Jobcentre day, wahey

2004-03-29 at 10:53 p.m.

Signing on day, what fun!

Not that it takes long, in and out in minutes. Which is odd, because everyone else has to prove that they have been seeking work, show where they have applied to, be shown jobs by their advisor...and I don't.

Actually, I reckon its racism. I think that I get trusted because I'm white. I can't think of any other reason why everyone else gets held in for ages and I don't, why they trust that I'm not committing benefit fraud and don't trust the others. Its weird - like someone's skin colour is going to determine their honesty. But maybe thats the way they think? Incidentally I should mention that the staff at the Jobcentre are not all white - though there are a disproportionate number of white staff considering the "customers" are 99% Asian/Black. Which could be it, I suppose - because I'm different therefore they are less likely to have seen benefit fraud by a white person, just because there are fewer of us? Still I must admit that if I were Asian, I would complain strenuously about it. As it is, it works to my favour, so I am not going to rock the boat.

Afterwards I went to the library. Its not bad, considering how appalling the area is. I got out a book by Christina Jones (who wrote a quite good feminine-fiction book, bit mad which was probably why I liked it), two Ruth Rendell books and another whose name I forget right now but I think it is a crime book.

I also ordered in Christopher Stasheff's Her Majesty's Wizard which is an excellent book if you like fantasy, by the way.

Afterwards I adjourned to the pub and promptly demolished two of the books I had just got out of the library. Bugger, those are meant to last at least a couple of weeks!

The East End is a strange place. I don't go there often, even though I live there, technically. One street away from mine it becomes very, very poor. I noticed in the library, in fact, that I am entitled to all sorts of money for further education because I live in a deprived area.

The East End has always been an area of immigrants - it started with the Jews, then the Italians, Afro-Caribbeans and now its Asians. The reason it has always been poor is because those immigrants, as soon as they have any money whatsoever, move somewhere else - the Jews went mostly to North London, for instance. I don't know about the other groups. Still, I think that it may be more poor now than it was once.

London, like every city in the UK, had a period of slum clearances, where they tried to get rid of the worst of the old housing, and tried to reduce the number of people in a household. In Newcastle, where I'm from, there was a big period of slum clearance in the late 60's, early 70's. I think that the slum clearance in the East End (always notorious above all other places) happened in the late Victorian era, up to the Wars (the East End was badly bombed). The reason I think that is that there is a surprising lack of unpleasant 60's architecture in the East End. There is some, but not a great deal.

What startled me when I went to Limehouse in particular, was that there are some very nice buildings around. Those, I suspect, were built during the late Victorian era - and I think they were built on reclaimed slum areas. There was a simply enormous church, which looked Victorian in architecture, next to the town hall where that SI conference was held. Across the road was a home, as I recall, built to commemorate the Great War. Both nice, solid buildings.

The thing I noticed the most when wandering around the East End is that most of those nice buildings are crumbling. Lack of care, I assume, but they all look dirty from pollution, uncared for, and even dusty (and thats from the outside!). There are strange terraces of two-storey buildings, the bottom shops selling cheap clothes for poor people, and the tops (presumably) flats. I saw several fire-blackened ones. I saw windows broken, and not repaired. I saw no street furniture. Cheap shops, such as you only get in very poor areas. The nicest and best-cared for building I have seen is a mosque - which is very nice, though from a sign outside, its still being built, which is presumably why.

Perhaps it was that people had ambitions for the East End, in the wake of the second world war. They built nice buildings - some astonishingly nice for the area, buildings which, transplanted elsewhere, would fetch a great deal of money. Stuck where they are - they are worth little, and the people who own them evidently cannot be bothered to do anything about them.

What went wrong?

It can't have been immigration - as I mentioned, that area has always been full of immigrants, and Asian immigrants are as typically hard-working as first generation immigrants are. Perhaps it was Thatcher, and the unemployment she provoked. Perhaps it is the council, maybe they don't do enough, don't foster community pride?

Ah, that might be it. Community. There isn't one. You might expect it - in an area where the majority of people are newly come to a country, and from a roughly similar background (and religion) you would expect there to be some sense of community, some sort of community organisation, events and suchlike. But there isn't, not really. There are "community" events, but they are divisive ones - looking today at the notices in the library I saw various events and groups for women, for Asian women, for Black people, for the disabled, for mothers-to-be and for mothers - but nothing for everyone. Not even a neighbourhood watch society - perhaps because people think there is nothing worth stealing?

I don't know how to solve those problems, but it bothers me when I go in there, to see an area which is intrinsically rather pretty, and which is slowly crumbling away through sheer neglect. Maybe all cities have them, but surely we can do something to help - for one thing, better surroundings tend to make for happier people, and if a government is not interested in obtaining happier people, what use is it?

Man cannot live on lower taxes alone.

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