17 October (Part 1) - The wrong side of the tracks
If
I had the time to trawl through the three hour recording of
the People Scrutiny
Committee meeting I would eventually find councillor Danny Hackett commenting on
Tuesday’s fatal stabbing incident on his Lesnes Abbey patch. From memory he may have
thanked the police but suggested it might be about time that both they and
Bexley council started to take Thamesmead’s gang culture more seriously. I
remember that when I first met my MP Teresa Pearce nearly five years ago she said something very
similar about Thamesmead’s drug problem but had been told by the Borough
Commander that there wasn’t one.
Danny announced on Twitter that he and the police were going to be at Thamesmead’s Atrium
Community Centre on Thursday afternoon so that residents could drop in with
their concerns if they had any. He wandered over to tell me the same thing at the
end of the ‘People’ meeting and although it may be a bit outside my usual
blogging interests it would be churlish to ignore the invitation. One problem was that I had
no idea where the Atrium was. Some research showed that it is no more than 200
yards from my home for the past 28 years.
My excuse is that it is the other side of the railway line and there is
absolutely no need to go there. The adjacent satellite image includes both my house and
the Atrium Centre. I’ve walked along the Green Chain walk to the left of the
image loads of times but the parallel road was foreign territory to me.
The rain had only just stopped and it was getting towards dusk and the atmosphere there
felt distinctly threatening. I was too timid to get my camera out of its case
which was irrational and stupid; the only sign that there was anyone around was
some shouting from an anonymous window.
The brutalist architecture is distinctly grim on a gloomy day; when I returned
in today’s sunshine (Photo 1) it looked a whole lot better.
The 200 yards took me twelve minutes to walk because all the shortcuts (escape routes)
have been blocked off and I had to go all the way up
to Wolvercote Road (the scene of the murder) and then retrace my steps
on a parallel path. In doing so I passed houses whose owners or landlords had
tried to improve and some didn’t look so very bad. (Photo 2.)
Whilst the 1960s planners were manifestly insane and their legacy remains I
wouldn’t like you to think the people are just the same although some may be.
When I first lived a literal stones throw away I had my windows broken and two
petrol bomb attacks. Other neighbours suffered car damage and burglaries and the
culprits would make their escape directly across the electrified railway line.
There was obvious drug taking in the nearby park. All of that stopped quite a
long time ago. Whoever has been caring for Thamesmead has done a good job but
further progress may be slow. As far as I know the area shown here is not
scheduled for demolition.
At yesterday’s police display I not only met Danny Hackett, but I saw Teresa
Pearce pass through as well as representatives of Peabody/Gallions Housing
Association and Bexley council and maybe as many as six policemen.
They weren’t inundated with visitors but there was a steady trickle willing to
pass on their views about their area, among them Brian Barnett
whose photographs
of the murder scene were published in the News Shopper.
When I asked one policeman about gangs he said that tackling them isn’t easy because most of them come from across the nearby Greenwich boundary. That’s not very different to what I was told twenty years ago before the local problems disappeared.