A Week Upside Down

Monday 8th August 2011. 

This could not have been a more contrasting day, as we left Bellever Youth Hostel to the call of the swallows, and crossed the granite bridge of a softly flowing River Dart, making our way to Shallowford for the last time; and at the end of the day arrived at Clapham Junction amid the sound of police sirens, rampant youths attacking shops, and worried people gingerly finding a way home.

At the farm, the last activity arranged for the girls was a walk with a local naturalist along the river to see what could be seen and to stimulate their curiosity. To their surprise they found a lizard warming in the sun, a large frog in the mud and disturbed a g**** snake under a log, and identified a host of butterflies. 

We left the farm after lunch, the girls having made a good impression on the farm, and the farm on the girls, all eager to be home, and eager to return again. 

At around 5pm, having sent a text giving our eta, I received a message to warn me that, according to social network information, riots would begin at Clapham Junction around 8pm; a short while later a call from Providence advised me to avoid Clapham Junction as there was trouble. Taking a back way through Wandsworth, we arrived on Plough Road to see a herd of youths marching furiously, and then attacking the shuttered store front of a local shop. There were girls among them, but no faces that I recognised. Apparently this same group had gathered in the park where our guys were earlier conducting a football coaching session. Passing the back of Clapham Junction, we noticed the police cars, and sensed the uncertainty; traffic was almost at a standstill as we turned the corner to Providence House. 

Providence car park was full of spectators and club members apparently the gang I had seen a few minutes earlier had congregated for a while near our building before moving on into the estate. Apparently they did not attempt to enter, but our guys said they were ready if they had! A couple of the girls parents said we should have stayed on the farm.

Eventually we closed the youth club, and I, the last to leave, got into the minibus to go home. Clapham Junction itself seemed very crowded, so I elected to take the slip road past Asda to Lavender Hill; the odd police car was strategically placed, while groups of people gathered, and many hooded and bandanared young men moved along the road. There seemed little point in hanging around, and I was weary from a long journey. En route home I avoided London Road towards Thornton Heath, having heard on the news that there was trouble towards West Croydon. As we neared our house, I asked Rosie if the columns of black clouds were smoke or the threat of dark rain; later I learned that it was the pall of smoke from Reeves Corner, burning into the night. The furniture business at Reeves Corner we had known as children, and apparently the Reeves family had started it in Victorian times; it was a landmark everyone knew.

While we ate and watched the continuous television news, we learned of the extent of the troubles in Croydon and also at Clapham Junction, with graphic pictures of looting in St Johns Road and Lavender Hill. So I went back to Providence, and sat for a few minutes in the car park. The building was secure. I watched some youths looking through their trophies by the side of the road, and then one of them, dressed in red from tip to toe came over to me, and asked if I was police; no, Im just making sure my youth club is safe. Then he looked from behind his red bandana with a sort of recognition: I used to come here as a kid, no-one will trouble this building. His companion called my name and wandered off. Perhaps there is some twisted comfort there.

Across the road, the corner shop had been broken into, shutters forced open, and the shop now turned into a self service store. Trusting the security of our building to God and to some youth villains moral code, we drove slowly round the estate, and then up to Clapham Junction. By now the police seemed to have secured St Johns Road, though I heard that later it came under renewed attack. Up Lavender Hill, various shops were smashed, including the bible bookshop. Large crowds hovered, many just watching, tourists to a new curiosity, others masked or with hidden faces roaming menacingly. Effectively the whole shopping precinct was smashed with large scale looting; later on the Party Shop was ablaze, allegedly through helium canisters being ignited. 

Not needing to be a part of the spectacle, nor wishing to be caught up inadvertently in it, Rosie, my daughter, and I made our way back across south London. Balham and Streatham seemed unaffected, though I later heard the cash and carry shop was broken into. In Norbury, the amusement arcade was smashed up, and the computer store, and as we turned into our road, saw the police arresting a man outside Tescos, which too had suffered damage. 

The sounds of the night were not those of the wind in the trees, the cackle of the ****erel, the cry of a sheep in the breeze. This was indeed far away from the farm.

  Tuesday 9th August

As soon as I was up, Rosie and I drove to Clapham Junction, and found to our relief that Providence House was secure. Only the corner shop had been looted, and a failed attempt at the store next to it, but the rest of our parade was untouched, the Red Cross, the cafes, the hairdressers, the undertakers and the motor bike spare parts shop. But Clapham Junction was sealed off, and policemen manned the barriers of tape cordons, and almost like a border crossing there was a continuous traffic of people coming to the boundary trying to have a look. I met one young man, who regretted he had not been there the night before, and had missed a once in a lifetime experience!

