London

Problems:

• gangs
• antisocial behaviour
• crime

‘So, what do you reckon?” asked the man in the sunglasses, open-necked shirt and jeans, gesturing to the half-acre of bare Islington grass in front of him. “It should shape up nicely, don’t you think?” His dark-suited companion was clutching a map and squinting into the early spring sunshine that bathed the New River Green estate in Canonbury, north London. Before he could reply, however, the silence of the March morning was shattered by a moped engine revving into life as a black-clad rider sped across the estate towards the Mercedes parked at the kerb next to the two men. At the last moment he veered off, pulled a wheelie and jumped over the hump in the road designed to slow traffic down. He looked triumphantly back over his shoulder, grinning through his helmet’s visor at the men. They stared back then slipped quickly into the safety of the car as the rider raced off.

According to Annabel Palmer, director of Southern Housing Foundation – the community regeneration arm of London-based registered social landlord Southern Housing Group – the men were probably discussing a potential housing development on land next to the Rosebowl Community Centre on the New River Green estate. With house prices on the estate running at £350,000 for a two-bedroom flat, they are unlikely to be put off by a rogue moped rider. For residents on the former Marquess estate, however, the incident has more sinister connotations.

“Things on the estate are much better than they used to be,” says Palmer, whose staff organised the project team put in place to tackle antisocial behaviour after Southern, housebuilder Countryside Properties and architect PRP finished the seven-year, £56m project to remodel the 1,305-home Marquess and Channel Island estates in 2005. “But you do still get problems with kids stealing motorbikes and bringing them here and setting them on fire. There certainly is a gang culture here now. It is quiet during the day, but you do see the police there quite a lot at night.”

Sergeant Mark Rutherford of the Metropolitan Police Service’s safer neighbourhood unit says the kids involved are part of a gang calling themselves the Marquess Boys. “We have taken action to remove a couple of individuals who were trying to make things worse,” he says.

“It is nothing like the gangs you get in south London though. There used to be much more violence here but with the regeneration project and people moving away, that has changed.”

Rutherford explains that the main challenge he and his colleagues now face is dealing with the reputation for violence and organised crime that the Marquess estate acquired in the 1980s and 1990s. “It has been a real battle to explain to people coming into the area that this just isn’t the case any more,” he says. “But we are trying to combat 20 years of bad history. There were rumoured to be links with one particular family on the estate and organised crime – money laundering and violence. They have gone now because of their unacceptable behaviour.”

We were asking ‘what can a housing association do to fight gang culture?’ Definitely a leap in imagination there

Annabel Palmer, Southern Housing

Chris Donovan, community service and development officer for Islington council’s arm’s-length management organisation, which manages 830 homes on the estate, says the problem of entrenched fighting between largely white rival communities has now gone. “The area is much more diverse now as a lot of the former population did not come back to the estate once the homes had been finished. The main reason was that people were moved into some very nice street properties elsewhere in Islington with the right to buy attached. Why wouldn’t you grab that with both hands?”

He adds that for the ALMO the key issue now is putting in place some of the community networks that were lost with the upheaval in population in New River Green’s 1,138 homes. “We need to set up youth forums and older people’s forums. We also need to get some more informal information from people on what exactly is happening on the ground.” He feels that doing this will go a long way to solving the problems of antisocial behaviour that, although a far cry from the violence and intimidation of old, still persists on the estate. “It is the same in any inner-city estate in London,” he says. “It is not all major criminal activity. It is often just groups of 20-30 kids with nowhere else to go messing around. However, if you are on your own coming home at night and are confronted with one of these gangs of kids, then you are going to find it intimidating. We are working on ideas to reassure people that they are safe.”

Although positive steps such as the installation of CCTV and the formation of the project team are being taken, Southern Housing Foundation’s Palmer admits that more could have been done at the time of the initial regeneration project that could have made life easier there today. “We would never do it this way again. Our focus at the time of doing the project was bricks and mortar. This was all planned just before people began to realise you couldn’t just impose things on a community. You have to work with them and ask what they think. Take the name New River Green – most of the old residents still here will say to you: ‘It’s the Marquess estate – now f*** off’. They don’t identify with New River Green as it was nothing to do with them. It was a learning curve for us.”

Palmer adds that the founding of the project team at the start of 2006 to help co-ordinate their approach to the estate with that of the ALMO, the police and residents was a watershed for New River Green and for Southern as a whole. “We were asking ‘what can a housing association do to fight gang culture?’ There is definitely a leap in imagination being made there. But what we can and are doing now is concentrating on neighbourhoods and helping deal with issues there. That is one thing we have learned from our approach on New River Green.”

This collaborative approach has been welcomed by the police and residents and has delivered almost instant results. One of the first things the project team achieved was the imposition of a dispersal zone for the estate that prevented large groups of teenagers congregating there as they had done in the past. People felt safer even if, as Rutherford points out, often the kids didn’t realise older residents found their presence intimidating. Whether it is linked to the dispersal zone or not, reported crime and incidences of antisocial behaviour have, says Donovan, “shot down” in the past year.

The body armour-clad guard on duty at the Sainsbury’s store on the edge of the estate may claim that “it is just not safe for us to go in there, so we don’t”, but there are now no empty properties on the estate and there is even talk of getting Arsenal Football Club to send some of its star players to the estate to run coaching sessions for local kids. That would be likely to appeal to the rogue moped rider, although the council may have to move quickly to arrange sessions before the last patch of grass big enough to be used is turned into housing.