I’ve lived in Armley for 18 months or so. The recent attack by a bunch of very young lads on a couple of Polish guys shocked and saddened me, but didn’t surprise me. In the past month I’ve experienced some pretty unpleasant behaviour.
The other day I was walking back from Armley Town Street through the small park off Mistress Lane. I had to pass a bunch of five or six young lads busily constructing an improvised site specific artwork from half empty Cola bottles, takeaway cartons and seemingly endless amounts of spit. I jovially alerted them to the pair of litter bins provided by the council less than ten strides distant.
“Fuck off queer.”
“Shut your face, paedo.”
“Do you want a fucking kicking, cunt!”
This is just some of the charming feedback I received. There was more but my listening skills failed me in the hurry to make the exit before things turned nasty.
Not long after, walking past another group of slightly older lads drinking cans of lager around a bench in Strawberry Lane park, the encounter was less verbally aggressive but considerably wetter. Fortunately I think the gobs of spit that spattered around my feet were more for effect than genuinely meant to hit. I didn’t bother to remonstrate. I’ve avoided that route since.
That same evening some graffiti appeared on the wall of my house that faces the main road. The neighbours (an Asian family) were also done with the same paint, in the same style – if you could use such a word for moronic, incomprehensible scrawl. As I was trying to scrub it off on a clear, bright, busy morning a couple of lads screamed by on a quad bike and threw a plastic bottle in my direction. This also happened twice when I was painting the garden fence earlier in the summer, once with a can of lemonade too… at least I hope it was lemonade. I decided it wasn’t worth the aggravation and called the council graffiti removal team. As I couldn’t say the graffiti was offensive or racist (it is illegible) it may take a month to remove.
Then, two weekends ago, around half past twelve in the morning, a brick came crashing through the kitchen window. A serious Victorian garden wall brick, cement laden, soil heavy, not one of the puny specimens they used to build council estates in the ‘70s. Let’s just say a brick of that heft does a fair amount of damage – I’m still picking bits of glass out of my socks – as well as the expense and the emotional grief, which anyone could do without.
Neighbours said they heard kids laughing and shrieking just before the enormous crash. The kitchen lights were on but the blinds were down. Anyone could have been behind the kitchen window. It would have been time to call an ambulance.
When the repair guy came to assess the damage and board up the whole kitchen he got hassled several times by young lads passing in the street. This was between 3.30 and 5.30am. I witnessed the last couple of times he was abused. Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. The repair guy shrugged and said it’s common, he just got used to it and thought it best not to respond. People – well, young lads – shout horrendous things at a worker just doing his job. Sadly there was no Channel 4 TV crew to witness any of this.
I’m not comparing these recent experiences with the Polish guys who got beaten up in Armley. And I’m certainly not saying racism didn’t play a part in that (I was going to share a couple of pics of graffiti I collected from places minutes from where I live but they are genuinely too sickening.) But it seems to me that suggesting that Armley is somehow a hotbed of racism and xenophobia is missing the point and could be potentially divisive.
Armley has a problem with a section of society that is totally out of control and absolutely not worried about the police or legal consequences. They certainly are racists but they are also a problem for everyone who lives here and wants just to get along. Random violence, damage, insults etc. affect everyone. If I’d stayed in the park to argue about the appropriate disposal of litter the other week who knows what might have happened? And it was my window that got trashed the other week, but it could easily be my Asian neighbours next time or the Polish family who live a few houses further down the street. The kids don’t care. It won’t necessarily be “racially aggravated” just because my neighbour isn’t a card carrying Ukipper. These kids aren’t exactly politically insightful.
I’m glad the cops at least have arrested someone, and let’s hope it goes to court and the right people get punished. When will they sort out the rest of them too?…
They need to be properly disciplined, but in our “progressive” society disciplining somebody is a breach of their human rights because they are victims of society (which is why Thatcher said “there’s no such things as society”, to stop people escaping responsibility by blaming their behaviour on society).
Sorry to hear of your difficulties Phil – the brick incident must have been particularly distressing and behaviour like this is obviously completely unacceptable.
If arrests have been made I hope at the end of the day you fell you have “got justice”.
Having said this however do you need some context to the situation you describe before “they sort the rest of them out”.
For a start you will know from your understanding of the Victorian city that “anti-social behaviour” amongst young people was prevalent in the poorer parts of town even then. various names were used to describe them and their parents such as “residium” “lumpen proletariat” etc.
There is then a well known story of “interventions” and attempts to “rescue” these young people before they became part of the criminal classes varying beginning with religion-based and secular “uniformed organisations” through to the state sponsored Youth service and associated third sector.
Underlying all these efforts were the ideas of “normalisation”, and turning young people away for various perceived vices and temptations. Often lying behind this too was arguably some nostalgic idea of a “golden age of childhood” when things were not like the present.
So to when in the recent past can we can we apply this notion a prelapsarian golden age – well Theresa May has conveniently provided the answer to this question obviously during the period of selection in secondary education when the mass of these problematic youngsters were schooled in secondary moderns for a life factory work or domesticity. Any free time could be spent playing table tennis at the youth centre or parish hall.Of course on top of this there was national service just to round things orf.
So how does any of this apply to the Armley. Firstly from the time when I came to Leeds and lived in Armley there was a clear geography of “rough” and “nice” areas which had partly been created by the LCC’s housing policies, partly by private landlords and no doubt to some extent by people themselves.
Second there was and still is an archaeology of youth interventions of various kinds “trying to do something about the problem”.
So beyond saying like the poor problem youth will always be with us – are the issues getting more complex, more entrenched and more difficult to ameliorate?
The answer is probably yes because Armley is probably more diverse than it has been in the past so that it is easy for antagonisms to develop whether these are racist, xenophobic, ageist or whatever. Armley is probably poorer and youth has less opportunity and more controversially perhaps informal social controls no longer operate to constrain unruly or violent behaviour.
Sadly I don’t have particular solutions – vigilantes, national service, the cane in schools, religious evangelism, temperance movement and the pledge, short sharp shock – I don’t think so.
Personally I’m big on the “neglect” argument that areas like Armley have been ignored given the scale of the issues they face either through a failure of “civic leadership” at LCC or by wider national policies which have either achieved little or made the situation worse.
I must feel fortunate then that anti-social behaviour where I live is defined by not being seen at the farmers market, not eating artisan bread and not growing your own fennel.
Kind regards
Sour
I have no answers either. But your passing comment about youth clubs with table tennis tables made me wonder… have you noticed table tennis tables springing up all over town? Yesterday I passed a couple in the grounds of the old Braimes factory in Hunslet – now a tech college I believe – and later a row of them in the bottom floor of the Corn Exchange.
What’s going on?
Is it a ping-pong intervention?
“Armley has a problem with a section of society that is totally out of control and absolutely not worried about the police or legal consequences.”
This is part and parcel of living in inner city Leeds. The council have absolutely no control over large numbers of families in critically deprived areas- they are effectively lawless places. I went to school with kids from Seacroft and it was a shock to me, coming from north Leeds, how badly behaved and vile they all were. I honestly feel leeds’ prosperity, its ability to attract people to live here, and its future as a creative city attracting creative people from all over the country and all over the world, is jeopardised by the poor attitudes and behaviour of some of its residents.