Strangers In Their Own Land
Prospect Magazine 27.01.2010
From the mall at Bluewater to the caravan sites of Hastings, the people I met in the southeast of England feel a quiet disaffection that could find a voice in the election
The Identifying the territory of southeast England—minus London—is simple; articulating its identity is harder. Officially it includes Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Sussex, Hampshire, Buckinghamshire, the Isle of Wight, Surrey and Kent. But like most regions of the country, its characteristics become fuzzier the closer you look. The southeast counties incorporate many Englands: the Surrey of the professional, commuting class; the Kent of London’s working-class diaspora; the postwar new towns; the southeast coast; Oxford’s dreaming spires and so on. The region lives in the shadow of the capital and many of its inhabitants are ex-residents—but it is almost defiantly not London. At the end of last year I travelled to Surrey, Kent and Sussex and observed the aspirant working-class people who moved there from inner London. It
Short Story: Junkspace
The Sunday Times 13.12.09
‘Should Dad tell Lucy, as she mops up the ketchup and cheese from her burger lunch, that British children are getting fatter faster than anywhere else in western Europe? What do they say? How do they break the news to their kids?’
We’re doing it for the kids. The door to Gap Kids wafts the vocals of Kylie and Robbie onto the main stretch of the shopping complex with every swing. Lucy Webb’s sticky hands are suctioned to the glass like Garfield’s paws to a rear windscreen. She appears younger than her four-and-something years. A veil of dry skin covers her crown like cradle cap. The remains of a lolly form a snail trail from her chin to her jumper, jeans and jelly shoes.
“Lucy do it,” says her mother, Debbie, gently. “Lucy open the door. Lucy do it.”
As the child can’t control a lolly, it’s unlikely she can shift a thick glass door, but — “Lucy do it,” Debbie says, going for the hat-trick.
With the heat and pressure almost melting the child’s digits into the glass, Debbie Webb gives
Legacy of the Docks
The Guardian 05.08.09
It is time to rethink the London Docklands development as simply a struggle between powerless locals and 'yuppie' colonisers, says former resident Michael Collins
The aerial view of Canary Wharf in the opening sequence of BBC1's The Apprentice is the iconic image of Docklands, now fixed in the public consciousness. It's impossible to imagine the docks that Henry Mayhew witnessed in the 19th century, where the scents of tobacco, rum, coffee, spice and "the stench of hides" greeted the passer-by within a "forest of masts". Even the desolate wasteland in Bermondsey and Rotherhithe in the 1970s, just as the southside docks had given up the ghost, seems remote.
Where the Design Museum now stands, alongside a colony of Conran restaurants, the late artist Derek Jarman once occupied an old grain warehouse, and scouted for coins and pilgrim badges on the shore below. That moment, before the builders and the bulldozers arrived, is documented in his Super-8 shorts of the time about Bankside
Tribes of Clutter
New Statesman 24.11.08
A new study of contemporary Londoners' possessions and the values they attach to them reveals a shift of allegiance away from wider society and towards the individual household
This book sums up how far social anthropology has progressed since Henry Mayhew wrote about the skull shapes of costermongers in the 19th century. Daniel Miller's approach is more in keeping with that of the wild and weird Tom Harrisson and the pioneers of Mass Observation in the 1930s. Having studied cannibalistic tribes in the New Hebrides, Harrisson despatched researchers to Bolton and north London to spy on the British working class at play. They reported on, among other things, the fixation with astrology, the football Pools, and "the cult of the aspidistra". These brief expeditions were undertaken as a tentative consumerism began to lighten the lives of the masses. At the time, George Orwell, having returned from his sojourn in Wigan, suggested that fish and chips, tinned salmon, radio and strong tea
Backlash Against Political Ignorance
The Guardian 18.06.08
A tiny bit of history repeated itself with the results of last month's London mayoral election. In the spring of 1908, the Progressive Party, the first administration at the London County council, was ejected from the office it held for almost 20 years. In The Condition of England the following year, parliamentarian Charles Masterman wrote: "The Progressive Party ended its political career in the Metropolis because it had forgotten the Middle Classes."
Those middle classes dwelt in suburbs in what became Greater London, and existed as figures of fun, particularly to authors such as George Gissing and even HG Wells, himself a native of Bromley, south London. They were cast as thrifty conservative clerks living in villas named Homelea, grudgingly handing over taxes for the indolent proles they feared were ready to revolt and head their way.
