Destructive Break-in at Barlaston

Esperanto House has been broken into again, following burglaries in 2022 and forced entry earlier this year. This instance was particularly destructive and clearly targetted: the perpetrators have ripped down the ceiling panels and stolen the pipes.

They gained entry via a very narrow window at the side of the office, out of sight of cameras:

They've obviously done this before: they knew exactly where to find the stopcock, which they turned off. (It's in the ground-level cabinet with the open door at the back.) Why? Because then they could remove the water pipes for their copper. This involves ripping down the ceiling tiles.

They also cut the electricity. The library is particularly dark because they locked the cover to the fusebox and stole the key.

Assuming it's not a red herring, we might conclude that the perpetrator is a very small man (capable of fitting through that narrow window) called Graham:

An additional shame is that we've seen within the past week that somebody who previously broke into Esperanto House has recently shared photos from within it online. Those images have been shared; we have added comments in one of the places of which we are aware.

Besides the obnoxiousness of sharing images online of somebody else's property you've unlawfully entered, they give an inaccurate representation, showing Esperanto House not as it stands now, but as it was at the time he broke in. That was certainly many months ago: the office door isn't boarded up in his images but has been for a long time, following a previous break-in. Additionally, the archive is viewable in those images which have been shared online, even though it's been held in an external storage facility for months:

And his photos of the library show it partway through our removing its contents as part of a several-year digitisation project, which we've reported to members in the pages of Update and in the Trustees' Annual Report. He shared a photo of shelves which hadn't yet been categorised and boxed up ready for scanning. Here are the same shelves more recently:

We have saved a copy of his Facebook page and reported him to the police for, at the very least, illegally entering the building. We may no longer operate from Esperanto House but we still pay the lease and utilities bills, and should expect to be able to store our property locked up there without people breaking in and, in this latest case, causing massive destruction to the building.