London: The Biography полностью

One unwelcome novelty of the latter half of the twentieth century, for example, was the race riot, among the most notable being those of Notting Hill in 1958 and of Brixton in 1981. The Notting Hill riots began with individual harassment of black men by gangs of white youths, but an incident on 23 August provoked a full-scale riot. Tom Vague, in the aptly named London Psychogeography, describes “a crowd of a thousand white men and some women … tooled up with razors, knives, bricks and bottles.” In the following week a large mob proceeded down Notting Dale and beat up any West Indian they could find, but the worst rioting took place on Monday 1 September, in the central area of Notting Hill Gate. Mobs congregated in Colville Road, Powis Square and Portobello Road before going on a “smashing rampage, chanting ‘Kill the niggers!’ … women hang out of windows shouting, ‘Go on boys, get yourselves some blacks.’” One observer noted that “Notting Hill had become a looking-glass world, for all the most mundane objects which everyone takes for granted had suddenly assumed the most profound importance. Milk bottles were turned into missiles, dustbin lids into primitive shields.” So an area of London becomes profoundly charged with the emotions of its inhabitants; everything is irradiated and transformed by their hatred. The accoutrements of a civilised city had suddenly been transformed into primitive weapons.

A youth leader remarked that “Those sort of boys take up any activity to break the boredom,” and in the twentieth century boredom had to be considered a component of any crowd behaviour. The sheer daily tedium of living in impoverished and unprepossessing surroundings is enough to break the spirit of many Londoners, who feel themselves trapped in the midst of the city without redress or relief. It creates not apathy but active tedium. Thus the violence starts.

On that Monday evening the West Indians collected together in Blenheim Crescent with “an armoury of weapons including milk bottles, petrol and sand for Molotov cocktails.” The white mob entered the area, with shouts of “Let’s burn the niggers out!,” and were greeted by home-made bombs. The police arrived in force, just before things could develop into out-and-out race war; some rioters were arrested, the others dispersed. Then by curious chance the great heat of these August days was swept away by a thunderstorm, the rain falling among the debris of broken bottles and wooden clubs. At their trial in September certain white rioters were told: “By your conduct you have put the clock back 300 years.” But this would only take them back to 1658; they had in fact behaved like their medieval predecessors who “swarmed” upon supposed enemies or aliens with often fatal results.

In the spring of 1981 the young black Londoners of Brixton, enraged by the perceived prejudice and oppression of the local police, erupted in streetrioting. For the first time petrol bombs were used in attacks upon the police, together with the conventional deployment of bottles and bricks, while a general wave of burning and looting left twenty-eight buildings damaged or destroyed. The depth and diversity of the disturbances suggest that they had a cause more fundamental than those of police oppression, however, and we may find it in the propensity among certain Londoners for riot and disorder. It then becomes a way of fighting structural oppression, whereby the very texture and appearance of the streets are oppressive and oppressing.

Poverty and unemployment have also been cited as the causes of sporadic violence, like that in Brixton; certainly they confirm the character of the city as a prison, confining or trapping all those who live within it. What more inevitable consequence, therefore, than rage against its conditions and its custodians? There have been other race riots; there have been riots against the police; there have been riots against the financial institutions in the City of London. Reports produced after the event characteristically refer to “the collapse of law and order” as well as the “fragile basis” of civic peace. But in fact the curious and persistent feature of London life is that “law and order” have never collapsed and that civic peace has been maintained even in the face of grave disorder. It is often wondered how, in its diversity and bewildering complexity, the city manages to function as a single and stable organism. In a similar fashion the fabric of the city, despite a variety of assaults, has always been preserved. Its mobs have never yet dominated it.

CHAPTER 44

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