Forum topic: Mysterious mattresses

On the basis no one could possibly own so many mattresses, i have to assume its an art-based regeneration supporting installation. Not sure i buy it though. Tracey Emin, my beds .... ?

After an earlier, Tracy Emin inspired, mattress fest highlighted on PGC, last night on the way to the Talkies Here Festival I came across a discarded mattress close to St Johns Church Hall on the Bourne. The previous day revealed a small mattress on Fox Lane near the bridge, before that one on Lakeside at the Fox Lane end, while previous weeks have revealed similarly discarded old mattresses outside The Fox on Fox Lane, on Old Park Road and tastefully laid across the wall on the Fox Lane railway bridge. And that’s just ones seen through my eyes.

Is this a common feature across London or is PG, and perhaps specifically Fox Lane, the old mattress centre of the western world? This one may need the eyes of a whole community to understand.

Spotted today from a W6 while heading down Aldermans Hill, a couple transporting a double mattress slung across a Morrison's trolley going in the opposite direction. Does this deepen the mystery of the PG mattresses, merely provide a new clue or simply be people taking their mattress for a walk in the sunshine.

And so the quest to understand PG’s mattress mystery goes on, this today on Fox Lane, aka mattress central. Could this one have arrived by Morrison's trolley I wondered to myself. Could there be a "mattress hour" when they are secretly secreted about the place or is their placement truly time-random?

Rerouted by google from the A406 on a return from Epping Forest we found ourselves rat running along Fords grove N21. There, on the cricket pitch side was yet another discarded double mattress. In best Wagatha Christie fashion we concluded:


Yet another double discarded on a busy traffic route (and so near certainly they are being vehicle borne).

This one was again close enough to Barrowell Green to suggest a resident would have gone the extra five minutes to leave it there. Hence it was likely “commercial” in nature to save any fee or being turned away.

Getting a double mattress in or even onto a car is going to be some challenge, so most likely it was van or lorry borne

They have all looked not that appalling and so using my experience of rented spaces and their associated mattresses, landlords have either raised their game - a lot - or there is something else going on.[/li]


To be continued – we have to assume, but ideally not.

Hi Karl

On my litter picks around Bounds Green I see plenty of mattresses and have called in four doubles in the last month - two to Haringey and two to Enfield. Both councils are quick to pick up (usually next day) so my message to anyone who sees a mattress or other dumped casual builder/renovator waste is to call it in via council flytipping webpages.

Why this is happening is a separate issue. There is IMHO a general increase in casual littering of all kinds which probably has multiple social causes. It is also possible that builders/developers find using council tips awkward or expensive. Finally (as we found when we replaced our own double mattress) it may be difficult for buyers to get sellers to take away the unwanted mattress without paying a steep fee. It may even be that when we do pay to have them taken away, the drivers pop round the corner and dump them.

When my wife's parents died some years back we had a mattress to dispose of which we took to Barrowell Green where there was a place for mattresses. However, over the course of repeated visits we were aware that these mattresses were not being dealt with appropriately (as the separate skip suggested) but were being treated as general waste and possibly going to landfill, which we definitely did not want. We had an exchange of e-mails with Cllr Daniel Anderson, who was very helpful and tenacious and took up the matter with the department. The last e-mail I received, from Peter Robinson, Assistant Head of Service – Commercial Development and Strategy, Enfield Council (whatever that means, but with an interest in waste management), included this:

'Unfortunately recycling mattresses is not at present an economic or efficient solution and this is a common problem faced across all the north London boroughs and other councils. For some difficult material streams Government has introduced producer responsibility legislation that requires producers to pay for their products to be recycled but this does not extend to mattresses at present. Residents are able to arrange for mattresses to be recycled through the Matt-UK collection system although a charge does apply. [...] Although we cannot specifically recycle mattresses at present the metal from them is recovered and recycled after they are processed at the energy for waste facility. We do however recognise the need to continuously look for new economic and environmentally efficient means to increase recycling.'

This was in 2017 so the situation may be different now.