Across the pond

Only the day after hundreds of young people marched through North London in protest at the knife murder of Ben Kinsinella in a favourite partying area between King’s Cross and Camden Town, there has been an even more horrific murder of two French students at New Cross in South London. Laurent Bonomo had 194 stab wounds and his colleague, Gabriel Ferez, had 47 injuries. Both students were here on an exchange programme to do post-graduate research at Imperial College.

As yet the police have no idea who killed the two French students. Kinsinella was the 17th teenager to be killed by a knife attack in London this year. His murder resulted in a spate of articles about the propensity of today’s youth’s to carry knives for their nights out. The murder of the two French students is particularly poignant, because they were both the kind of people which gives oldies like me hope for the rising generation. Both were aged 23, not using their considerable intelligence to make a fortune in the city. But, at aged 23, they were not mesmerised by the chase for wealth to buy the many seductive products of our generation. Bonomo was studying a parasite which can spread from cats to human foetuses, the kind of thing that is a danger to us all in this era of mass travel where such things can travel around the world in weeks. Ferez was working on using bacteria to create ethanol for use as fuel, doing his bit to stave off global warming.

There is clearly a problem that needs to be addressed by the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and the rest of us. But just how serious it is, and how much worse it is today, than it was when I first came to London in 1955, is not yet clear. The rest of this blog seeks to put it in perspective.

The scene of the Kinsinella killing is a few hundred yards from Gospel Oak where I lived for over forty years. Both of my daughters partied there, and at Camden Lock, and managed to survive, despite the presence of the drug dealers and the gangs. I also know the New Cross area, another tough inner London area where the gangs of the 1950s ruled the territory. But where Goldsmiths University, flourished and made a notable contribution in providing a very good education for thousands of students, including a large number of blacks. I have had many friends amongst the teachers and the students and some of my white middle class neighbours sent their children there without them coming to any harm.

I also taught daily for 27 years at City University, London, near the Angel. This, like King’s Cross and New Cross, was a tough inner city area, where gangs were extremely powerful. It had several pubs ruled by skin heads whose idea of a good time was beating up blacks. They mostly used their fists and boots. But what is truly remarkable is that only a tiny minority of City students came to any harm. Although City had a huge percentage of coloured students, from overseas and from the immigrant populations of the UK.

The punch-ups were not widely reported in the press. It was certainly not news in the 1980s, let alone the 1960s, that people got beaten up in pubs is such areas. Which have always attracted a criminal element, seeking to enlist newcomers to the area into prostitution or thieving. Just as it was in the time of Charles Dickens.

What is truly amazing is that all three of these areas have hosted thousands of students in the last thirty years and that mostly those students have not been mugged, or knifed. They have even managed to find the tranquillity to study. And, of course, combining that with many opportunities to let off steam by partying.

These inner city areas have been reclaimed for their law-abiding inhabitants. There are no such powerful gangs as the Kray Brothers, whose nastiness was quite equal to whoever killed the two French students. And, who despite their obvious wickedness, managed to mix socially with British ministers and friends of Winston S. Churchill, like Bob Boothby.

These areas of London are SAFER than they used to be.