I have spent some time revisiting my old town, my town of birth, the city of London in the early summer of the year 2019. I note the date because of how fast London tends to change. I’ve been away eight months and my head is spinning with the tension, the signs of accelerated gentrification along with the clear after-effects of austerity. I thought it would be nice, just for a visit. Maybe I would go and see some art, immerse myself in the crowds and excitements, take the city at face value, somewhat like a tourist. But, depressed by the political situation, low with poor health, and moody with the gloomy clouds that greeted me through the polluted air, I ended up staying mostly at my mother’s. This meant not venturing far from the bounds of North-East London, between Walthamstow and Tottenham, crossing the boroughs of Waltham Forest and Haringey.
These were more or less the areas I lived in for most of my life in London – born in Haringey in 1988, living there until the age of ten. Later when I returned to London after 10 years in Scotland, I lived from 2014 to 2017 in Waltham Forest, in an abandoned psychiatric unit, with a motley crew of artists, students, London hippies (usually just like everyone else, though with ever-so-slightly alternative lifestyles) and I guess you could say, some real down-and-outs. We weren’t squatting, but it appeared we were paying to – we were paying to be ‘guardians’ of the property, until the place got sold off and made into flats. We weren’t paying very much considering London rents, but over the years the prices inched up, as the rubbish around the place piled up, and we were further disillusioned by the marks on the walls of former inpatients that seemed to bleed through into the psyche of those who had turned up there, sane and hopeful, lured in by cheap rent and the wild, beautiful gardens still owned by the NHS that were wrapped around the home.
The day after I arrived back to London the barista in the local hipster coffee shop grinned and told me that Walthamstow had a new market. I was terrified, thinking perhaps it had taken over the old one, bustling up and down the high street, serving the local working class and immigrant community, cheap and bursting with character, selling knock off high street clothes, kitchenware, boxes of outdated electronic cables and crystals. Luckily it hadn’t been taken over yet. The new market was in fact a ‘Box Park’, a series of gentrified, identical markets that started off in Shoreditch, a dystopian East End hipster paradise, completely devoid of life or personality. I was pleased that by the time I’d left, I’d managed to avoid it.
When I told the coffee barista I was going to the library in Tottenham, he quipped, ‘hehe they’ve got a library now? It’s on the up!’ I concealed a bitter grimace, as I didn’t want to be too down on him - his job is unlikely to pay him enough to really thrive in London, and he will ultimately be a victim of gentrification himself. I left saying nothing, taking my guilty coffee, both delicious and bitterly tasting of the yuppies that had recently overtaken the local area. On the end of the street where my mother’s house is, across from Blackhorse road, there is a little conglomeration of shops and businesses. The place where I get the nice but guilty coffee caters, to be fair, to most of the locals since it is relatively cheap (for London). It has a repair shop in the back, which very nichely, repairs a lot of old and new audio equipment. Across the road is a Coop supermarket, where all the affluent of the area buy their overpriced groceries, whilst posters in the window advertise, ‘Knife Armistice Tuesdays’, encouraging local gangs to pop by and give up their weapons. The corner of Knives and Nice Courgettes.
They keep saying, ‘it’s on the up’ about Tottenham… not long after the riots in 2011, when another black man was killed by a police officer, and the outcry, a small schism against the state, which became another sustained PR campaign to criminalise the poor. It seems that neglected areas, where violence has blown up, the impact of austerity, when a place goes up in flames, eventually goes up the property market, firstly due to enterprising young creatives looking for cheap rent, followed by the middle class professionals who want a piece of the action. And so here we are in Tottenham, ‘on the up’. There’s me, dragging my junk of a laptop over the Wetlands, canal and marshes to Tottenham library, because the underground makes me panic now, and I am low on money. I’m going to the next borough because the nearest library to my mum’s, in Walthamstow, is chaos. Like many inner city libraries, it’s really the only safe place for the homeless, or those with particular needs who have nowhere better equipped to go, often sitting or wandering in amongst yellowing council-stamped books, and harried library staff with degrees or qualifications in humanities subjects, not very well trained for care in the community roles.
Here I am in Tottenham, trying to sort out the ruin of my life that I thought I’d left behind in the U.K. the year before. I’m in Tottenham library, clutching wads of government stamped letters in a see-through plastic wallet. In the library on a display stand are documents giving advice for members of the Windrush Generation seeking compensation. This is around a year after the government apologised for its appalling mistake in classifying thousands of legal UK residents from the Windrush generation as illegal immigrants, harassing them, detaining them, stripping away their rights and even deporting them. ‘Mistakes happen’, they say – so now it’s okay, ‘It’s on the up’.
