It’s just after 3.30am in Islington, on a Thursday morning in May. A man wearing a canvas backpack, a black hooded jacket and a bucket hat is loitering next to a shop window, watching cars and buses pass. In a gloved hand, he’s holding a red vape which he takes a long drag of. The smoke has barely billowed away when he produces a small orange emergency hammer from his pocket and smashes all of the shop’s windows in four methodical blows.
Fifteen minutes later, he is wheeling a bicycle further down the road. He carefully places it on the side of a wall, checks to his left and right, and smashes the windows of a second shop before stowing the hammer in his jacket and cycling off down the pavement.
In the following weeks, the same thing will happen to shops in Oxford Street, Mayfair, Marylebone and Chelsea. The perpetrators never make any attempt to break in — they simply smash the windows and sidle off.
The perpetrators never make any attempt to break in — they simply smash the windows and sidle off
Over the past two years, there have been at least 50 hammer attacks on a group of stores across London. The clothing store Toast’s nine locations have had their windows broken over 20 times in total. Other clothing brands like Zadig & Voltaire, Balibaris and American Vintage have also been hit multiple times, while branches of the gift shop Scribbler have had their windows shattered 15 times, often on the same night. The company estimates that the damage has cost them around £180,000, and they lost their insurance for a year due to repeated attacks.
“It has been very distressing for our teams as our premises have clearly been targeted for no apparent reason,” Scribbler told the Standard. “The cost of the damage to us is well over £100,000. Last year our insurance company withdrew cover, as there was no indication that the incidents were stopping”.
The shops are often located near each other on affluent high streets which are quiet at night. In September last year, Zadig & Voltaire, Balibaris and American Vintage had the windows of their shops on Hampstead High Street smashed in one night. There is also a Toast on the street, which had the same treatment in June. Locals wondered if someone had a vendetta against the high street.
Most shopfront windows are broken as a means to an end — to grab goods or cash. When no theft is involved, there is often a message behind it.
Last year, the now-proscribed group Palestine Action claimed responsibility for smashing the windows of dozens of Barclays branches across the country and dousing them in red paint. The group had criticised the bank’s ties to an Israeli arms manufacturer.
Yet none of these brands appear to have any such ties. Toast is an upmarket British clothing brand that specialises in things like woollen jumpers and corduroys in earthy colours. It’s art teacher attire, with a focus on sustainability and natural materials. The other three are French-owned contemporary fashion brands.
Scribbler deals in novelty socks and greeting cards emblazoned with dad jokes or funny animals. It was founded in the 1980s by an English couple “on a mission to rebel against boring cards”, according to its website.
Repeated, multiple attacks
Shop assistants at Toast wondered if it could be a vengeful ex-employee. But Toast is a “great company to work for”, according to one employee. “They’re very mindful of where they’re sourcing things from and our benefits are outstanding.”
And after the attacks kept coming, month after month across London, it seemed that it was something bigger.
While speaking to the affected companies, there was something they had in common
The repeated targeting of specific businesses over a years-long period suggests that this is not the work of a casual vandal, but a case of organised crime. The question arises of who would stand to benefit from these seemingly senseless acts of criminal damage.
While speaking to the affected companies, there was something they had in common: they all said that they used the same window glazing business to repair the damage. The business is controlled by a man with a criminal past. When approached by the Standard he vehemently denied any involvement in the damage to the shop windows.
While the shops which have been targeted recently by window smashing are usually chains on well-heeled high streets, this was not always the case.
Between 2022 and 2023, dozens of businesses in east London had their windows smashed in hammer attacks, with no attempted break in. The attacks were focused on independent shops and restaurants in the Hackney and Tower Hamlets area.
“It was very confusing and unpleasant,” recalls Tom Sixsmith of Batch Baby, an independent coffee shop in Hackney which was targeted multiple times in 2022.
Thousands of pounds spent on repairs
A glazier had first been called after a single window was broken by a thief, who was panicked by the alarm system and made off with only a kettle. Two weeks after the window was fixed, CCTV captured a man coming up to the coffee shop in the middle of the night and smashing “seven windows in about four seconds”.
The same glazier was called back to fix the windows, only for them to be broken again within weeks. “We’d only been open for about six months, so we were really confused as to what was going on,” says Sixsmith. “It felt like maybe someone was targeting us.” The nearby Duke of York pub was targeted later that summer, also suffering repeat attacks.
