presumed it was a one-off. Then, in February, it was back. “I found a massive pile of it when it snowed at half term, and that was the start of it again,” she explains. Charlotte thinks that, by now, there have probably been about 30 separate incidents. The roads around her home on Carter Knowle Avenue are in the grips of a phantom pooer.

Most of the incidents have taken place on Carter Knowle Avenue, a side street of Carter Knowle Road in S11. But human feces have also appeared on Springfield Avenue over the other side of the main road. It has sometimes appeared on the road, and at other times on the grass verges. Sometimes it is smeared on the telephone cabinets, or thrown into the hedge. After another massive pile appeared in the middle of the pavement last month, Charlotte painted a large circle around it with the words “WATCH OUT”. 

Mid-March seemed to mark a step change in the culprit’s modus operandi. On Sunday 16 March, Charlotte found two lots, both deposited between 7pm and 9pm near the top of Carter Knowle Avenue. “I thought two lots was weird,” she says. Then, in the week that followed, new incidents occurred every night: on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. On the following Monday and Tuesday, Carter Knowle Avenue was briefly, mercifully free of feces. 

But the culprit had merely moved to the other side of the road on Springfield Avenue. Then, an unexpected lull for four days. Just as Charlotte began to hope it had stopped, a devastating new pile appeared on the road next to the Cherry Tree pub. Just what, she wondered, was going on?