Gloucester Grove’s most notorious feature is a series of towers on the end of each block, which house lifts, stairs and rubbish chutes. They stink, breed flies and vermin, and are more severely vandalized than the bleakest city centre underpass. ‘How,’ asked Mr Balli, ‘would I like to invite a guest to my home up one of these stairways?’ ‘You wouldn’t believe that human beings actually live in these appalling conditions,’ he said, ‘the parents inevitably give up, and the kids get out of control.’ All the blocks on Gloucester Grove are named after Gloucestershire villages, and Mr Balli laughed at the idea of the villagers coming to live in them. They wouldn’t, he said, know where to begin. (Which would apply equally to the residents of Gloucester Grove, were they to be dumped in the middle of the country.) Gloucester Grove flats open onto long internal corridors – one I visited must have measured well over a hundred yards – which looked like the inside of cell blocks. ‘Think of the old people, who have worked all their lives, and finish up stuck in here,’ said Mr Balli mournfully. Gloucester Grove had been built like a snake, with a result that the noise was echoed and amplified. He showed me where Gloucester Grove’s only shops had been – now gutted – and the burnt-out tenants’ hall. ‘Now,’ he said simply, ‘we’ve got nothing.’ The nearest source of milk was half a mile away, and the nearest proper shop a mile. It wasn’t yet quite dark, but no one passed us. A blue metal sculpture stood forlornly in the deserted piazza. On one wall there were tablets on which two verses of Lewis Carroll had been inscribed, and which Mr Balli apparently had not noticed:
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
And neatly spread his claws,
And welcome little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!
The block that housed the shops, built as a community amenity and focal point, was to be demolished. The original architects, said Mr Balli, had not taken account of the type of person who was going to live there; they expected them to have the outlook of their own class. He said: ‘They should have been more down to earth, with community involvement from people like crime prevention officers. Local people should have been given a say in what was being built for their habitation.’ According to Mr Balli, as it was presently designed, it would take thirty or forty policemen to police the estate.
However, some remodelling had begun: gardens were being added on the ground floor to keep passers-by from the bedroom windows; the stairs and the rubbish chutes were to be removed from the towers; and each block and corridor provided with entry phones. We peered through a door into one corridor, which seemed like another world from the smelly, urine-stained cell blocks. The corridor was immaculate, there were mats outside each flat, and brass knockers and numbers gleamed from the doors. The people, as Mr Balli pointed out, were the same, but the improved environment had revolutionized the way they lived.
A similar plan to the one being implemented at Gloucester Grove had been drawn up for the renovation of North Peckham, and had been costed at thirty-five million pounds. A pilot scheme was due to start on one corner of the estate in the summer of 1987. Predictably and ironically, the money is to be spent returning the estate as near as is now possible to a traditional housing development. A block is to be demolished so a road can be run through; the ground-floor apartments are to be converted into maisonettes with front and back gardens; the bridges connecting the walkways are to be demolished, thereby isolating each block, which will all have entry phones both at ground level and on each floor. Tenants will have their own ‘defensible space’.
By 1987 Professor Alice Coleman of London University had demonstrated that environment was of far greater consequence than either Mr Tebbit’s notion of innate wickedness or the Left’s belief that crime is a consequence of social inequality. She wrote: ‘Research shows that crime levels vary with sixteen specific features of bad housing design. Blocks of flats without any of the sixteen did not report a single crime during our study years, while those with thirteen or more defects averaged one crime for every five dwellings. Juveniles are seven or eight times as likely to be arrested if they live in the worst blocks than in those with three or fewer defects … The effect of bad design is twofold. First, it omits certain features now seen to be vital in socializing children, with the result that some of them grow up to be vandalistic and violent, with a “standing decision” to commit crimes. Second, this type of design is highly vulnerable to assault by criminals, both those who have been bred there and intruders from outside.’ Then she added: ‘Having said that, it seems that unemployment affords long idle periods, which help maximize the number of crimes committed by those who already have a pre-existing bent for it.’ Her clinching evidence was the north-eastern town of Hartlepool, where ‘a low crime rate co-exists with massive joblessness … Hartlepool, which has never built flats, has a lesson to teach.’
