Hiding Under Your Duvet

I moved to east London at the end of the summer in 2008. It’s a mix of students, upwardly mobile career people, artists and the working classes. If the Daily Mail is to be believed, it is full of warring gangs who spend their time fighting each other or mugging and raping the locals; this is not true. East London has its fair share of trouble but unless you decide to ignore every alarm bell and warning sign and walk into an uninhabited, dimly-lit danger zone at some ungodly hour, or walk up to a gang of surly-looking youths and say to them, “Who do you think you’re looking at?” you are probably in no more danger than if you were in any other dimly-lit, uninhabited danger zone in the country. Most of this fear, as far as I can tell, is brought about by the media and the fact that the east end is the definition of a cultural melting-pot, which makes it very easy for newspapers to play on the irrational fears of Middle England. The old tricks are always the best.

I was born in Hoxton in 1978 and lived there till I was eleven, so it wasn’t such a culture shock to move back to the east end. I have a lot of old friends that had moved back to London from Essex so I had a social safety net to fall back on and had no need to rely on making new friends. I didn’t know what I was going to do for a living when I got here but a good friend of mine had always said to me, “if you wait for the perfect set of circumstances to come along before you do anything, you find that you end up waiting a very long time for something that never happens” and “it’s not such a bad thing to get out of your comfort zone and take a leap of faith...necessity can be the mother of invention,” and as it turns out, he was right.

A week after arriving in Mile End, I had landed a job as an electrician, which got me back on my feet but after a couple of months I decided to go back to bar work. Being a self-employed electrician pays well but it is also quite stressful and I can’t handle stress at the best of times. I had spent the past 18 months trying to calm my drinking down and now the slightest alarm or surprise brings on an anxiety attack, but it is a lot less pronounced now. I got myself a job in a nice little pub in Globe Town that was frequented mostly by students and creative types. They found me quite novel since I was one of the few cockneys that they got to converse with on a regular basis that didn’t intimidate them or tell them to piss off back to where they came from. I’m not even a cockney, really; I just speak like one - something I inherited from my parents. There is a lot of resentment towards the new arrivals in the east end, a lot of people who have lived here for most of their lives feel that all it has done for the area is drive up house prices and divide the community. Public houses have suffered as well; the white community feels that the traditional Pub is on the decline and won’t be around for much longer, and there is some truth in this.

 The east end is also a geographical anomaly. You seem to be a maximum of twenty minutes from nearly everywhere: central London, Greenwich, Essex - you name it. And it’s only a short journey from where you are to where you want to be. When you arrive, you may not necessarily want to be where you are but at least it’s a short trip back home. I was invited out for a few drinks in Hoxton square, which is one of the dull and grossly overrated hotspots around the east end. It is full of generically themed bars all of which are completely indistinguishable from each other and criminally overpriced. I would rather have been mugged by a hobo for the amount I spent that evening, for I, at least, would have been able to say that there was nothing I could have done. Instead, I was handing over an endless stream of twenty pound notes, willingly, to some belligerent po-faced fop in the full knowledge that I was being ripped off, but I only have to walk 100 yards and it looks like any other deprived area in London. These places are enclaves that are not parts of the community.

The regeneration of east London is also slightly oversold. The 2012 Olympics hasn’t resulted in very many jobs for the local people. The young people in the area have limited facilities to keep them entertained and occupied, and the facilities that they do have are rarely within their financial means. Most of the sink estates are still no-go areas after 9pm and like so many places around the country, there might well be jobs, but no careers. The apprentice schemes that people of 20 or more years ago could take advantage of are long gone and show no sign of returning, and the jobs that are available are low-paid, uninspiring and have no real future in them; but if you are an affluent student looking to get paralytic drunk and then eat in a fine dining establishment in-between downloading your coursework from the internet, then the east end is your oyster. This is not a blanket statement that I’m making; this is reality.

The real problem seems to be people’s inability to integrate with each other; and when I say people, I mean local government, residents new and old, developers and business leaders. In east London you can look at any 100 square meters of it and find all races and creeds, private housing, public housing, million pound houses and bedsits - all right on top of each other. It should be one of the easiest boroughs in which to create a sense of community and hope for the future. Instead,  we create enclaves for the exclusive use of one group of people or another. The best example I can think of, that shows how easily people can get along without having to consciously making an effort is Brick Lane. You can’t keep your head under the duvet in Brick Lane for very long; right next door to each other, you have trendy bars, mobile phone shops, down-market Indian take-away and up-market Indian restaurants, handbag stalls, second-hand clothing shops and an American-style bowling alley. The very people that you hate or fear, love or loathe, are right next to you having a drink in the same old fashioned east end boozer and trendy bar as you. And if one of these people tries to socially interact and engages you in conversation, I can assure you that you are in absolutely no danger to respond in kind.

There is a mosque two hundred yards or more from one the most famous bagel shops in London and no one has tried to blow it up yet. If the popular press is to be believed, it shouldn’t still be standing by now. The endless ranks of Muslim fanatics that are alleged to populate the area should have blown it up and Brick Lane should be covered with the charred remains of cream cheese and smoked salmon, but it hasn’t happened because they don’t exist. Not every Muslim is a potential fanatic and not every youth, a violent criminal; much in the same way that not every football fan that you meet is going to kick your head in. I know so many people who won’t step outside their front door unless they have a specific reason to do so due to some skewed media -driven fear of what might happen to them or who they will meet. Most people that you encounter in the outside world are just like you and I.  If you smile and say “Good afternoon”, you will invariably get a response in the affirmative whether you live in the suburbs or in the heart of London. As a people, we rely far too much on what we see on the TV, read in the newspapers or on the internet that we have almost lost the ability to engage with each other on a human level. And it’s not because we are all tired of human interaction, it’s because most people are scared - thanks to people like Rupert Murdoch.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

It is very easy for me to sit and write this and be all fluffy and touchy-feely because I have always been like that, anyway; it’s the way I was raised. I am the bloke that starts talking to you in the pub even though you are a complete stranger to me. I like people but so many of us are paralysed by fear. I would strongly advise that you give people a chance; they don’t bite very often and not very hard even when they do, and I think you will find the risk is worth the reward. So don’t sit in your bedroom hiding under your bed clothes down to some phobic, media-induced perception of the outside world. Don’t get a taxi directly from your door to the trendy bar in Hoxton square so as to miss out all the gritty, allegedly dangerous bits in-between because of something you heard in the news. The press are only trying to sell papers at the end of the day; informing the public is the last thing on their mind. As for the lack of jobs and investment and the lost generation, well, that is a bigger problem than what I’m trying to talk about here, but I am quite sure if we all start introducing ourselves to each other and do not allow ourselves to be paralysed by fears that have no basis, in fact, we might come up with a solution to the bigger problems all by ourselves.