The Lefts and the Rights 

I live near a corner of London's zone one: less than half a mile from a busy mainline station, and in a district which was long known for its poverty but is now undergoing modest gentrification. The health-food shop over the road closed down yesterday, after the landlord told its owner that the rents were due to rise by more than 50 percent. The two shops on both sides (a launderette and a grocer) are both wary of the same catastrophe. Yet for all the landlords' dreams of cafes serving bruschetta to passing executives, the area remains basically run down: on the main road, plenty of the shops are boarded up, there is grafitti everywhere. The reason why the shop is having to close is precisely the absence of As, Bs and C1 customers. People, not having much, see no need to buy green.

The road itself constitutes a tangible class barrier. To the right, heart disease is low, mothers tend to breastfeed in pregnancy. There are churches, public gardens, swings and libraries (duly gated). On one street, the houses ever have obelisk and sphinxes carved into their facades. The collective wisdom was Blairite in 97, Lib Dem now. People work in marketing for private companies. Forty years ago, the inhabitants would have been accountants or their children. The children were probably hippies. The population now is 'white' migrant: American, English-speaking white South African, Chinese-Australian, affluent, creative people from any country. A typical inhabitant now works in marketing for a large private company. The number of households employing live-in servants is rising.

The main road acts as a border. The rights whose housing extends even just to the edges of the road, instinctively keep away. Further rightwards are other shopping areas, better lit, with proper parking and vacuum-packed vegetables. The lefts, being more numerous, feel that it is our territory. We go up to the border, if no further.

On my side, the left, our estate is the entrance to several miles of council housing. Teeth are bad, diabetes is high. There are large employers: rail, construction, but the workforce is not local. People in our building in other council blocks, as live-out caretakers, as administrators, cooks, as classroom assistants. Migration, when it happens is basically 'black': people came from Ireland in the 40s, from the Caribbean in the 50s, from the warzones of refugee dispersal more recently. High on our list of hates are the Tories and the council (currently Labour). Few people have a good word for the kids either: while everyone else hides in our flat, teenage boys are occasionally seen milling on the street in pairs. We have a designated ASBO unit, set up after the Prime Minister complained of the council's failure to act on the Blunkett legislation. (The borough to the south was historically keener). Youths are seen, the unit is called quickly.

People work for a living, and people talk about the area in a political fashion constantly, but the experience of employment is not shared: everyone works somewhere different. A boss is a boss, admittedly, but who employs the new mum, the student, the pensioner?

The war was an issue; now it is merely context. Racism is a common experience, but our corridor alone comprises white English, white Irish, Brazilian, Congolese, French, Welsh, Algerian, Turkish, Iranian, and West Indian families: the borders of inclusion and exclusion are rarely obvious.

The true common experiences are housing and social benefits: how to claim maternity allowance, what not to say in a letter to the council. That collective experience is shared, and shared constantly. Frustration becomes action. Yet action remains individualised: the personal complainant, sometimes the sole litigant, are both common figures. 

At one time there was a cattle market, later still it became a centre for cut-price clothes and fashion. More recently, the space has alternated between daylight five-a-side-football and evening prostitution. The street name 'Maiden' on a road-sign, I take to be corruption of some long-gone 'Midden'; while a fading oak-tree painted on the side of our estate pub commemorates the great march in honour of the Tolpuddle martyrs.