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He tries not to get the three confused. |
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There are two of them, a man and woman. It’s difficult to tell what age they are, because they have obviously been drinking for many years, and possibly living on the streets that long. It's not the first time I've seen them or their companions, huddled in a corner muttering intently to each other. And there are one or two young men in their twenties, a bit scruffy, hanging around, asking those who are leaving for unwanted travelcards and those coming in whether they want one. They gaze at the ground, their voices low, coming, it seems, not from them, but from somewhere near them. It's the latter half of the evening, in Mile End underground station in east London, my local commuting point and I’m pondering the changes that it and its immediate neighbourhood have gone through in the last eighteen years. When I first moved to Bow, the area to the north of Mile End, row after row of terraced houses and council house blocks were run down, many sites were boarded up and derelict. But there were plans for the area. Beneficiaries of one of the last gentrification schemes awarded by the dying Greater London Council, my partner - purely financial - and I received a grant to rebuild the three bedroom house we had bought, in the process installing for the first time an indoor toilet and bathroom. The previous owner was typical of the neighbourhood, an working-class widow while we were typical of the middle class thirty-somethings who were moving in as the old moved on or died. Elements of the past remained; for the first year I was woken early each morning. first by the cock which crowed loudly a few houses away, then by the housewife who punctiliously swept her yard a few feet from my window. Over the next few years signs of the upwardly mobile appeared throughout the neighbourhood. Trees were planted. Skips hauled away rubble and fresh paint appeared on door after door. New houses appeared on empty sites. We became a conservation area with strict regulations about what we could and could not do to amend our property. The local Presto supermarket became a Safeway, offering a slightly more sophisticated range of food and wine. By the mid-1990s, Bow was a tapestry of ages, classes, races and even sexualities. Cockney could still be heard, but my neighbour and I conversed in BBC. There was at least one African and one Indian family in the street, and an elderly Chinese couple scurried by on their errands every day. The ethnic mix was even greater in Roman Road market, among both the stallholders and buyers and in the supermarket gay men could occasionally be seen. The changing scene was only history repeating itself. Tower Hamlets has always been a destination for immigrants, from the seventeenth century Huguenots to the nineteenth century Jews. In the late twentieth century it was Bangladeshis and it is they who now form the biggest racial community. With the exception of middle-class whites like myself each incoming group first struggled, then thrived and integrated before moving out to wealthier boroughs. The Bangladeshis are moving from the second to the third stage; money is being made and a third of the councillors and the Mayor are Bengali speakers. In the 1990s Mile End station did not gentrify – it is used by too many students at the nearby Queen Mary and Westfield College, and its catchment area to the south remains further down the social ladder - but it was refurbished. The building site opposite became an office and the nearby park was extended and given the locally famous banana green bridge. Traffic calming schemes quietened several roads. With cherry blossoms and brand new homes, the walk home from the tube was no longer urban desolation, but as pleasant as a moderately busy road might be. I began to feel myself an East Ender, at least by adoption, and to consider myself part of the community. But in the last few years, the pleasure I have taken in that walk has diminished and the community I felt I briefly belonged to has continued to change. The station is increasingly the haunt of society’s destitute, while passers-by are from communities that a decade ago were never seen - Somalis and Ethiopians who first arrived in the mid-1990s, other Africans who came a few years later, now Ukrainians and Turks. And, something that used to be rare in this part of the borough, more and more women, even the young and apparently educated, wearing headscarves or even chadors, a display of devotion to religion as depressing as a troupe of yarmulkes or wimples. At the same time, violence in the neighbourhood is increasing. In the past month, in streets I walk through almost every day, shots have been fired at a passing car, a student has been stabbed to death in his flat and a teenager is killed by gunfire outside a pub. And so the community I had begun to see as safe and familiar is neither. Of course no racial group is to blame. The drinkers I described at the beginning of this piece are white, while the young men perpetrating the violence on other young men are of different ethnicities. But, as has happened throughout history and across the globe, when a significant number of people from one cultural background - whether a different colour or different language or both - enters the lives of another large group, the sense of belonging and trust in one’s surroundings breaks down. When your neighbours look and sound very different from yourself, you cannot help but look on them with unease - the same unease with which they look on you. At worst there is tension and at best discomfort and incomprehension that lasts for at least a generation. What is different now is the speed of change. It was centuries between the arrival of the Huguenots and Jews, decades between the Jews and Bangladeshis, now incomers arrive in wave after wave, from so many different places there is little time to adjust. Furthermore, ease of contact with the homeland means there is little incentive to integrate, so that instead of one culture there are many, sometimes complementary, sometimes competing. The phenomenon is global and outcome uncertain; a homogenous language and outlook by the end of the century or minor or major conflicts across the world erupting year after year? Ten years I was, I now naive to think that the little world in which I lived would change little except perhaps to become even more middle-class. I still like where I live. My street is quiet, the neighbours friendly. I come home at all hours of the night and do not feel afraid (the meanness of my expression and walk has offered me protection in many parts of the world), but the ten minutes between my house and the tube station is no longer my territory. It’s no man’s land and will be for years to come. |
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| 2 December 2002 |
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© Martin Foreman |