Brixton

The other day I went to the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton and, waiting for a friend to turn up, killed time reading a South London newspaper, which featured a piece about activists marking the tenth anniversary of the Brixton nail bomb and their campaign to stop the BNP winning seats in the European election next month.

It contained the following quote from Roger Lewis, of the Lambeth branch of the trade union Unison, who lives in Brixton and heard the 1999 bomb, planted by the far-right fanatic David Copeland, explode: “The BNP are bully boys, trying to affront all minorities, and want to break up all communities. But we weren’t divided ten years ago and we won’t be divided now.”

As a former resident of Brixton, who covered the aftermath of the explosion as a junior reporter, there was a time I would have seconded Lewis’s comments about the indomitable nature of Brixton’s community spirit. I drifted into the area after college, but grew to love its edginess and Benetton-advert racial diversity so much that I ended up staying eight years. It seemed life-affirming that so many people from so many different classes, professions and races could live together in a place that was for decades a byword for violent racial distress.

But I realise now I was confusing coexistence with integration…

Read atTimes Online