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The Standard Enters a Notorious Housing Estate to Uncover a Community Struggling to Overcome Violence and Deprivation

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The Standard Enters a Notorious Housing Estate to Uncover a Community Struggling to Overcome Violence and Deprivation Tina Brown’s new cause Why the media mogul is standing up for women Pages 22 & 23 Monday 28 September 2015 FREE standard.co.uk WEST END FINAL THE ESTATE WE’RE IN Picture Matt Writtle ❚ THE STANDARD ENTERS A NOTORIOUS HOUSING ESTATE TO UNCOVER A COMMUNITY STRUGGLING TO OVERCOME VIOLENCE AND DEPRIVATION David Cohen Campaigns Editor Like nothing else, estates epitomise the Lon- In, takes you onto Angell Town, an estate in mothers trying to stop their children entering don that has been left behind — a London of Brixton soaked in poverty and with a history the cycle of violence. Our series of reports TODAY the Evening Standard launches a deprivation, alienation and, in some cases, of violence going back generations. comes in the wake of two recent stabbings hard-hitting investigation into life on one of brutal gang violence and radicalisation. We spent a week living on the estate and London’s most notorious housing estates. Our special investigation, The Estate We’re met everyone from gang members to single Continued on Page 3 LABOUR CONFERENCE: SHADOW CHANCELLOR BACKS DIRECT ACTION >> PAGE 12 HOUSE PRICES SURGE AGAIN >> PAGE 8 MONDAY 28 SEPTEMBER 2015 EVENING STANDARD Like us on Facebook facebook.com/eveningstandard News | Follow us on Twitter @standardnews | News Inside the town within a town where cameras follow your every move Angell Town in Brixton is one of the most deprived areas in the country. David Cohen stayed on the estate for a week to gain a unique insight into a hidden world of gang violence and alienation. This is the first of his hard-hitting reports T WAS a warm afternoon as the Lambeth council official described it. understand the mentality of young men — called Squirrel, Laughter and enormous dignity, yet she seemed to ice cream van pulled up onto “Strange atmosphere. Desolate as a people in Angell Town, you have to Incy — that I couldn’t get out of my embody the schism of the estate Angell Town estate, announcing ghost town.” Yet Angell Town — popu- grasp its geography, for it is like a land- mind. It went like this: “Squirrel was within her own family. Her son Mala- its arrival with an exuberant burst lation 4,000 — also has a reputation for locked country virtually surrounded by sitting in his car in Angell Town when chi, 16, had just won a scholarship to of music. The driver opened his being very noisy indeed. The Metro- other estates: Myatts Field to the north, he saw his friend Laughter being Royal Russell, a £17,000-a-year inde- Ishutter for business. But there was no politan Police score it “red” on the Stockwell Park to the west and Lough- chased by Incy with a knife. Squirrel pendent school in Croydon, and her patter of small feet. Nobody came. Not Gangs Matrix, the most serious classifi- borough to the east. Beyond them are jumped out to protect Laughter, but chef daughter Sukanah, 18, used to a single child. A police car tore through cation. It has a long history of gang more interlocking estates — Somerley- Incy then turned on Squirrel and work at Buckingham Palace where she the estate, siren wailing. But as the ice violence, being home to the notorious ton, Moorlands and Tulse Hill. Many of stabbed him through the heart, killing made the Queen’s salad. Yet Dwayne cream van trundled away defeated, GAS gang, short for Guns and Shanks, these estates have gangs as violent as him with a single blow.” was dead and her oldest son Tyrone, and the siren receded, the streets fell and before them the feared PDC, or GAS — with names like ABM (All Bout It sounded totally surreal, but it 26, on remand in jail charged with a preternaturally silent. Poverty Driven Children. More than half Money), TN1 (Tell No-one), the 67s and was all too real. Squirrel was Lorraine’s drugs-related offence. We were only an eight-minute walk the estate lives in poverty. The Depart- Siru — and who, to put it plainly, are “at 20-year-old son, Dwayne. “I have seven I was to spread my stay over three from Brixton’s vibrant town centre ment for Communities and Local Gov- war” with Angell Town. children,” she said softly, “six on earth families, beginning with single mother- where the streets were pumping, yet ernment classified it as “extremely I went to live on Angell Town for a and one in heaven. In Angell Town, of-six Golda Mochia, then moving to Angell Town was so quiet you could deprived” and “one of the 10 per cent week this summer to understand what terrible to