“We’d only been open for about six months. It felt like maybe someone was targeting us”
Between February and March 2023, the attacks intensified. A hair salon in Hackney had its windows smashed four times over three months, while Elliot’s wine bar was hit twice in two weeks. “We feel like we’re part of the neighbourhood and a good thing for the community, so we were completely shocked, because it just seemed so out of the blue,” says Samantha Lim, who runs Elliot’s with her partner. Three sets of vast window panels stretch around the wine bar, flooding it with natural light.
The ordeal cost several thousands of pounds as their insurance did not cover the damage. “By the third time we were fed up with it happening repeatedly and we didn’t know who to trust,” she says. They ended up paying to station a nighttime security guard in the restaurant, and changed all of their windows from glass to perspex.
Despite the shop owners’ pleas for support and security, local police were “pushing it around from borough to borough”, while emails to the council bore little fruit.
Frustrated and fearful, the business owners decided to create their own tranche of evidence to submit to the Metropolitan Police as well as launching a petition. They all contributed to a spreadsheet detailing when their windows had been broken, and how many times.
Crime was high in the area at the time. In the first three months of 2023, 19 local businesses had a single window broken by thieves who then stole valuable items or money from the till.
When repairing that broken window, six of the businesses realised that they had used the same emergency glazier — the same one that Batch Baby and the Duke of York said they had used, and that Toast, Balibaris, American Vintage, Zadig & Voltaire and Scribbler would go on to use in the years to follow.
All six then had their windows smashed again in subsequent hammer attacks, with no attempted burglary. The attacks weren’t limited to east London. One independent restaurant owner called up the glazier after a window was accidentally broken. They came promptly and fixed the window.
But less than a week later, the owner arrived for work one morning to find three of the restaurant’s windows broken.
The effects of the attacks on one London retailer
Scribbler deals in novelty socks and greeting cards emblazoned with dad jokes or funny animals. It was founded in the 1980s by an English couple “on a mission to rebel against boring cards”, according to its website. Branches of the gift shop Scribbler have had their windows shattered 15 times, often on the same night. “It’s been very distressing for our teams as our premises have clearly been targeted for no apparent reason,” Scribbler told the Standard. “The cost of the damage to us is well over £100,000. Last year our insurance company withdrew cover, as there was no indication that the incidents were stopping”.
“We went through all the thought processes that you go through: are we being targeted, have we annoyed someone, is it a disgruntled ex-employee, et cetera,” the owner says.
“Naively”, they called the same glazier back and were told that they could come and fix them straight away.
“You try not to be biased against people, but the guys who turned up were swearing every three seconds. But some workmen are, so you just kind of live with the language.” They broke a couple of panes of glass as they were trying to install them, but did the job, which came in at £7,500.
Then another five days passed, and every single window at the restaurant got broken.
“When it happened the second time, I was very suspicious,” says the owner. CCTV footage showed a man in a high-vis jacket carrying a toolbox who approached the restaurant just after midnight, ran along the side and put a hammer through each window. He then scarpered and jumped into a white van in a nearby car park, though street cameras were too grainy to catch the number plate.
The mysterious glazier connection
There are lots of stressful things about running a restaurant, but this was a particularly upsetting time. The owner considered hiring a private investigator to stake out the restaurant for a couple of weeks, but was advised not to. They also tried to persuade the police to use them in a sting operation to catch the culprit, but were told that there was no budget for something like that.
“We decided to not repair it straight away, because we just didn’t have any confidence that it wouldn’t just happen immediately again. We had a funny month-long period where customers were coming in going, ‘Oh my god, what happened to you?’”
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The glazier was at this point “badgering” the owner to get them to come in and fix it, but after speaking to other business owners who had been affected and discovering that they had all used the same glazier, they decided to switch to a different one. Their windows have remained intact since.
According to the shop owners, investigations were being dealt with by local police forces who were not co-ordinating to establish whether the attacks were linked. “I was like, ‘Can you not see the absurdity of this?’” the restaurant owner says. They were told that until there was a clear suspect, the cases could not be linked together.
“To me, this is really a case of policing incompetence and a lack of funding, or a lack of ability to do things, because it was a slow-moving tsunami across London.”
While police efforts to find out who was behind the 2023 attacks petered out, senior detectives at the Met have opened a new investigation. Last week, they arrested a man suspected of carrying out some of the recent hammer attacks. In a statement, the Met said: “Police are investigating a number of reports of criminal damage to commercial premises across London.
“Allegations relate to criminal damage to buildings in a number of London boroughs which have been committed overnight across the last 18 months.
“On Tuesday, July 22, a 49-year-old man was arrested in east London in connection with recent offences between April and July of this year.”
But for some, it is too late. “That’s why I closed the shop in the end,” says one east London business owner whose windows were smashed in the 2023 wave. “It was just too stressful.”
Additional reporting by Anthony France
