No-one's Told the Gangs we've been Gentrified
12 Oct 2005
Evening Stanard My road in Hackney is typical of many. The houses are Victorian villas originally built for respectable city clerks. In the 1980s it was dominated by a big council estate infested with drugs, prostitutes and red ants. And the pretty villas were turned over to bedsits.
But the twin forces of government regeneration and bourgeois gentrification have turned my road around. The worst tower blocks were blown up; smart new council homes were built; yuppie flats replaced the local pub and, above all, the middleclass gentrifiers swarmed in, as relentless as the red ants, doing up the Victorian villas.
The road is now almost as respectable as when it was first built.
But at one end lurks a ragtag army of youth gangs and drug addicts. No one seems to have told them that the area has been gentrified and they persist in acting out scenes of degradation more reminiscent of a Hogarth print than any notion of Victorian gentility.
In the (new) estate near the end of the road a gang of young men hangs out day and night. They may be discussing the latest Harry Potter. And the ones with bicycles may be practising for the Tour de France. But I go past every day on my way to the bus stop. I notice no discussion of literature but a great deal of furtive coming and going and the cyclists, curiously, only seem to undertake very short journeys that bring them straight back to their gang.
Right on the corner 24 hours a day are the junkies, including sad women whom crack has robbed of every vestige of self-respect. The shopkeepers tell me that at six in the morning there may be as many as 30 of them milling around. Respectable women going to their cleaning jobs in the City, and other early risers, are forced to use another bus stop.
It would be comforting if this was all the result of political and police neglect; at least then it would be relatively simple to put right. But I have raised the problems of this and similar areas in Hackney with the police many times. Periodically they do flood these areas with officers. But as soon as the police leave, the gangs and the junkies swarm back.
Part of the problem is a police policy which concentrates on catching "Mr Big" and measures success in the number of kilos of cocaine seized. But it is "Mr Small", the drug dealer on the corner, that upsets my constituents. A new solution is planned for such problem areas. The police will bring in a "dispersal zone" which - in theory at least - will force the gangs to stay home and discuss Harry Potter.
Now, I am a long-term civil libertarian. I know that such zones solve nothing in the long run. I know it is all an infringement of people's civil liberties. I even know that many of the young boys doing their best to look terrifying under their hoodies are probably as scared of their companions as the rest of us. But I cannot wait for the dispersal zone.
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