A hundred years on, many of those suburbs are populated by the white working class, once resident in inner London's poorer neighbourhood. This
Wired for vision
The Guardian 28.05.08
Britain's latest attempt at creating a new town is bold, magical - and raises two fingers to sneering middle-class utopianists The disappearance of 30 electricity pylons from a chalk quarry in Kent heralds the construction of Britain's first new town of the 21st century, and the nation's first "wired" neighbourhood. By the autumn, the burgeoning town of Ebbsfleet will be branded by a "landmark" piece of British art. It will be the largest statue in Britain, chosen from a shortlist of six contenders currently exhibited within the megalithic Bluewater retail complex.
Standing in the backyard of Bluewater, adjacent to Ebbsfleet international station - Eurostar's suburban link to Europe - the acreage of Ebbsfleet Valley is three times that of Hyde Park. As the realisation of this whole vision will take 25 years, the developers behind the scheme, Land Securities, will be selling dreams of the future for some time yet, even though show homes for the first stage, at Springhead Park, have
Photographic memory
The Guardian 14.05.08
Left half-forgotten in carrier bags for 30 years, teacher George Plemper's pictures of the working-class kids he taught are a remarkable social record, says Michael Collins For three decades, George Plemper's photographic record of south London working-class life gathered dust in carrier bags, only disturbed each time he moved home. He hoped that one day the images might be recognised as a significant social record of a community and a landscape. At the time, in the late 1970s, this was not a fashionable photographic subject, so Plemper's hopes seemed as unlikely to be fulfilled as his mother's fantasy that he might become chairman of ICI.
It would be nearly 30 years later, with the emergence of a new media platform that gives us the potential to be producers, broadcasters and exhibitors, that Plemper finally unpacked his bags. The turning point came with the launch of Flickr, the webpage that does for photographs what YouTube does for home videos and Facebook for friendship.
An
Dreams set in concrete
The Guardian 01.05.08
Forty years ago, work began on the construction of Thamesmead, 'a 21st century town'. But has it lived up to its promise, and what does its future hold? Michael Collins reports To an outsider, inconsequential sounds and shadows take a sinister turn on Tavy Bridge around late afternoon, as the day begins to darken: damp tea towels drying at half-mast, a weather-beaten flag of St George flapping on the balcony of a tower block. It's not simply because the raw climate here brings harder, faster winds than the rest of south-east London. It's because Thamesmead has a reputation - compounded, even created, by its use as a backdrop to violent scenes in Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange.
But even Kubrick's glam-rock Droogs, with their bowler hats and baseball bats, pale beside the figure loitering around the estate's walkways and stairwells: a gangly white boy in oversized parka, his head lost in the protruding hood, his face concealed by a chalk-white kabuki mask. "No one
A raft on the sea
The Guardian 02.02.08
Derek Jarman, like HG Wells and E Nesbit before him, was intrigued and inspired by the coastline around Dungeness. Michael Collins explores the strange appeal of a stark stretch of shingle Heading into south-east London via docklands in early spring last year, I passed a spray of flowers propped against a wall to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Derek Jarman. The artist lived in various riverside warehouses in the 1970s, arriving at the third floor of Block B Butler's Wharf in 1973. During his first summer there, he wrote in his diary: "The studio is a forest of emerald-green columns, at sunrise, the ducks float in on the driftwood over a glacial river which reflects orange and vermilion, while the sun pours through the doors." By 1979 , however, he had jettisoned the old grain warehouse, having tired of lording it over a "gay Butlins".
I've never been a fan of Jarman's art or even his films, many of which feature in a new exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. As a native
White noise
Royal Society of Arts Journal Spring 2008
Fellow and author Michael Collins gives a personal reflection on why television continues to provide a distorted portrayal of the white working class During his brief reign as Director-General of the BBC, Greg Dyke suggested the corporation was ‘hideously white’. It was one of those ill-judged moves that middle-aged men in the media make in a bid to be ‘relevant’. Rather like playing air guitar to rap. It’s a half truth to describe the BBC as hideously white without slipping the words ‘middle class’ somewhere in there. For despite the comedian Lenny Henry and the actress Meera Syaal describing the broadcasting industry as overtly white in high places, or the call from a BBC insider for a Macpherson-style investigation into institutional racism within the corporation, it is class not ethnicity the BBC has an issue with. The relative absence of anyone from a working class background within its commissioning teams (certainly BBC1 and BBC2), may account for its inability to portray
The white working class has moved home
The Telegraph 07.03.08
A playwright once castigated a BBC wardrobe assistant for kitting out the northern characters in his working-class drama in mufflers and caps. It was the 1960s, the season when there was said to be a social revolution in the air, and yet here was a BBC staffer unaware that the proles were shopping at Burton's.udging by the reactions to the latest BBC season on the white working class, the corporation is still stuck on mufflers and caps. The series kicks off tonight with the film Last Orders, in which the decline of a working men's club is, presumably, a metaphor for the wider demise of the white working class. But the working class have not become extinct; they simply started drinking elsewhere. Where the numbers of the tribe have diminished is in major cities, and London in particular. In the satellite suburbs of the capital and elsewhere you will find the current working-class generation very much alive, and in some cases, thriving.
