Hackney riots: ‘The message when youth clubs close is that no one cares’
Darrell James, youth mentor at the Pedro Club, E5. Photo: © Izzie Tran
The estates are quiet, curtains pulled against the sunshine in Hackney’s concrete labyrinths. A group of young girls mooch up and down the shops at the top end of Hoxton Street; they don’t go any further down than Hackney Community College and would never venture further east into neighbouring London Fields.
“It’s safe here. But not there,” said Ellie, 15. Like her friends Georgia, 13, and Sarah, 17, she wears the summer uniform of most teenagers around here – thin, cheap T-shirt and worn tracksuit bottoms. “What would we want to go out of this place for?” said Sarah. “There’s nothing to do here and nothing to do there.”
They didn’t leave their homes during the riots in Hackney last Sunday and Monday, and less than a quarter of those arrested for looting were 18 or under. But the riots came as no surprise to young people in London who either live with or alongside the deprivation and social exclusion that many adults and politicians were so shocked to have seen erupt into lawlessness.
Joe, 16, is out, near the bottom end of Hoxton Street, where chicken take-aways and mini-markets stickered with handwritten special offers end, and bars and little restaurants begin. He lives on Clarence Road and won’t go any further up Hoxton Street, certainly not into the estates that fan out at the top.
“I don’t associate with Hoxton, or London Fields. I’m in the Pembury Boys gang so I would get shot or stabbed up if I went there. You have to be in a gang because when the other estates come round they can be a lot older than you, you’re not just fighting people your size. Poles, baseball bats, guns, knives, whatever, anything. It’s a fight to the death. I ain’t scared of death or nothing.
“You get adults and you get really tiny kids. I saw with my own eyes a seven-year-old stab up a 15 years kid in the park.” He looks disgusted.
Joe was excluded from school at 13 and never went back. He is too young for benefits and his sweatpants are holed, his worn T-shirt too big and he is thin and hungry. He wears an electronic ankle tag and, he claims, is facing firearm charges over a gun belonging to a cousin. “I do what I have to do,” he says of his lack of money. He lives with his mum and two brothers. “She’s a good mum, she tries to feed us.” He says she would be angry if she knew he was a gang member.
“I’ve got a 10-year-old brother and I don’t let him go out late at night. He can go to a mate’s house but I go and get him at 6pm and bring him home. He’s still in school and I don’t want him caught in this train of madness.”
His eyes light up when we talk about the riots: “One kid got 21 BlackBerrys. In boxes! New,” he grins. “Mad.”
“I knew it was gonna happen. It’s the police, I hate them. Everyone hates them. They stop me about 20 times a day.”
Off Hoxton Street children are playing in a small square of tarmac, a car park for residents – few of whom own a car. The oldest is Victoria, 11. Her parents are out, and she is staying close to home and looking out for the younger ones. She will spend all the school holidays here. “I used to go to Mare Street but I wouldn’t go now. I’ll just stay around here. But I got big brothers so they won’t let nothing happen to me,” she said.
Her friend Aduke, eight, misses the local dance club, which has shut down. “I’m not worried about living here but I’m not going to join a gang. I think it’s bad because it’s the gangs’ own town and they are trying to destroy it.”
A few hundred yards away, two design students, dressed in leather jackets and brightly coloured skinny jeans, are leaving the White Cube art gallery in Hoxton Square. They “love Hackney”. “I’d live here in a shot if I had a car,” said 19-year-old Amy. “It’s really cool. But I wouldn’t like getting a bus around here on my own. I wouldn’t like to go wandering through some of those estates, but I’m not even sure where they are, to be honest. I can’t imagine they would be interested in fighting me. It’s the politicians they are angry with and I don’t blame them.”
Her friend Jemal stays in student accommodation here. “Honestly? I go from the flat to the tube and just this area. There was a girl shot on Hoxton Street last year and I went up there to see the flowers and got a lot of aggression from kids on bikes. I wouldn’t go there again.”
The girl was Agnes Sina-Inakoju, 16, who died queueing for a takeaway when two gang members opened fire through the window. Agnes and her friends chose their route carefully from their estate to the chicken shop. Most often they were to be found at the Crib youth club, a safe space for dozens of children who wanted to avoid trouble. But the Crib this year lost three quarters of its funding. Its opening hours have been slashed. “Usually we have loads of things going on in the summer, this year – nothing,” said youth worker Kelly Reid. “What are the kids doing instead? Looting. We were out patrolling those nights, making our kids go home, we BB’d [BlackBerryed] lots of them, telling them to go home. They are latchkey kids and there’s no one at home telling them to get indoors. That’s why you saw so many little ones out there on the streets, they were being looked after by the older ones. That’s the only childcare anyone can afford or when the mums are out working their fingers to the bone trying to bring in some money.”
Many youth projects across London’s inner city estates have closed down due to funding cuts. Yet the capital dominates the child poverty statistics, with far higher proportions of poor children than other European cities – 44% of Hackney’s children live in poverty. For Candy, 14, on the Whitmore estate off Hoxton Street, that’s a poverty that sees her sleep each night under a coat on a bare mattress on a bare floor. “Sometimes we have food, and sometimes not much,” she says, opening an old, scratched fridge. Her mother is asleep on a plastic-covered sofa in front of an old TV. “She is not very well, she gets depressed,” explains Candy. Next door three children under nine are home alone. Their mother will feed Candy when she gets back from work for keeping an eye on them.
In neighbouring Haringey, where youth project funding has been slashed by 75% this year, eight of the borough’s 13 youth clubs have shut. “Normally the summer university would be running; most of those rioting on the streets would last year have been attending courses,” said Symeon Brown, founder of community group Hype – Haringey Young People Empowered. “Youth clubs provide safe spaces and it does become political for kids when they see them closed down. It’s a message to them that no one cares, the politicians don’t value them enough to provide a service. Young people see politicians cheating, rich people not paying taxes, police not serving and protecting but shooting or beating people in custody, so they think why consent to a system that is not legitimate? It’s why no one uses the police. I’d be surprised if you found one male in Haringey who hasn’t been robbed at least once – I’ve been robbed at gunpoint – but no one calls the police.”
As social media have been alive with opinions of what the riots were about, an African proverb was a popular posting: “If the young are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.”
Equally, said Mimi Potworowska, an art psychotherapist who works with children in Southwark, they might have quoted Martin Luther King: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
“It really can take only a small amount of intervention to make an impact on some of these marginalised young people. Just a tiny bit of knowing that someone can hold you in mind when parents are too stressed, too preoccupied or mentally ill or absent to do it for them.
“Sometimes they just need someone to have met them and listened to them. They have a lot to say. It’s not bad parenting, it’s good enough parenting – and that’s not a class issue.”
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