All morning the forensic teams conducted their meticulous inspections, and the great and the good put in an appearance, Mayor Boris, Teresa May the Home Secretary; by the afternoon the broom brigade of volunteers came in and swept away the glass and debris but not the memories.

At Providence House, we are in the middle of a daytime holiday youth club, and a trickle of young people and visitors came in and out all day. We opened, too, for the evening junior club, but not a single person came, parents clearly reluctant to let their children out of their sight. The local shops also closed early and let down the shutters with renewed security. But in truth, like a storm that has moved on, there was little likelihood that the lust for looting would return for a second night of all night shopping.

This was a day of talking, and hearing eye witness accounts, but also imaginary tales, for example, how that MacDonalds was broken into and the rioters started to cook the chips! I was told of a lady who opened her suitcase on the floor and sent her children into the shop to fill it up with looted goods. Every age of person seems to have joined in the lust for goods. Several people who came to talk with me had been there as spectators, as the audience to a spectacle enacted before them, of theft, of aggression, of destruction, and until later in the evening of the police impotent to intervene, until the reinforcements came and armoured cars slowly entered the scene. 

This was a day, too, of opinions, of every shade of thought, of every theory. All day long we kept the television on in Providence House, and heard the dismal picture of Londons turmoil, growing more gloomy by the hour, and then the fresh reports of trouble in Manchester and elsewhere in the evening.

There is a new kind of tourism, and I confess that I succumbed to it. I walked to the Junction late in the day, and joined the crowds wandering around, cameras in hand, as if surveying the ruins of a Roman city. Lavender Hill was cordoned off, but elsewhere we were free to walk among the myriad of glaziers and carpenters boarding up. In a weird way it was a peaceful and friendly scene, workmen efficiently going about their business, and the procession of the curious ambling along, pausing to take a photograph, chatting with strangers. 

The first place you pass at the end of Falcon Road is the gym, and there a sign stands boldly: Fitness First Our Goal?  - Achieving Yours. I was sure there was some irony there as I passed onto the high street, and saw shop after shop smashed. Hardly a store escaped along St Johns Road; Waterstones was untouched perhaps the looters dont read; so too was Rymans perhaps they dont write either. Up Lavender Hill, from the Junction to the last shop before the library, the eat all you can Chinese Restaurant, every shop had a smashed window, none were spared in an orgy of destruction. There was one other exception: Dub Vendor the record shop. Most sombre of all, however, was the dark empty shell of the burnt out party shop.

Leaving that scene, I took the minibus to drive home, but decided to go on further into Croydon and have a look at Reeves Corner. A line of cars were parked on the freeway, as lookers got out to see this sight. It was a gaunt spectacle, a blackened skeleton of a building burnt beyond repair, waiting only for its final demolition on Wednesday. Further up the road, West Croydon was still a mess, still littered from the previous nights mayhem, with shut off roads and police everywhere. Back through Thornton Heath the long line of late night stores were shuttered and silent, and as I turned into our road, I saw that our local Tesco Express had remained closed, with shattered window panes not yet replaced. 

As I finally arrived home, there was no space to park the van, as the neighbours were having a garden party. Music boomed out from across the fence, accompanied by the click of dominoes and vibrant Jamaican accents. Our cats were nowhere to be seen. I guess they dont like reggae music.

Wednesday 10th August

My daily bible reading on Tuesday morning was from Psalm 108 which includes the words, give us help from trouble for the help of man is useless. That was clear enough on Monday night. There were the wreckers, a manic and relentless force. There were the watchers, who neither would nor could do anything about the pillage. There were the police, or perhaps there were not the police in sufficient numbers to restrain this excess of havoc, certainly at Clapham Junction. Late in the day, or rather late in the night the situation was eventually under control, or perhaps the fury of looting and mayhem had run out of steam for that night. 

The BBC website has posted a discussion, 10 explanations for the riots, from moral decay to excessive consumerism. Leaving aside for now this debate, it seems to clear to me that the shooting last week of Mark Duggan in Tottenham and the subsequent outrage provided the spark that ignited the riots, and the self organised gangs of young people descending on the town centres to cause trouble fanned and carried the fire of disorder, that subsequently drew into its path all sorts of disruptive and malevolent opportunity. Without the Tottenham incident there would have been no riots; without the gangs of youths creating the momentum there would have been no widespread destruction.