Dave Sutherland was an unlikely man to find in charge of the North Peckham housing office. With his careful haircut and immaculate white shirt, he looked as if he had strayed there from a West End estate agent’s office. He was, he confessed, feeling ‘burned out’, his commitment to public housing sorely tested by the unequal odds against which he struggled. Southwark’s authority to borrow capital sums for housing renovation had been slashed in real terms by 60 per cent during the Thatcher years, leaving thousands of crucial repairs undone; the sale of council houses had deprived the borough of better homes elsewhere into which to transfer people; half of the few available homes were earmarked for the growing numbers of homeless or for victims of racial harassment; squatting – encouraged by a politically sympathetic council – was growing apace, the number of properties squatted in Mr Sutherland’s bailiwick had grown from three to 513 in three years; in the next three months Mr Sutherland would have 155 homes (not all of them very desirable) to offer 5,003 candidates who had been accepted on the waiting or transfer lists. He thought a third term of Thatcherism would reduce public housing to ‘welfare’ housing; that situation already was very close.
A few months earlier, staff in his office had been attacked three times in as many weeks, once by an irate tenant armed with a hammer. One of the attackers – a discharged mental patient – actually thought he was in the neighbouring borough of Lambeth, and became angry when he discovered his mistake. The office had been closed so that a ceiling-to-floor shatterproof Perspex screen could be erected between the staff and their customers, but it couldn’t prevent intimidation. One caller, who was awaiting a flat, had threatened violence against an official. Mr Sutherland visited the man in his home and told him he was being struck off the waiting list and that, if he came to the office again, the police would be called. Because of such dangers all the officials were recruited from outside the estates. The previous summer Mr Sutherland had closed the office one afternoon and sent the staff home after gangs armed with clubs had taken to the streets of Peckham and begun looting shops. He feared there might be a serious concerted assault on the office, and that some tenants might try to settle old scores with staff. ‘There were thirty or forty people running riot; there was nothing we could have done,’ said Mr Sutherland, adding that there were days when the atmosphere is distinctly ‘iffy’. On such days a ‘fever’ would build up, he said, and one could sense the excitement the teenagers – ‘six-foot jobs’ – derived from violence.
For most tenants, there was only one issue – security. Seven years earlier, when Mr Sutherland came to North Peckham, there was the occasional mugging. Now fear of burglary and attack was a constant preoccupation; most of the danger was perceived as coming from squatters within the estate. Some of the squatters, he said, were very violent, unpleasant people. ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘didn’t the council reassign tenancies fast, so that squatters didn’t get the opportunity to move in?’ He laughed. Many tenants, 70 per cent of whom receive some form of hous
ing benefit, owe large arrears and do a midnight flit. Squatters can be in within half an hour; sometimes they pay the departing tenant for the key. Many councillors are sympathetic to the squatters – some were darkly suspected by officers of handing out addresses of vacant homes. The council itself has to go by the book, obtaining repossession orders through the courts. Two months is a minimum for that process. ‘We can’t just employ heavies to throw them out,’ said Mr Sutherland.
The council has few sanctions against defaulting tenants, whose attitude often is that if they are evicted they can only go somewhere better: it has an obligation under the Homeless Persons Act to house most of those who are likely to be evicted. A family can be thrown out in the morning and in a new council property by the afternoon. It could perhaps be argued that some of them were intentionally homeless because they ‘wilfully’ refused to pay rent, but that might mean the break-up of a family and taking children into care, which – social considerations aside – would cost Southwark more than letting the family live rent-free.
