The man climbed onto the roof on his Uplands Road home.

Man armed with rake talked down from Crouch End roof

by Flora Drury Monday, June 18, 2012
5:22 PM

A man armed with a garden rake had to be talked down from his Crouch End roof after he began yelling and throwing tiles down into the gardens below.

The man climbed onto the roof of his three-storey home in Uplands Road at around 9pm last night, where he remained with his garden rake until 1.10am when the fire service finally managed to lower him down to the ground and into a waiting ambulance.

Police - who were called to the road at 9.26pm - spent hours negotiating with the 41-year-old man, who began using the rake to rip up the roof tiles while shouting the same thing repeatedly.

Neighbour Paul McAdam, who described the man as “a bit of a character” who was always singing, said: “He sound very distressed. He was shouting the same thing all the time. It sounded like help or some Italian thing. He was constantly calling - every 20 seconds for a couple of hours.

“It was about one o’clock when I stuck my head out the window and saw them bringing him down. An ambulance had backed right up to where he was.

“He must have been cold, it had been raining for a couple of hours.”

The incident also caused a stir on Twitter - with the police helicopter’s official Twitter account @MPSinthesky tweeting: “23:05 Still over Harringay with this male refusing to come down off a roof.”

Times journalist Caitlin Moran - who lives nearby - tweeted: “He has STAMINA. And a lot of roof tiles that he’s chucking in next door’s garden.”

Meanwhile, @richtard tweeted: “Sure I could vaguely hear it from the other side of Green Lanes, would he sound like an owl from a distance?”

The man - who was taken to the Whittington Hospital to be physically and mentally assessed - has since been discharged from hospital.