Appalling: Plight of hundreds of Romanian gypsies 'imprisoned' for months in a ghetto so grim the town mayor sealed it off behind a wall

They were promised new apartments away from the biting cold of the Romanian winter.

But eight months on, 500 gypsy families are still marooned in a snow-bound slum in buildings riddled with damp and seeped in raw sewage.

The situation has been made even worse after the mayor of Baia Mare constructed a wall around the settlement, sealing the Roma off from the rest of the town at the end of June last year.

According to Catalin Chereches, this was part of a grand scheme to improve the lives of deeply impoverished families in the northern Romanian town who have been struggling to survive for generations.

However, human rights groups claim that the 33-year-old Vienna-educated economist is racist. They have accused him of imprisoning the population in a ghetto and making their plight even worse.

Photographs shot in the heart of the slum - and at a dilapidated communist-era blocks where some of the families have been rehoused - show scenes of appalling poverty with families struggling to survive in temperatures which can plummet to -26C.

Faced with such conditions, it is hardly surprising that many Romanians say they would like to move to Britain in January 2014 when they gain the right to live and work unrestricted under European 'freedom of movement' rules.

The concrete wall measures 1.8 metres high - built on an embankment, it appears much higher when you are inside the slum.

It is constructed on one side of a Roma neighborhood of crumbling apartment blocks, but because it links with other buildings and walls, it encloses the area with few access points. Mr Chereches says it was built to keep children safe from a main road.

He claims living conditions have improved by moving families away from a slum where naked children play in the dust with stray dogs and cats. But it still keeps Roma separate from other people and lacks space and bathrooms.

'It's clear, conditions there are not similar to the Hilton or Marriott. But this doesn't mean this is not a step forward towards their civilization and emancipation,' Mr Chereche explained in his tidy and modest office.

The local government started to relocate 1,600 Roma from improvised buildings in Baia Mare's 'five pockets of poverty' - including the Craica slum -  to the offices of a former copper factory, Cuprom.

Those who have moved to the Cuprom offices, near the area with the wall, signed papers to agree, but others still in their old homes fear eviction.

Source: Dailymail- UK