Mr Sutherland did not entirely share the Alice Coleman thesis. North Peckham, he said, could be a pleasant place to live if you could hand-pick the tenants, but there were some families whose poor behaviour infected the rest. The theory was that you tried to put such a family amongst ‘good’ families, hoping that they would improve through the example of their neighbours. In reality, the ‘good’ families gave up. For a while they might tidy up the rubbish chutes and even sweep and wash the walkways, but battling against such odds eventually proved too much. The ‘trendy’ view, said Mr Sutherland, is that it is all down to the environment – ‘some, I’m afraid, would not respond.’
But I did visit some homes in which after a few minutes I forgot the surrounding problems. Mrs Kemi Ogunleye from Nigeria had an immaculate home, decorated with artificial flowers and religious texts. Above the living-room door a gold-on-red notice proclaimed: ‘Christ is the head of this house, the unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation.’ She had recently apprehended a gang of four- to six-year-olds who had burgled her home. They had been spotted on the walkways wearing stolen hair slides, but the money and more valuable jewellery they took was never recovered. It was her fourth burglary, and she now kept an Alsatian. Someone had been taking it for a walk when the children broke in, which, she said, was fortunate, ‘because the dog might have killed them.’ Mrs Ogunleye never allowed her two daughters out except to go somewhere specific like choir practice or the dramatic society. She blamed lack of parental discipline for the vandalism and crime – mum and dad at the pub while children roamed the walkways. ‘Children will boast to you, “We’re under age, they can’t jail us,”’ she said.
Mrs ‘Jones’ is a bus driver’s wife. Sitting in her sunny kitchen, with its microwave oven, pine furniture and wine bottles on the side, one might have been in a private housing development in Wimbledon. She and her husband had brought up two children on the estate, one of whom is now a shipping clerk and the other a secretary. She believed that the reason why young people hadn’t got jobs was because half of them didn’t want them. I met a man with a longish criminal record who is permanently in work, and has changed jobs frequently, proving they are available. However, it is certainly harder for black people to get employment. At first, like Mrs ‘Smith’, Mrs Jones had considered herself to be extremely lucky to have a North Peckham home. But, by the time I met her, she would have moved if she could have found a suitable alternative. ‘If we could pick this flat up and move it elsewhere, we would,’ she said wistfully. ‘As people move out, those who take their place are not half so nice. They don’t care how they live, and they cause the noise and the dirt. Even the “problem” families are getting fussy and don’t want to move here.’ There had been an attempt to encourage people like art students and schoolteachers to move into North Peckham. In one case I heard of, one of several young women sharing a flat was severely raped, and after psychiatric treatment was recuperating with her parents. Her flatmates had fled. Mrs Jones had been burgled once and ‘mugged’ once. A well-dressed man had stopped her near her front door to ask directions. He had snatched her necklace, leaving a small bruise at the nape of her neck. Now when Mrs Jones goes out, she wears no jewellery and leaves her bag behind. When the flat is empty, the family hide their valuables, leaving a few pounds and some ornaments out in the hope that intruders will not ransack the flat.
Life had a permanently nostalgic quality for many people I met. Two middle-aged school cleaners looked back to before they were rehoused as if to a golden age. They remembered helping drive cattle to a local butcher’s shop, and watching a blacksmith at work. ‘I’m sorry now we didn’t buy our houses. Only needed £100 for a deposit, but we hadn’t got £100.’ (Needless to say that if they had, they would now be sitting on small fortunes.) Out of twenty-five flats in their block, four had recently been burgled. Said one: ‘I don’t think a woman is safe on the streets at night. When I was a child, I never heard of anyone being attacked. I think we was more happy then. We used to go singing and skipping along the streets. The most crime was when a girl got in the family way. I have walked home from Piccadilly of a night time.’ Children, they believed inevitably, no longer respect their parents. Both women, now in their late fifties, said they would still never answer their own mothers back. Punishments had lost their potency. When they were children, being sent to bed early was being sent to a room with a bed and a chair and nothing else. ‘Now, it’s like being sent to Curry’s,’ said one. Again, inevitably, they raised the question of race: ‘I’m not against foreigners. Don’t get me wrong. But when I was a child, the only coloured man you saw was an Indian selling ties door to door. You’d say “first luck” when you saw him,’ said one. They added that they didn’t think people of their age would ever get used to immigrants, and complained that ‘we’re not allowed to sing half our nursery rhymes now.’ One said: ‘I have two boys in the Navy. When they go to other people’s countries, they have to abide by their rules.’ A probation officer told me that one reason why Liberals were doing well in places like Bermondsey was because locals believed Labour was too much on the side of black people, espousing unpopular schemes like the renaming of streets after African nationalists.
