Gone...

While I was in London people told me not to toot my horn at anyone if I drove through Brixton. I wondered what they were talking about. They said I could get shot. Only five years before I used to go there all the time. Brixton has always been at the cultural sharp edge. Back in the early 1900s the suburb’s Electric Avenue was so called because it was the very first street in London to get electric lights. Over time Brixton became a mainly black cultural centre as immigrants from Africa and the West Indies settled there, and during the 1980s it became a flash point as some particularly nasty riots tore the area apart when locals rebelled against what they felt were the injustices routinely meted out to them by the white majority and the local police. The soul-searching that followed - and the barrow loads of cash too - helped Brixton get back on its feet, and it boomed. Even Madonna came to strut her stuff at Brixton’s renowned Academy nightspot. Another tangible result of the renaissance following the riots was a great cinema - the beautifully renovated art deco Ritzy. When I lived in London I’d be seen down there two or three times a week, eyes glued to the screen and afterwards I’d stroll to the Tube, all safe and sound. And now people were telling me not to toot anyone because I could get shot. What a crying shame.   
When I went back there in 2001, young men on the streets of Brixton regularly sported guns and most made little pretence about hiding them. When the police arrived to try and arrest these gun-toters they were routinely stoned by gangs of locals who resented what they saw as heavy-handed intrusion into their community - that’s heavy-handed police, not gun-toters, you understand.  
Brixton is just one of many London boroughs that have seen an alarming increase in street muggings and violent attacks, a trend which is also apparent in the rest of Lambeth and in neighbouring Hackney, as evidenced by signs attached to lamp posts warning pedestrians to be on their guard against pick-pockets. And even the most genteel of suburbs cannot escape the blight. One of the worst hit is Richmond-on-Thames, home to the likes of Prince Michael of Kent, Mick Jagger and a slew of well-paid television types. Indeed, such is the spread of the help-yourself crime wave that I often felt like a stranger, a timid, wary stranger, right there in my own city. A city that felt, well, dangerous, to me.
One day I drove along London’s Embankment towards prosperous Chelsea where homes regularly sell for over a million pounds and I saw one of those large yellow police boards asking passers-by for information about ‘incidents’. This one told the brief and sorry tale of a man who’d been approached, robbed and then thrown into the Thames far below the roadway.
Another day I was sitting in crawling traffic through Peckham and as I passed an alleyway I saw another board. This particular short story was about someone who’d been murdered just two days before. He didn’t have an especially outrageous name - something like Billy Blake - but the sign said he’d also been known as The Crucial Kid and he’d been a local drugs dealer. He was 14 when he’d been killed - you’d have thought that was barely enough time to develop yourself a criminal master mind, let alone know how to use it.