01 Jan 06
A journey around W11, Britain's Exhibition centre for extreme inequality. If the trilling of the Tory press is to be believed, 2006 belongs to one London suburb: Notting Hill. Just as Islington was condemned to be a by-word for New Labour, this patch of W11 is now a synonym for the New Tories.
Their very-White Knight – the absurdly over-hyped David Cameron – rose this autumn from the malformed crescents and painfully funky markets of Notting Hill, with incense sticks wafted carefully behind him by adoring spin-doctors.
At first, this blue-washing of Notting Hill seems surreal. Doesn’t this manor belong to Rastafarians, not Trustafarians? Didn’t this postcode provide the blood-flecked battle-ground for the worst race riots in British history, the three-day “kill the niggers” rampage of 1958? Weren’t great chunks of Notting Hill a no-go area for the police as recently as the 1980s, when David Cameron was busy casting off his straw boater and sailing into Tory Central Office?
But as I wandered around the narrow streets and retro junk shops of Notting Hill this week, it seemed strangely appropriate for the Tories to stamp this suburb as their own. Since the 19th century, this area has been the Exhibition Centre for the most extreme inequalities in London, a place where massive wealth lives without embarrassment next to grinding poverty. In the 1850s, you could find grandiose, gargantuan villas where the average life expectancy was 39 next door to infested slums where the average life expectancy – the average – was eleven. At the base of the Hill, there was a rotting, fetid pool of pigswill, sewage and sludge used by the poor known as “the Ocean”.
And today? I stood at the crossroads between Notting Dale and Holland Park. To my left, there was an area pocked and cratered with poverty, where mums struggle to raise their kids on less than a tenner a day. (You try it). To my right, there was Holland Park – home of the new Tory king – lined with lime trees and scented with cool, hard cash, where mums spend more than a tenner on their child’s shampoo in the local Holland and Barrett.
I spoke to Ray Anderson, a 56 year-old black man who has seen Notting Hill transformed around him in the forty years he has lived here. “Notting Hill has been made whiter and posher, and I think it’s quite deliberate,” he says softly. “There have been two main waves of expulsions of black people to make way for the Camerons,” he explains: in the 1970s, “lots of black families were taken and placed in Hackney and Acton. It was done subtly: the council would say, you can stay in your one-bedroom flat here with your three kids, or you can have a house in Hackney.” And again, in the 1990s, the property boom gave developers an incentive to shunt black people out. “It’s weird to see Notting Hill become a brand. I never thought I would see the day when people who live in Holland Park would say they are from Notting Hill,” he laughs.
He leads me into People’s Sounds, a reggae record store on the All Saints’ Road. This used to be the front line against a racist police force, the place where the black community would gather to keep the coppers out. Today, as I browse through the records and hear a singer talk about “when they forced us out of Africa”, it feels like a museum, a place preserved in aspic for a community nudged and shoved away.
Yes, it occurs to me, this is a fitting symbol for the New Toryism: a suburb where Richard Curtis characters nonchalantly wander through a Ken Loach movie on their way to a Saturday night soiree. The Cameroonian residents live by a discrete, unspoken code: price the black people out the door (with a sweet smile, of course), ignore the pockets of poverty up the road, and congratulate yourself on how tolerant and cool you are for living in a “mixed” neighbourhood. Welcome to David Cameron’s Britain.
First appeared on JohannHari.com