That same day I was with another Southwark probation officer, Rod Gillespie, an ex-guardsman and ex-hotelier who was brought up in one of the streets demolished to make way for the North Peckham estate. He devoted much of his spare time to a boxing club off the Old Kent Road, and believed strongly that boxing can save kids from a life of crime. After fifteen years – eleven as a probation officer and four as a volunteer – on the front line, he argued that communities like North Peckham and Gloucester Grove were only kept stable by a class of people despised and dismissed on the political right as agents of the ‘nanny state’. These are the housing officers, the inner-city schoolteachers, the DHSS officials, the social workers, the beat policemen and the probation officers, who act as a ‘buffer’ between the anger and frustration of the jobless, the badly housed and the hopeless and the wider society. He said: ‘Some argue “sack the lot, and it won’t make a blind bit of difference,” but these people soak up the frustration, and without them the anger would come spilling over.’ He feared that as conditions in the inner city continue to deteriorate, more of the better ‘buffers’ will take themselves off to more congenial jobs. Eventually, the dispossessed will take it out on society more directly. Of all the theories as to why the present government not only survives, but appears to thrive with three million unemployed, Mr Gillespie’s seemed as plausible as any. The British are slow to complain; by the time someone goes to a housing office he is probably pretty angry. When he reaches for a hammer to smash the head of the official on the other side of a desk, he has reached a state of blind fury, not with the individual, but with all the impersonal forces the official appears to represent and against which he feels utterly impotent. A riot is a collective spilling of that cathartic anger.<
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Father Austin Smith, a Catholic priest who lives in the heart of Liverpool 8 and for ten years was a chaplain at Walton Prison, said: ‘To the people a riot is ecstatic – mysticism on the margins of society. For the first time the “enemy” is in his sights, all lined up with its riot shields. They are no longer whispering about their frustrations.’ Politicians pile into the riot zones in their limousines, telling the people, ‘violence will get you nowhere’, their very presence denying the truth of their words. Some very unpleasant people will get to the top during a riot – he was later acquitted on appeal – but it is not they who cause the riot. As hopelessness increases, and the riots enhance the status of extremists, the ‘buffer’ – which includes parents – has progressively less with which to negotiate, and negotiation in any case becomes less relevant.
This translates for the youth into a lack of trust in and respect for anyone in authority. According to a Southwark youth worker, ‘The youth have lost confidence both in the institutions and in themselves. They assume now that they are not going to get a job, and so don’t try in the first place.’ A young female colleague said she herself had ‘lost all oomph’ between mock exams and O level. ‘Everyone got rebellious, starting asking what they were staying on at school for,’ she said. Both of them worked for the Southwark Unemployment Youth Project, an organization that presumed its customers would never work, so concentrated on the individual’s personal development. Youth work, as the Inner London Education Authority which sponsors the Southwark project recognizes, is no longer a question of providing table tennis and snooker. ‘The kids stay in bed all morning,’ said one of the workers, ‘getting up at about one o’clock, and the night is the focus of everything that happens.’ Seen through these workers’ eyes, the Tebbitite refusal to make the connection between unemployment and crime is simply wilful. ‘Crime is going on everywhere,’ they said, ‘it is a question of economics. When you take someone’s possessions, you’re imposing a tax on them.’ Others described this redistribution as a ‘yuppie tax’, which is somewhat romantic, since most of the victims of Peckham crime are at least as impoverished as the thieves.
When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain Page 15
