The dark ages returned to a council estate in North London after a row between the local authority and the water board left 24 flats on the Tottenhall estate in Chalk Farm without heating and water for the entire Christmas holiday period.

Despite first notifying the authorities of the problem on the 17 of December, both Camden council and Thames Water refused to accept responsibility for fixing the leak, which was the root of the problem. Dozens and dozens of phone calls ensued and the leak was finally fixed, but not until the 28th December - far too late to save the miserable Christmas that most of the residents had endured.

Tracey Childs, a resident and mother of two, said: "I don't want to go through that again. It was a nightmare. We had to carry buckets of water up the stairs several times a day in order to wash cook and flush the toilet."

As you might expect, both the council and the water board tried to deflect blame from themselves and pass the buck of responsibility elsewhere. A council spokesperson said: We checked with Thames Water on December 17th to find out what was wrong. With the problem still occurring on Christmas Eve council engineers inspected the site with Thames Water. Camden had no obligation to deal with this but we stepped in and placed an order with Thames Water sub-contractors to tackle the problem in true Christmas spirit."

Arguing the case for Thames Water, a spokesperson said: "The problem was first reported to us on December 19th. We attended on the 20th and 21st and traced the problem to the customers pipework. On December 23rd they got in touch again and asked us to erect a large standpipe. They also asked us to look for a leak - which we did, but we could not find it. On December 24th we re-attended and the leak was located. The council was responsible for this repair. They asked us to do it. We told them it would be advisable to look elsewhere for a contractor as the workloads of our teams were very full. On the 27th we heard from a solicitor of one of the tenants asking us to do the work. This job had to be ordered by Camden council. Once we received the order from them, the repair was completed on December 28th."

Sounds like a rather typical case of bureaucracy and belligerence buggering it all up for badly-treated bystanders…