Someone might correct me here, but here goes.
No 15 has a history, more so then some, but mainly from neglect. Some years ago a previous owner died and I gather the house was in probate for years and the residents could not contact anyone to find out what was happening and the council were deaf to appeals to help protect the house. During this time kids broke in on several occaisions as it was not secured, eventually it was set alight and that promted either the council or the owners reresentative to board it up. Then out of the blue we found it was sold.
The next owner, I assume, without permission started ripping the house and garden apart** (sorry developing the property), he wanted to turn it into flats, he used some Polish labourers to do the work (they worked odd hours and lived in the house, I sold them some plasterboard scrim at 7pm on bonfire night one year, for some reason they were desparate for it and couldn't wait until morning!!). Luckily the council weren't so deaf this time and stopped the work (I'm sure the conservation deptartment will tell you why they had so much trouble). I gather they eventually were to issue court proceedings, the owners having been out of the country for months, but in the mean time house had been sold on again, rumour has it for a substantial amount and a second rumour that the house was sold unseen and the new owner thought it nearly ready to move in!
Now I'm not sure who owns it out of the recent two, but again proceedings were halted by the fact the house was up for auction, however it was withdrawn at the last minute and now it's up for auction again.
**The trees are covered by preservation orders as we have specimin trees in the estate and some rare Hollys, at one point the developer chopped down a significant number of trees in the garden of 15 and scraped back the level of the ground with a digger. Unfortunately we have a lot of sycamore weeds, but they seem to be protected as well.
There's no vandalism to speak of, I think 15 was so obviously neglected it appeared an open invite.
I'm glad you want to pull the weeds from the paving, we have two clean up days a year to repair the road and pull weeds, but this year we seem to have missed the spring one, we should have put a date in the diary at the last residents meeting. In the eveniing of the cleanup days we usually have a bar-b-que on the roundabout. In fact we have several a year, but are short on a host for an early springtime event.
Mike