Having said that, I dont think enough attention has been given to the broad spectrum of criminal behaviour. I learned today that a local Primary School was broken into and copper stripped from the building; indeed whoever did it seemed to have time to drag their booty into the adjoining park to take off what they wanted, leaving the debris on the g****. That was not the work of a feverish gang of young people. I noticed an art gallery with smashed windows on Battersea Rise, and I doubt that was of real interest to youth criminals, especially as adjacent shops seemed unharmed.  Monday in Battersea and south London was a day with a good chance of getting away with a crime, out of the spotlight of the main streets.

We opened the club as usual today, and as well as our regular young people, others dropped by. One young man came in, who it is said was among the marauding gang on Monday, but I did not see him. He is about twenty, and over the years has played football with us, been to the farm with his family, and joined in with many things over the years. The first thing he said when he entered was, where are the old photos, havent you got any picture of me up at the moment? I paused and then said, lets hope that they are the only photographs of you that will be on public display at this time.

I had a call from the Recipease restaurant at the Junction to say that despite all the troubles our group of girls should still come for their cooking workshop; and so they did, and in the slightly unreal atmosphere of working in a semi-boarded up shop front they enjoyed their lesson. Business as usual.

There is a kind of what if feeling about the place; no-one thinks there will be more trouble, but what if... Consequently people are alert, cautious, not going out so much in the evening. The Metropolitan Police are keeping 16,000 officers on duty in London until after the weekend. I attended a meeting of Battersea youth workers, to discuss whether an event in the park, planned for this Friday, should go ahead. It was decided to postpone it for two weeks on the what if... basis.

There is also, I think, a north and south of the railway tracks feel to Clapham Junction. Almost as if out of the estates north of the railway came the barbarous hordes, and out of the housing south of the tracks came the broom army to reclaim the streets and clean up the mess. It is not as simple as that, but I discern a sort of feeling from talking with some people.

I spoke with another twenty year old man today, who had been present during the lootings, and his comment was that what the looters didnt stop to think about in their frenzy of theft was that when some of these High Street stores are forced to close, and the Junction declines as a business concern, it will be their mum, or aunt or brother who no longer has a job.

Back to Psalm 108, the context of the words quoted above is that the people are in trouble: who can lead us? Is it not you, O God, you who have cast us off? Give us help.... Some of the phrases of this Psalm are identical to Psalm 60, whose words seem apposite to our situation. You have shaken the land and torn it open; mend its fractures, for it is quaking. You have shown your people desperate times ... Give us your aid, for the help of man is worthless. It may have been Clapham Junction, and other places, that have been fractured, maybe something in the social fabric that has been breached, but there is a deeper ruin here. Maybe all the 10 explanations in the website debate are valid the culture of social entitlement, social exclusion, lack of fathers, spending cuts, weak policing, racism, gangsta rap and culture, consumerism, opportunism, technology and social networking. Maybe they all played a part, but all the time we fail to see that prior to any of this there is a spiritual breakdown. We avoid exploring our social relationships in the context of God, of his word, of his ways, of a deeper foundation, both personal and social.

Thursday 11th August 2011.

Things are getting back to normal today. I took a minibus load of young people swimming and ice skating, and the riots were hardly mentioned; though one girl did say that she hoped they would not start again at the weekend. I said that the momentum had passed.

Things are getting back to normal today. England seems to be comfortably winning in the cricket against India, with both the bat and the ball; but just in case the Spurs Premier League game is postponed this weekend.

Things are getting back to normal at the Junction, at least as normal as can be expected. Traffic is flowing, trains are running, and people are on the move. Some shops are carrying on with trading despite unrepaired windows and wooden boarding, some shops are busy refitting, some shops appear to be silent, one or two shops will be silent forever.

Things are getting back to normal, but the helicopters still hover overhead from time to time, and each time you hear a police siren you ask whats up. Police minibuses still slowly patrol the area, and of course the courts are queuing with hundreds of cases following the growing number of arrests around the country.

Things are getting back to normal. A full moon shines with an uncertain light through silver clouds this evening as I drive home through south London.

Friday 12th August 2011.

