Clean-up 'shifted vice from King's Cross to Fitzrovia'

For years pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers plagued King's Cross.

But after a relentless police and council campaign the area has finally started to shake off its reputation.

New hotels, loft apartments and fashionable bars are helping to give the area a makeover in advance of the opening of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link in three years.

But it is the introduction of antisocial behaviour orders that have done most to lift the area. Camden has issued 92 Asbos, 38 of them in King's Cross, to make aggressive beggars, addicts and prostitutes stay out of the area around the station or risk jail.

Camden council said: "We only normally use Asbos where lighter enforcement options have failed to change behaviour."

But while Camden has used the orders at more than three times the rate of any other London borough, there are serious concerns that the problems have simply been shifted elsewhere. Residents in nearby Fitzrovia say their lives are being made a misery by the same drug dealers, prostitutes and beggars who were banned from King's Cross. Maurice Conroy, who has lived on Fitzroy Square for 15 years, said: "This is now the new King's Cross.

"There is drug dealing in the square every night, heroin addicts are constantly breaking into houses for a quick fix, and prostitutes have set up brothels. It's turned our lives into a nightmare."

Rather than solve the problems, he says, the council and the police have simply moved them on.

"This was once described as the trendiest district in London. But now it is nothing more than a backwater ghetto."

For the residents of the new King's Cross, Asbos have failed.