Environmental protection officer Patricia Henry at work in Enfield. Photograph: Graham Turner for the GuardianI am in a thread-like alley in the back end of the London borough of Enfield wading through a scurf of beer cans, chicken bones and oozing, unidentifiable things in knotted carrier bags. The stench of excrement is so thick I can almost taste it. Patricia Henry is pointing her camera at a collapsed shed which balances like a sculpture on a heap of unwanted furniture. "My great fear," she says, "is that one day, in one of these alleys, a huge dog will come tearing out at me."
Henry, 46, is an environmental crime officer with the borough council and her photographic eye is an unusual one. Not for her the willows and waterways of Enfield's pleasanter pockets; her albums feature meticulous portraits of bin liners split and leaking, of graffitied obscenities on walls, railings festooned by estate agents boards and the occasional action shot of a flow of canine nature.
While her colleagues in environmental health pick their way through hazardously insanitary homes, Henry and her eight-strong team tackle more public filth. "Street scene enforcement" is the official term; those ubiquitous stained mattresses slumped on grass verges are her call to arms. She pursues builders who sling inconvenient rubble into alleyways, householders who put their bin bags out too early, estate agents who tether their boards to park fencing and the night skulkers who paste flyers to available flat surfaces. "Estate agents are a big problem because they must remove their board within 14 days of a sale or let, but they prefer to leave them up indefinitely," she says.
The boards are an eyesore, but they are among the less unpleasant nuisances that demand her attention. Much of Henry's week is spent rummaging through illicitly dumped waste seeking evidence to identify the culprit. This is a job that requires a strong stomach. It also calls for sleuthing skills. "That's why I dress like this," she laughs, modelling her black trousers, black jacket and stout black lace-up shoes.
Recently her detective work brought about the successful prosecution of an off-licence which had been dumping packaging in bins reserved for local authority residents. "Someone reported a car registration number which we traced, then found till receipts which led back to the shop," she says. "In about 40% of cases there's some kind of evidence such as receipts, labels or addressed envelopes."
Once she has identified a suspect, Henry's powers extend to summonsing them to Enfield's civic centre and questioning them under caution. If they refuse she doorsteps them with her fat black notebook. When the evidence is sound enough she can bring a prosecution and seek to reclaim the considerable cost of cleaning up after the offender.
Even in today's 25C heat, Henry wears her fluorescent yellow jacket with the council logo, so that Enfield's environmental mission is reassuringly visible to locals, who can approach her with their concerns. Has she ever thought of transferring her skills to police work? "I wouldn't mind being a magistrate," she replies.
It was shopping trolleys that propelled her into her current career six years ago. "Dozens of them, abandoned all over he place," she says. "It was my bugbear and I was forever complaining to the supermarkets. I've always been passionate about the problem of litter, so when this job was advertised I knew it would suit me."
That passion has not waned. "I thank the Lord daily that I got the job," she says. "Every complaint is important to the person who makes it so you have to give it your all, because it might have repercussions for them."
Henry plots her patrols each morning when she arrives at her office and opens up the list of complaints from the public that have been logged by the council's customer services hotline. On an ordinary day there are about half a dozen, most reporting fly tipping or dog fouling, as well as emails sent to her direct from residents' associations or from street hawks – local people who volunteer to be the eyes and ears of the neighbourhood.
She is responsible for three wards and can clock up 20 miles a day in her investigations. "Sometimes I might spend a couple of days doing paperwork at my desk," she says. "Each case has to be followed up with the complainant and warning letters have to be sent out to offenders. Sometimes there's an emergency such as newly dumped rubbish which might contain evidence so then I rush there, take photographs and go through it in my mask and gloves."
Today a resident has alerted her to a garden shed that has been disposed of in an alley between two rows of back gardens. Someone else has spotted a neighbour allowing her dog to foul grass verges and there's been a messy incident behind some garages. Henry prints out the report forms and heads for her car with her fluorescent jacket and a pull-along suitcase. "All my kit's in here," she says. "Rubber gloves, mask, camera, leaflets about waste disposal to hand out to householders, pink bin liners labelled 'illegally dumped waste' in which I bag up rubbish left on a public highway to alert the cleansing teams and prevent duplicate complaints and, in the car boot, a pair of wellies for when things get really mucky."
En route to the dumped shed she pulls into a side road to check up on a malodorous alley behind a row of shops. "Traders have been using the residents' bins to dump their excess waste and avoid paying collectors to remove it," she says.
The passage is littered with beer cans, two mattresses, the back shelf of a car and broken planking. A pyramid of dog waste blocks a small drain, evidently tipped there. Henry resolves to leaflet householders and traders in the surrounding area, and will add the alley to the itinerary when she and her colleagues head out en masse on their regular eco patrols.
Since the alley is private land the council has no responsibility to remove the clutter unless it's blocking the large council-owned bins. "We could serve notice on the landlord to take action," she says. "Sometimes we do a land registry search to find out who owns it but if it's a group of residents, enforcement can get complicated."
Does she ever fear aggression as a lone woman, stalking alleys and confronting defensive strangers? "A woman did once come at me in a passageway, but she was clearly mad," she reflects. "I'm always very polite and friendly so I've never had a problem."
Next on her list is the dumped shed. The informant has provided her with a house number, but the tenant denies all knowledge. Henry hears him out politely and, by dint of apparently innocent social chit chat, elicits possibly incriminating details such as his posse of dogs, who could be at the root of the fouling round the corner. She outlines the rules for waste disposal and tells him the case is closed. Her visit alone will hopefully prevent a repeat offence. "Because the shed is on private land and isn't a public health hazard we're not obliged to remove it," she explains. "If the complainant is prepared to go to court we could prosecute; otherwise I might alert the manager of the housing association or send teams of low-level offenders to clear it as part of the community service scheme Operation Payback."
A couple of miles away is the house of the alleged dog fouler. As she draws up, Henry notices a mountain of bin bags on the pavement outside; today is not waste collection day. A nervous young woman, who admits to owning a dog but claims he lives with her at a different address, says she'd got her dates mixed up. She obediently hauls six of the sacks back on to her drive but disowns another two that have burst open, strewing dirty nappies and rotting food on to the pavement. Nobody she knows has a baby, she says.
Henry dons her gloves, peels off the black plastic and starts rummaging through, apparently oblivious to the stench. By now I'm so caught up, I start tracking a mother pushing a pram past. Nappies must abound in her rubbish, but she recedes disappointingly into another street.
The second sack yields a clue: two letters bearing the address of a neighbour up the road who happens to be mowing his front lawn behind a lopsided To Let sign. Henry bustles up, charming smile in place and listens amiably as the man explains that he'd left the sacks in the road outside his house two days prematurely to reserve a space for his car and they had inexplicably vanished.
Patiently Henry explains that sacks in the road are an illegal obstruction of the highway, and she elicits in the process that the man has a young baby and has lived in the house for several months. The To Let sign has therefore been left by the estate agent who will now be contacted and given 14 days to remove it.
"I could write the tenant a letter but I'll probably just open a file on that address and take action if I get more complaints," she says.
As she drives off, Bin Bag Man approaches Dog Dirt Lady and declares he has no knowledge of how his rubbish came to be strewn outside her driveway. We leave them, arms gesticulating, in the middle of the road.
"It's nice," says Henry wryly, "to be able to help neighbours get to know each other."
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