It has been announced that another man has died from the riots, an elderly man beaten up for trying to put out a fire in some bins; this in addition to the man shot in Croydon on the first night, and the three men mowed down by a car on Wednesday. There was one fatality in Battersea, though police are saying it is not connected to the recent disorder. A man was killed by falling masonry as he sat outside a bar in Battersea Rise. The building is now boarded up, with notices of condolence and a bright array of flowers. In its way it is an epitaph to the troubles, as is the message board at the Junction that many people have written on, including in other languages, including with some appropriate bible texts.

This afternoon, I agreed that Providence House could host a forum for young peoples views about the riots; local youth leaders brought along a handful of members, and it was led by the locality Youth Service manager. Maybe forty young people were there, almost half of whom had walked down the road from the mosque. Clearly they had not participated in the lootings and some of these young Muslims spoke very eloquently, expressing coherent views on justice. Equally clear was that one or two of the young people present had been there on Monday night, and may have been more than bystanders, and clear too that they had not grasped the moral enormity of what had happened. Overall the views expressed in that brief hour predictably mirrored the broad sweep of public opinion echoed on every phone-in radio programme every day this week, and touched on the weakness of the police and the good work of the police, on the undeniable wrongness of the looting and the broader social perspective. Nothing defining was achieved that afternoon, but perhaps it gave opportunity to let some views out, and was an indicator to me that in the future we should be holding more of our own forums with young people.

The Prime Minister has spoken: We will not allow a culture of fear to exist on our streets. And we will do whatever it takes to restore law and order and to rebuild our communities. The bishops are now speaking: "I hope there'll be at least some recognition of the serious and relentless erosion of public values, including those whose roots are in the rich heritage of religion. The result of their disappearing is a moral deficit in private and public life that has spawned acquisitiveness and dishonesty."

The riots were said to be copycat after the initial outburst. There are many copycat instances in broader society of what the bishop calls spawning acquisitiveness, in expenses scandals, over inflated celebrity and sports wages, the disappearing trillions in the banking sector, and now this copycat greed without mercy at street level, almost a re-enactment of some violent play station game, only this time the points scored at each level being booty taken, crimes committed, destruction and damaged lives. In addition, the destructiveness of the looting is plain to see; less plain to see is the self destructiveness, that the looters have looted something of themselves, something within is being lost, if not already lost. 

Thirty years ago, almost to the weekend, there were riots in Battersea, two nights of them, as part of another wave of urban lawlessness. I can distinctly recall three features among rioters, deliberate confrontation with the police, and underlying resentment against police and authority and that was the night to bring it out, and of course the chance to loot. Perhaps it is a sign how things have moved on that it is the latter that is most prominent, accompanied by a greater crescendo of violence. A friend reported to me overhearing a couple of looters in a side road off Clapham Junction, having stopped in the street with their goods, and one saying to the other that he had left his shooter in the shop, and must go back for it.

Legislation will be hurried through in the coming weeks, as it was in the last generation, and improvements to security, policing, and maybe to social justice and cohesion; but you cannot legislate the heart. Even the call for improved education and training can only smooth things until the next time. As unfashionable as it seems, I believe it is the inner man that needs transformation. I find it very interesting in the gospel, that on one dark night a politician came to see Jesus to try and get his head around the phenomenon of Jesus impact upon ordinary people, and Jesus said to him, you must be born again. You cannot bring it about by legislation, any more than you can catch the wind. There must be an inner transformation. Over and over again Jesus did something good for someones physical or social or domestic situation, but beyond that he did something transformative in that persons life. It is the beyond that that we need today.

On Saturday night I drove from Providence House through Clapham Junction at around 10pm. The bar on the corner was throbbing to the sound of music, people had overflowed onto the street. The Junction was thronging with people, criss crossing the road, many, many groups of people. I almost needed to take as much care driving through the gauntlet of pedestrians, as it had been the previous Monday, only this time there was no fear, only noisy enjoyment. The same was true of Battersea Rise, and then Balham, and Streatham and onto Norbury such a contrast from the ghost town of earlier in the week. It was like all the bad dream of a few days before could be drunk away, or eaten away in a restaurant, or laughed away and forgotten. Is this what the Prime Minister called reclaiming our High Streets, or is it trying to forget that we face more than repairs and renovation, more than crime and punishment.

I drove on listening to the sound of Bruce Springsteen groaning out his song:

The sky was falling and streaked with *la*hd, I heard you calling then you disappeared into dust.

May your strength give us strength

May your faith give us faith

May your love give us love

May your hope give us hope

Robert Musgrave