When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (17 page)

To survive in such an environment – whether one is criminal or straight – it is necessary to be tough and streetwise. I met two middle-aged women into whose souls the iron had entered, and who, had it been within their physical power, would have taken the entire population of the estates by the collective scruff of the neck and shaken sense into them. Mary Ellery stands five foot nothing in her bare feet, which was how she was when I first met her. Her hair was scraggy, and she wore large red-rimmed glasses and a blue dress over purple trousers. She was a Southwark Labour councillor, smoked like a chimney – the air in the Blackwall tunnel could not have been fouler than the air in her cramped front room – and was much amused at having been described by a reporter from the
Daily Telegraph
‘with a plum in his mouth' as a ‘salty character'. Recently, all her windows had been smashed in a mini-riot. With a council official at her side, she reeled off the statistics behind North Peckham's reputation: the highest rent arrears, the highest living density, the highest unemployment, the highest numbers of single-parent families and of people on housing benefit – 25 per cent of this, 62 per cent of that. ‘Anyone who went door to door asking people their problems would get a hell of a shock,' said Mrs Ellery. I didn't doubt it. The estates had started to decline, she said, when unemployment surged upwards at the beginning of the eighties – until then, she said, the estates had been ‘brilliant'. ‘Unemployment knocked six kinds of shit out of people. Careers officers came into schools with the bad news when kids were fourteen, and from then on they knew there was no bloody point. All you need to know now is how to write your name and how to go on the dole. If you're forty-plus, you're on the shitheap,' she said.

Factories had closed, hospitals had closed. At the same time millions of pounds had been stripped from the council's housing funds, so property deteriorated. On the older estates, balconies were flaking, window-frames rotting, asbestos was being left untreated. It would take ninety million pounds just to make good the shortfall since Mrs Thatcher came to power, according to Mrs Ellery. The one million pounds on offer from the Urban Task Force to put local people to work catering for local needs, which was much ballyhooed at the time, was like a ‘piss in the ocean'. Her own young family was, she said, typical. Three of her four children were out of work – a 22-year-old son had never worked; the only one with a job was ‘on the dust'; a bright seventeen-year-old with seven O levels was at home. ‘What does he do?' ‘Walks around in his shorts and spends the day watching TV, I suppose,' said Mrs Ellery. This son had become discouraged because employers never ‘let him know', Mrs Ellery said: ‘If you give this address, you've had it. The employers have no respect; don't treat the kids as human beings.'

She had ambivalent views about the police. People who voted for her told her they wanted her to work with them, and she held regular surgeries with a policeman present. But for months during the Wapping printing dispute the estates, she said, had been largely unprotected. ‘Every time someone was burgled, the police were at bloody Wapping or out of London at the mines. We have to take all this shit because it's more important to look after Mr Murdoch's factory,' she said. Quite a few Murdoch printers had lived on the estate. A neighbour had worked in print for thirty years, and ‘lost his pension, the bloody lot,' which had led to a nervous breakdown. What many commentators who were surprised by the sustained picketing of Wapping overlooked was that the east end and south London communities from which the printers came were in many ways as tight-knit as mining villages. The day I met Mrs Ellery there were police everywhere. ‘Ah,' she said, ‘our MP is due here today. They always put on a show for her or if a wally comes from the government.'

The other equally doughty woman was Sandy Cameron, who led the North Peckham tenants' association. ‘Nothing will happen if we don't get together, if everyone just sits and moans and groans. People wanting to move away creates apathy. I have no intention of moving away. I like the people. There's nowhere else you'd get so many different nationalities, foods, languages, clothes as here. My kids are street kids. I'm not keeping them covered in cotton wool. They've got to equip themselves to face the world,' she said. As she talked, she breast-fed the youngest of her large family, and poured scorn on the nation's rulers. ‘The people who have the power to make changes are so far away from the problems, they haven't a clue what it's all about. They get all their information from the hierarchy,' she said, describing the ‘massive entourage' with which politicians and senior police are surrounded when they visit the North Peckham estate. Beat police, she said, understand the community, and have to deal fairly with residents in order to survive on the streets. It is the ‘big boys' in the drugs and serious crimes squads who cause bad relations – ‘anyone who lives on North Peckham is dirt as far as they are concerned. If you're an ambitious copper, you've got to be a shit to get up there.' She described raids in which the wrong doors had been kicked down, neighbours abused, and bystanders pulled in on suspicion. ‘Erstwhile law-abiding people get fed up when they are maltreated,' she said, and accused the police of caring more about local shopping areas than about the safety of the residents of the estates. The police, she said, drive gangs onto the estates to disperse them, and care nothing for the consequences.

She described working for the tenants' association as ‘having a finger in a dyke'. She said: ‘People are so demoralized. They have no power, no hope, everything is too far out of their reach.' And she talked about the pressures on kids to conform, to wear the right brand-name shoes. ‘They've got to have this expensive uniform or they are not accepted. They'd rather go out barefoot than in shoes with no name.' An unemployed teenager trying to keep up the style will almost inevitably turn to crime, she said. Had she been burgled herself? ‘Oh yeah, quite a few times. You just take it. That's it.' She got a dog as a deterrent, but ‘that just lumbered me with another problem.' Once dogs had frightened teenagers, but now most families have got their own dogs. ‘For every deterrent, they build up a resistance,' she said fatalistically. Most of her neighbours wanted to blow the estate up, but Mrs Cameron looked on it as an old piece of furniture in need of renovation. ‘We know what the problems are, so let's tackle them on a drastic level. If we built again, we wouldn't realize what the new problems were for a few years, and then we would have to start again.'

Ali Balli lives on the neighbouring Gloucester Grove estate, and, when I met him, had just resigned as a Labour councillor, disillusioned by what he said was his party's lack of commitment to improving housing. He had been fighting for the renovation of his estate ever since he returned from one holiday to find burglars had broken into his flat by the simple expedient of removing the one layer of plasterboard between the back of an outside pram shed and his bedroom. ‘It couldn't be right,' he said, ‘it was obviously a design fault. I was very aggrieved.' He took legal advice, but got nowhere, and threw his energies first into the tenants' association and then the council.

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.