These are the progeny of the white urbanites who
Under the hammer
The Times 09.12.07
The only Magna Carta in private hands is to be auctioned next week. Michael Collins explains why the charter still stirs the nation’s heart The road from a Thameside meadow in the 13th century to a New York auction house in 2007 is a long one, but it’s the route Magna Carta has taken. For the first time in history the great charter is going under the hammer.
David Redden, vice-chairman of Sotheby’s, the auctioneers, calls it “the most important document in history”. Bids are expected to reach between $20m (£9.8m) and $30m (£14.7m) when it goes on sale on December 18.
“This was the birth certificate of freedom, the foundation of law in the United Kingdom, the US, and throughout the world,” Redden said.
The story of how the barons forced King John to sign Magna Carta at Runnymede, a meadow by the Thames west of London in 1215 is part of English mythology. In fact, their deal concentrated on the rights of the nobility and lasted only a few months. It was not until 1297 that a revised
Class and strife
The Times 07.05.07
Michael Collins is intrigued but finds flaws in this account of the modern working class Here, journalist Paul Mason celebrates the forgotten players in the history of the postindustrial working class and the global labour movement that began almost 200 years ago. The book (sub-titled How the Working Class Went Global) is perfectly timed, arriving in the baby years of a new millennium, with “globalisation” the longest word on the lips of many.
Mason, a BBC business correspondent, hopes to reach out and touch the 21st-century equivalent of those whose blood, sweat and tears were spilt in bringing about change. Their modern heirs are those activists who took to the streets of Seattle, Genoa and elsewhere to rail against globalisation and those on the factory floors, working for the monolithic corporations created by globalisation.
What jars, from the outset, is the comparison between the pioneers of trade unionism and organised working-class labour, and “the kids in combat trousers
The myth of multiculturalism
The Guardian 21.05.07
In a season similar to this 30 years ago, British educationalists were preoccupied with something referred to as "the great schools debate", in which the urban comprehensive was placed under scrutiny. When the media got wind of this, one particular television crew was dispatched to the school I attended in south east London, having decided it was the epitome of an underachieving, inherently multi-racial school within a poor and neglected postcode. The documentary that emerged - Our School and Hard Times - revealed the literacy of teenage pupils was dramatically below par, truancy was high, and hope was at an all time low.
The sixties outakes on the teaching staff were steeped in theories of social engineering and hinted to the camera that surroundings and social class rather than the pupils themselves, or teaching methods, were responsible. It was an argument that appears to have been around since Aristotle was a lad, and served its purpose until the issue of academic
Poor white boys are the new failing class
The Sunday Times 19.11.06
Working-class white boys have taken over from their black counterparts as school under-achievers. Michael Collins explains why If confirmation were needed that the urban white working class has moved away from the archaic image of a cockney cap-wearing armchair revolutionary, it came via a report published last week from the Social Justice Policy Group: a think tank created by David Cameron and chaired by the former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith.
While liberals stand accused of demonising and disenfranchising the white working class, and new Labour legislates on the food that should go in their mouths and the words that should come out, the Conservatives have weighed in with news regarding this urban tribe’s rising generation. The prognosis isn’t favourable: things ain’t what they used to be.
The report, entitled State of the Nation — Education Failure, casts the young of the tribe in an image that takes up the baton from Vicky Pollard of Little Britain and the chav industry
"Tremendous, absolutely essential book....with The Likes of Us, Collins becomes an anatomist of England to dwarf almost all others. This is a passionate, humane, brave and beautifully controlled book, written in anger but not angrily written.....Do what I did. Read it and weep."
Bryan Appleyard
Sunday Times
"One of those rare books that make you swoon like the best pop singles used to."
