City Space Thursday September 15, 2005
Two or three years ago, I found the web site of a person living in New Zealand who moved to Manchester about a year ago. Now she’s moving back, and has recently identified three critical points:
Less rain
More sun
No chavs
I despair sometimes at the quality of life I have, compared to people I see on the internet. Photoblogs with endless displays of sunny blue skies, and an outdoor orientation to life. Britain is not at all bad, when we get decent weather. It’s traditionally called ‘green and pleasant’, meaning a mild landscape with plenty of trees and foliage and when you add clear skies, it’s great. Sadly, especially in the North, that’s relatively rare in the long term situation. How boring, how we Brits discuss the weather all the time, and how we complain about it. Well, it’s difficult not to. I love the sunshine; it gets my hormones bubbling, and lifts my mood. And it helps with photographic work. The sun is supposed to shine!
The other factor is the ‘chavs’ she’s fed up with, and I understand that. On TV recently, the subject of being taken over by a new race of people came up on a comedy show. Actor-comedian Steven Fry quipped that yes, we are: they’re called chavs. Adopting a politically correct and responsible adult position I can say that yes, I understand the problems of poverty and inner city tensions. Adopting the position of a decent public citizen like New Zealand girl, I can say I’m also fed up with anti-social behaviour, hoodie culture, drugs, petty crime and the tribalism that has recently been given the name ‘chav’. I remember once a young chav commenting on my dress with a vague hostility and I had to explain that my corduroy jacket was £15 from Asda, and my wool-mix trousers were over five years old. Expensive or posh it was not; but it appeared so compared to their ubiquitous sports wear and trainers. I was once asked by young street-chavs for a light; I don’t smoke (uber-yuck), said so, and they were incredulous because it was such an integral part of their daily tribal life. I understand poverty because I have never been rich; never struggled to eat, but had a standard of living no better than a ‘comfortable student’. But ‘chav’ culture is not only about deprivation; in fact the ‘bling’ that sometimes accompanies it indicates readily disposable cash. It’s also about tribalism, and the group identity gained from its characteristic features. I went to a chav school around the same time as TV presenter Mark Steel – Swanley Comprehensive. I don’t remember him from my time there, but his Mark Steel Lectures were quite entertaining. About a year ago he went back to Swanley to give a comedy performance and it was astonishing to hear him refer to social and community problems from over twenty years ago, that the audience immediately understood. In particular there were two notorious families, the Etheringtons and the Yeldings, the latter often called The Yelding Gang. They terrorised their community, before it was fashionable. Once, as a young lad returning to school after lunch, I encountered one of them with the remark “C’mere, cunt!”, as he spat a mouthful of ice cream down my tee shirt. I was a complete stranger. Thank you; nice to meet you too. Steel referred to these gangs by name, and I subsequently had a sociological revelation about my teenage years: how grim and unpleasant my school days were. I knew that anyway from personal and psychological experience, in relation to nasty chav-boys that made my life hell. But Steel’s reminiscences made me remember it in sociological terms, in relation to the current concern with ASB and the new ASBO legislation. Walking home from school, past the library? Chav-boy rides up on his bike and kicks me in the lower back very, very hard. Enjoying the likeness I’d achieved with a drawing in art class? Chav-boy tries to destroy it much like the nasty characters in Costner’s film Dances With Wolves deface and ruin his carefully illustrated journal. See beauty, destroy it – presumably because you can’t create it yourself, and feel jealous. I had my left wrist broken by a football aimed viciously at my face. I had my front teeth smashed with a table tennis bat. And so it goes on. Those kind of incidents were actually not the worst; more cruel and unpleasant was the daily grind of name-calling and hostility from Swanley chav-boys against an easy target – me – who was quiet, intelligent, and didn’t like football. I know all about the chav way of life, sections of the working class where, as a bouncer said recently on a BBC programme about bouncers – physical intimidation is integral to masculine identity, part of their accepted social exchange.
Every major city has dodgy and problematic areas, but anti-social chavvism seems to be a peculiarly British infection. I don’t know the facts, figures and extent of it, but don’t know any other country where it’s central in the public consciousness, centering around ASBO legislation and web sites satirising chav culture (try a search in Google). Moss Side, one of the most dire areas in the UK, is a just a few miles from me. This is a slightly different subject, associated with criminality rather than chavvism, but there are thematic links. I drive through there occassionally, to get to my nearest Asda or to a nearby park I quite enjoy. It’s grim; the last time I was there a street had been cordoned off by the police and I discovered later another shooting had taken place. And it’s a peculiar experience driving down the central road where the shops are, because invariably you will see groups of men (they usually are men) lounging around menacingly, either looking for drug-buyers or because they simply have nothing to do. And they always stare. Always. It even gets vaguely annoying, reminding me of the famous “who you looking at?” ritual, precursor to a thousand fist, foot and bottle fights. And this is what I’ve realised: there are identifiable reasons for this behaviour – boredom, or drug-dealing, but also because the area is so cramped. People are forced into the vicinity of others, the traditional working class street life, and when everyone is angry or impoverished, or disaffected, it creates jungle-like tensions. There’s no space. It’s too cramped. People stare at everyone else with strange psychological hungers, edgy hostility, and because it’s difficult not to when it’s like being trapped in the same cage.
Why is the UK so expensive, that we use the phrase ‘Rip-off Britain’? It must ultimately be because there are too many people, in too small a space, competing for the same resources. In a better life, designed according to my wishes and inclinations, I would go to live somewhere like New Zealand. Where a litre of petrol costs about 30 pence, compared to the UK price of about 90 pence. Where house prices are presumably lower than in the UK – where the Bank of England is so terrified of a negative equity crisis, they are content with stabilising prices at their inflated level, not reducing them – and house prices will eventually have further repercussions on the economy, so services and products will become correspondingly more expensive. I’d prefer a country where cars cost significantly less, in proportion to their true value, as they do in Europe and America. And so on, and so on. Or I would find a quiet little place in Southern Europe with sunshine and a carefree sense of community, like you see in Greek villages. I don’t think I like cities any more. I’d be happier with a more simple life.
I’ve always lived in cities but always enjoyed the countryside – I would escape from Swanley with little cycle rides, go for walks with my Dad and bruv across agricultural fields, and for the last five years have learned to love the Lake District. Mountain landscape is beautiful for what is not there – noise, pollution, politics, chavs – as well as for what is there: space, miles and miles of wild, unspoilt, fresh, and peaceful beauty.
Personal photo sites are fun and interesting but inevitably you make comparisons with your own life, when you see someone else’s. If I have to live in a city, for example, I’d ideally like a place where I could go out every day for interesting photos; somewhere like London. I visit a photo site of an NYC resident, and that’s what he does: goes out every day, taking photos – great! Manchester, reputedly the Number 2 city in the UK, isn’t remotely like that. Or here’s another idea…..a lifestyle as enjoyed by TV presenter Melvyn Bragg, who works in London (producing The South Bank Show), and then spends the rest of the week at his home in the Lakes, an area north of Keswick where mountaineer Chris Bonnington also lives. Living in the UK, if you have to, that would be nice.