I walk to the Bernie Grant centre. It is an arts centre that opened a few years before, named after the first black councillor, and joint first black MP in the UK. Bernie Grant was elected in Tottenham, known throughout his term as a black radical and socialist in the Labour party right through to the Blair years. The Bernie Grant centre is committed to diversity in the arts. It is open to the community. I sit in the pissing rain in a cold metal chair outside the building to try and cool my brain down. It feels metallic and stretched. I eat my small portion of plasticated Tesco-bought vegetable sushi, feeling ever-so-slightly sheltered as the rain pelts down on the newly-laid, even tarmac of the square. It is a well-scrubbed area of Tottenham.
The centre cost 15 million to open and it is just across from The Old Well, which served the community over 200 years before, over on the other side of the bit of park - scrubby bits of grass and nice tall trees. Back to the present day, outside The Bernie Grant centre, in the pissing rain, is a film crew, all white, mostly men, interviewing a black man, tall, looking in very fine health, about racial discrimination in the police force and the legalities of `stop and search´, particularly in relation to young black men. As this is happening a young black student is seized by police as he exits the building across the square. The camera crew respond quickly - shouting loudly to each other through glimmering curtains of rain, grabbing equipment, filming the action at a safe distance. The athletic man dashes across the square to talk to the police, with confidence and grace, holding a flyer that he has grabbed from my table about discriminatory stop and searches. Looking rather shady, the police officers eventually dispatch the youth. The crew, over-excited and gabbling, ask the youth if he is willing to be interviewed. He is very calm, puts his hood up and gently declines. They don’t seem to hear him. The well-meaning, healthy looking man tells him he can have his back to the camera, and assures him that they know he is innocent. The young man seems a little weary, politely talks to the crew briefly, and then goes off somewhere, through the sheets of rain still pounding the polite plaza.
The next day I am back there sitting inside the centre and the ladies staffing the caff are telling the young men getting their lunch that, ‘good things are happening here – “Question Time” is taking place in this very building!’ I notice the bustle growing around the boldly-coloured wooden painted tables and people who look swish slowly fill the building as they discuss the country’s future in the hallways. You go down to Seven Sisters, you tell the community, the old Irish, the Polish that replaced the Irish in the old-boy pub, the Turkish and the Asian community in the caffs and shops, that good things are happening here now. It’s on the up, they say. Today I can’t see the healthy-looking man. After the incident, I overheard him talking to a young friend. It was about life, or more specifically, the life of a family he’d been supporting through his outreach work. It sounded familiar somehow, but connected to a life I couldn’t really imagine anymore as I float further away from the air of the city that had quite choked me up the day before, the fog of freeway city-smoke, leaving me light headed when I arrived home. As he spoke, I was completing a child safety training on my laptop, and simultaneously reading about abuse and neglect. He pointed out a young girl, walking past the window in a school uniform. She looked around 14 years old, she had braids in her hair and was eating crisps. He was talking about the family, he was saying that the girl needed to be protected, he gestured at the young girl, walking past, ‘She looks exactly like her,’ he said, ‘’cept she’s actually younger, only 12 years old.’
Across the road is The Old Well that used to serve the people of Tottenham, from the late 1800s. It was donated by a rich man in 1791 and later poisoned and killed a large proportion of Tottenham's working class populace. It poisoned them for a long time until they realised. It was only after the death of an official that they officiated it was polluted. Apparently there were many years of contaminated water and quibbling over the sanitising of Tottentham’s water, until they eventually constructed a nice sewage pump in the mid nineteenth century to resolve the issue, and then the water was reportedly one of the purest in London. It is a beautiful sewage pump, you can see it to this day at the MarkField Beam Engine & Museum, bright, pristine and painted. They give it a showing twice a year. Those Victorians knew how to make a sewage pump, I tell you. They refurbished the well years after it had been out of commission - in the 1950´s, for the Queen’s Jubilee. I wondered why they had chosen a sewage pump to commemorate this moment. Beside The Old Well now, inches away, is a large junction, and around these corners roar lorries, cars and buses that connect the rest of the city to the rest of the world, splashing up cloudy dark puddles. It’s on the up, they say. Oh it’s on the up.