The riots and the brooms
The pictures of local residents in Clapham gathering, brooms aloft, waiting to help clean up their destroyed high street have been for many an uplifting counterpart to the images of burning buildings and pimp-rolling hoodies clutching their swag (the best picture in lolz terms, by the way, being the guy proudly holding up a giant bag of Tesco Value rice). The Guardian had a double page spread of the Clapham crowd in the paper yesterday . A lot of people are smiling, some cheering, others taking pictures of the scene on their phones. It is a strikingly middle-class looking crowd: well-groomed, a range of ages (but mostly mid-20s to 40s from the looks of it), dressed in bright coloured t-shirts and sunglasses, proud that their community has come together to make the best of a dire situation. None of them look like they’ve visited a JD Sports in their lives.
The contrast between this crowd and the one that features in Sky News reporter Mark Stone’s remarkable video, shot in the same area on Monday night, could not be starker. The people failing to wrench a Ladbrokes television screen off the wall and smashing up a upmarket hairdressers are nearly all in their teens or early 20s (again, from the looks of it), most wearing tracksuits and hooded tops. There is a palpable atmosphere of adrenline-fuelled exuberence, bordering on mania. People seem to be bouncing off the walls, and off each other, egging each other on. They look like they’re enjoying themselves, and it is not stretching things to say that there is a sense of community here too. Just like the broom holders, this crowd may not know each other personally, but they have all come out on the streets for a common purpose, and they seem pretty happy about it.
These two images of two communities, utterly removed from one another, but sharing the same high street, the same space, appositely illustrates the point James Meek made in his excellent recent LRB blog post. Meek uses Broadway Market, rather than Clapham, as his example of what he calls the ‘spectactor-inhabitant’ tendancy of much of London life, but the point remains the same. Anyone who has visited the Broadway Market or London Fields on a weekend must get some sense of the dislocation between the two communities who inhabit the area. The freelance graphic designers BBQing on the park, or the media publishers browsing the artisan cheese stalls exist in a hermetic bubble which floats above the world which is revealed by a quick walk down any side street. Controvesy over the gentrification of Broadway Market is nothing new – the arrival of second generation gentrifiers pushing rents up and forcing long running businesses to close in favour of the new boutiques is documented here, but it has certainly increased in pace in the past decade. The number of people who live in the estates surrouding the market who can afford to buy a load of homemade bread from £4 must be even fewer than the number of regulars at the Cat and Mutton who wear tracksuit bottoms without irony. There are two planes of lived existence in Broadway Market, two versions of the same space that rarely if ever meet or even acknowledge the existence of the other. The only time the two communities interact in any form is when the middle-class BBQers get accidentally caught up in the crossfire of violence that forms an undercurrent of working class Hackney life – such as when a picnicker was shot on London Fields in 2010. As the inestimable Paul Lewis again documented, part of the shock felt by those present was that the violence normally projected internally amongst the local working class community had broken out of its usual boundaries and affected ‘one of us’ .
This pattern of spatially concurrent but utterly removed planes of existence is one repeated across the capital. My work place in White City is almost literally an island of almost entirely middle-class ‘media-types’ in a sea of council estates. The bottom floor of my building is taken up by a Tesco’s, which is virtually the only place where the two communities – the media workers and the local residents – have any interaction at all. But there is no real interaction here, even when we’re standing in the same queue. It is almost as if the horn rimmed glasses gang (of which I am a member, naturally) and the pale elderly women, tracksuited teenagers or Somalian mothers squeezing their kids through the aisles are actually physically unable to see each other. In fairness, the company does run a mentoring scheme, in which employees meet with local schoolkids every so often, but apart from that, the only reference that is made to the world outside our wall-to-wall office windows are emails warning of recent muggings and offers of self-defence classes.
In normal circumstances, this juxtaposition of worlds that are physically on top of one another but on a completely different plane in financial and cultural terms is only able to survive by a kind of societal form of Freudian repression. For most people pictured in the Clapham broom scene, picknicking on Broadway Market, or shopping in White City Tesco’s, the world of the estates which is woven through their own with invisible thread is one that only comes into view when there’s reports of a teen stabbing, shooting or mugging. For the rest of the time, the social plane on which the rioters exist on a day-to-day level is driven out of the conscious mind entirely (or perhaps, as the easy way people have reached for the word ‘scum’ or ‘sick’ (see D Cameron), dehumanised, in a logical extension of the ‘chav’-bashing Owen Jones documents in his recent book). This has to be a factor in, or perhaps a consequence of, the continued tolerance of record levels of inequality in London (and indeed the UK) – to reheat a legal term used in the Murdochs’ appearance in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee, it is a form of willful blindness.
I might not quite go as far as this post when it describes the scenes in Clapham as a ‘strikingly middle-class, broadly white efforts to sweep issues of inequality under the carpet of a simulated big-society photo-op’ - I’m sure many people in Clapham were local community activists, although i’m also pretty sure the widely photographed woman wearing the ‘Looters Are Scum’ vest top, nor the Ealing shop owner who kept on referring to ‘feral rats’, weren’t. But it seems clear that the ‘community spirit’ people keep extolling is not one that includes the type of people who were rioting, and, more importantly, didn’t before the riots began. The community of the Clapham broom sweepers is one where people went to decent schools, can go to university, can afford a home, have got a job, can afford a certain standard of living (let’s face it, they wouldn’t be living in Clapham otherwise). The community of the rioters is one that has been systimatically excluded from all of those things, and as a consequence has removed itself (or been removed) from the social contract which enables membership of the broom community. Hence the absolute incomprehension of the political, media and middle-classes at the rampant destruction and looting. As this superb piece by Camila Batmanghelidjh argues, in the alternative commnuity constructed by the rioters, ‘the individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best.’
Whatever the causes or motivations of the rioters and looters – and there’s no need to line up the arguments on the left or the right here, they’ve been rehearsed endlessly elsewhere – no one can pretend not to have seen them. If nothing else, the riots are a forcing together of the two planes of lived existence in London: in a very real sense, this is the return of the repressed. The riots are an impossible-to-ignore announcement of the existence of the people living in the estates and areas most of the rest of us pass through as quickly as possible or pretend we don’t see. It’s telling that for the past few days London Fields has almost become a no go area for the middle-classes who, up until last week, hegemonically dominated the area – as if the people who are normally completely cut out of the elite social scene which has colonised the place over the last decade are wreaking a twisted revenge.
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