say, but too often the elderly Lorraine and ending with the Rev hear a pin drop. Where were the chil- most deprived areas in the country”. it’s like to live on a troubled estate. outlive the young.” Rosemarie Mallett in the vicarage of dren? Why were the streets deserted? In short, it epitomises the kind of Before I arrived, my host Lorraine Lorraine, 42, a single mother and St John the Evangelist Church, Angell “Like planet moon,” was how one estate outsiders fear to enter. But to Jones told me a story about three young church minister, carried herself with Town. I did not expect, in seven days, EVENING STANDARD MONDAY 28 SEPTEMBER 2015 News | | News “Open prison”: THE ESTATE Golda Mochia, far left, and in WE’RE IN the garden of her home on Angell Town. Inset, one of the estate’s many security cameras, with a football Evening Standard investigation defiantly kicked on to one of its protective spikes. Below, We ignore the Standard’s these areas of David Cohen arrives for his social exclusion week-long stay at our peril Continued from Page 1 on estates — the killings of Mohammed Dura-Ray, 16, and Marcel Addai, 17. All told 1.6 million Londoners — 20 per cent of the population — live on the approximately 3,500 social housing estates that are scattered across the capital, in every corner of every borough. Some are pleasant places to live, but many are anything but — with the highest crime rate, the worst poverty, the most over- crowding and the biggest proportion of single parents in their borough. The rise of estate-based gangs coupled with police warnings that estates are potential breeding grounds for religious extremism makes it clear: we ignore these areas of social exclusion at our peril. Our time living on Angell Town was spent with residents but also with Lambeth council officials, social housing experts and urban designers to dissect what has gone wrong and to re-imagine the future. We spent time, too, with the men who locals call “the Undies” (plain-clothes undercover detectives) to glean their perspective. It took us into a strangely compelling culture we know little about. We found aspirational single mothers determined to raise up their estate through community action. We found gang members putting out music videos that glamorise violence yet too scared to leave their own estate. And we found deeply divided feelings over the way the estate was policed. But it was also, to put it bluntly, brutally shocking. For in this world that can feel cut off, like you have travelled to another country, tragedy is never far away. @cohenstandard Pictures Matt Writtle Editorial Comment Page 16 to encounter the kind of drama that so named because it once housed the deeper into the estate, every 100 yards School of Business and Finance in cost Dwayne his life. I would be proved boilers that heated the estate, and or so a CCTV camera swivelled and Chancery Lane, but there was no col- cruelly wrong. which became a youth club — until the followed me as I went by. I was being lege that day and she was catching up ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ council shut it down in 2012 because watched by an off-site operator. I would with the laundry. of gang violence. soon begin to feel as if I had entered an Her father, a Ghanaian diplomat to O ENTER Angell Town is Yet what strikes you as you look open prison. Israel, had named her after the Israeli to cross an invisible around is the unexpected attractive- It was midday when I arrived at prime minister Golda Meir, but her life threshold. The estate has ness of the estate. It is clean and well Golda’s front door. “Welcome!” she took a dramatic turn when he died and been built facing inwards maintained and instead of forbidding said, beaming and beckoning me into Golda, aged six, came to live with her so it feels totally enclosed, high-rise tower blocks, it boasts human- her darkened living room where she mother in London. She was a wild Tlike a town within a town. On its bor- scale, low-rise blocks that are pleasing stood in ripped jeans and blue slippers child, got expelled from school and der, there is a church with a knife bin to the eye. The estate was radically and matching blue nail polish. married young. But by 30 she had left that exhorts passers-by: “Get a life, rebuilt 15 years ago when crusading “Have a seat! I am sorry we don’t have her husband and was living with three Bin that knife.” Then you drop down resident Dora Boatemah (now a settee,” she apologised, offering me children in a refuge for battered through a narrow passage once deceased) led a campaign to demolish a dining room chair with the plastic still women. dubbed “murder alley” to emerge at the overhead walkways that had on.
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