Julie Burchill
Times Books of the Year
"My best book of the year...No group needs understanding more than the former salt of the earth, allegedly dissolved into a BNP-voting, burger-stuffing Trisha audience. This vivid, personal account reminds us that it wasn't always so." Lesley White
Sunday Times Books of the Year
"The Likes of Us explores tensions between race and class with combative energy. What captivates and compels is the poetic rage at the book's heart.....a provocative engagement with family history and identity - funny, furious, frustrating and incredibly moving, with passages of lyrical rapture." The Glasgow Herald
"Michael Collins has woven an argument which has all the emotional impact of a well-wrought novel. If you want comparsons think Tom Wolfe meets George Orwell." Michael Bracewell
"...courageously clear-headed......sharply evocative. Southwark has produced a new kind of hooligan, one swinging his laptop like a bicycle chain around his head, if you are to believe the scandalised notices in some of the broadsheets. Michael Collins has provoked a major breach of the peace."
Mark Simpson
Independent on Sunday
"An often challenging polemic...one which poses some starkly necessary questions about class, identity and ethnicity."
Tristram Hunt
Times History Books of the Year
"There are some wonderfully vivid and at times moving passages......compelling...The Likes of Us appears at an apposite moment. For all involved, an acceptance that "white trash" are not neccessarily dustbin fodder can only be a good thing." David Kynaston
Financial Times
"Collins is good on the hypocrisy of the middle-class commentators for whom multiculturalism has been an abstract ideal rather than a day-to-day reality." Andrew Anthony, The Observer
"A brilliant book....refreshing, sharp and important."
Garry Bushell
The People
"Thoughtful and provocative, it should be read by any fool eager to dismiss whole swathes of society. "
GQ
"Almost half a century after Richard Hoggart published his pioneering insider's account of working-class culture, 'The Uses of Literacy', the number of books giving a realistic view of life on the other side of the great divide is still depressingly small. Better late than never, Mr. Hoggart has found an heir of sorts in Michael Collins, the author of a compelling new study, The Likes of Us."
Clive Davis
Washington Times
"Collins is a sort of poetic hooligan." Laurie Taylor, The Independent
".. powerfully felt and forcefully argued....Collins account is enlivened by the telling local detail......Collins lines up some high profile targets... and splatters them with well-deserved irony." (Book of the Week)
Tom Deveson
Times Educational Supplement
"Extraordinary. A vibrant, inclusive and compelling study."
I-D magazine
"Compelling reading, a story rich and full of incident as any you could hope to read." Southwark News
"[A] masterpiece....How this complex, brave and vital social group went so quickly from being portrayed by their betters and their wetters as the salt of the earth to the scum of the earth and how this view says far more about the thwarted desires and low prejudices of the other classes than it does the actual decline of the proletariat, are dealt with with staggering sass and style."
Julie Burchill
Times
"Fascinating, entertaining, personalized."
Time Out
"His is an important voice: he seeks to articulate something that has been pushed underground and needs to be opened for debate and disagreement."
Housing Today
"A breathtaking look at the white working classes.....The Likes of Us could spark a revolution."
Ladsmag
"Passionately-fought history."
Metro London
"Though hundreds of books about 'classic slums' have been published, The Likes of Us, is fresh and fascinating, because it is the story not of a 'class' but of individuals - all of them 'ordinary', but each one unique. Their hardships were as real as their pleasures, their loyalties as fierce as their opinions. You can never grow tired of that kind of history."
Jonathan Rose
The Daily Telegraph
"Exhilaratingly positive and empty of cynicism."
Austin Collings
Jack
"Collins' own memoir of his childhood is vividly written and genuinely interesting..." Melanie McGrath
Evening Standard
"What make his book "a wonderful read" is his evocation of the rich details of the milieu - from costermongers and preachers to gin palaces and children's funerals."
The Week
"Collins own family's history shows both adaptability and resilience, which Collins documents with an empathy and deftness of touch."
Times Literary Supplement
"Intriguing. It details the author's 200 year long relationship through his family, to the south-east London borough of Southwark."
Tribune
"Unsual and provocative...on the whole this is a measured, well-researched and deftly written book. And to the extent that it forces us to confront our "acceptable" prejudices, it is most welcome."
Nigel Farndale
Sunday Telegraph
"One of the strengths of the book is that it draws so well on many primary sources, stringing together a powerful narrative."
Scotland on Sunday
