When serious things come a bit too close

This evening I was returning from a design training in Bristol. We worked with several groups of young people, one of which was a group of 5 boys from a challenged school. They were pretty disruptive to each other and the rest of the groups, but their responsible adult kept stressing that they were very well-behaved for kids from their school. Apparently Bristol's a pretty harsh place in certain areas.

Settling into my seat on the train back to London my eye caught a headline about ..youths.. shooting.. London.. I thought to myself, oh, another one. Then I looked a bit closer and saw Stoke Newington in there. I flipped to page 11 and there was the name of my road in the text, a description of the boys that always hang out around my tower block, and a mention of the community centre that's nearly always closed and looks so sad with it's windows barred for protection.

3 young people have, while I was away, been shot just moments and meters away from my front door. My flatmate was home, and just like everyone else, he assumed the bangs were just the ubiquitous fireworks, and the group of kids just the kids that always hang out a the foot of our building. He didn't realise that 3 14-15 year old kids had been shot by a rival gang.

It's a bit scary, really. I've noticed lately that something's going on with the kids. There's been more of them, more often. And there has been more police presence on the estate, too, in the form of officers slowly patrolling the area, but certainly also in police vans chasing kids on scooters (only to get caught up by the lovely 60s urban design of the estate). This didn't happen when I first moved here a year and a half ago. I stopped a couple of officers on patrol just the other day to ask why there seemed to be more police, and they told me that they were just establishing a presence in the area in response to the young people here, nothing to worry about, ma'am.

Yeah, right.

What kind of places are we living in, where children have access to guns and shoot each other? And why the heck am I living in the middle of it all? And why is nothing being done to the physical, emotional, social and financial deprivation of my estate and of others around the country? Estates that encourage and enable behaviour that is not for the best of the community. Estates that do not inspire people to dream that their lives could be different of the lives of their parents, estates that are not legible, not accessible, not fit for purpose. Estates that have been built in one fell swoop, or estates that have developed piecemeal to a hodgepodge of disconnected spaces, linked by a series of non-places. No, I don't mean the Marc Augé ones; I'm on about the appallingly unpersonal and unwelcoming concrete leftover spaces that incompetent planners and designers failed to address in an appropriate manner. I'm talking about seedy concreted spaces that are fenced in and used for littering, broken curbs, a horrid back alley used for parking and dumping of all sorts of garbage and large household furnisings, narrow and poorly lit alleys and walkways, derelict green spaces, etc etc. Just outside my front door, and so many other people's.

As ever, my dear two readers, I hope you're doing well. Today I'll add in another hope - that you are and will remain far removed from gun-toting, balaclava-wearing kids on bikes.