A five-year-old boy in a ripped coat and dirty trousers hammered
on the front door of his council estate flat at 11pm last
Wednesday. 'Come on, you smackheads,' he shouted to his parents
inside. 'I know what you're doing.' By the boy's feet sat a
plastic bag with bread and milk. The only shop open at that time
is on the opposite side of a busy road, a 15-minute walk away.
According to neighbours, it is a journey the child regularly
makes on his own.
'Unless someone rescues that little lad and gives him a second chance, he's doomed,' said Dawn, who has lived on the Fitton Hill housing estate in Oldham for 17 years. She is too scared of her neighbours to give her full name. On an estate where deprivation and violence are commonplace, the boy's bleak, hopeless life is the norm and, if he takes his ambitions from those around him, his life chances are near to zero. In a few years he could seek to emulate Jack Johnson, a 12-year-old local boy recently arrested for the fifty-fifth time. He has already been given up for lost by his mother, his school and the local council. Jack in turn has little to model his life on except the family living around the corner, three of whose four children are heroin addicts including the youngest, who had an abortion two years ago when she was 11. The only child in this family not using heroin is a 16-year-old girl who had a child last year with a local lad. The baby has never seen its father: he was arrested for drug dealing before his son's birth.
Two weeks ago, the local newsagent was robbed by a 14-year-old boy high on drugs, wielding a butcher's knife and a plank of wood spiked with nails. The local church has barricaded its windows and surrounded itself with razor wire. Looming at the heart of the estate is the residents' apex of fear: are blocks of flats where bloodied tissues lie in pools of urine and tinfoil stained with crack drifts around the stairwell like autumn leaves.
The lives of Jack Johnson and his ilk are far from unusual: there are thousands of people across Britain eking out lives similarly marked by violence, educational underachievement, unemployment, sickness and disease. At the heart of almost every thriving city in Britain lies a second city, hidden from visitors' eyes, where, as Dawn sadly says of Fitton Hill: 'Decent, proud and law-abiding residents are kept prisoners in their own homes through fear of the gangs that rule the streets.'
There are around six million people living on council estates in Britain, many in properties that are rundown, isolated and abandoned. The Government's £12.5 billion flurry of initiatives promising a joined-up approach to communities, crime and criminal justice has produced a mish-mash of projects that have proved difficult to deliver on such barren ground. More police officers, community officers and a ban on handguns have made no dent in the growing level of violence in deprived urban areas. Street robbery and gun crime has risen, while Fitton Hill residents say they have yet to see the benefits of the much-vaunted Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Asbos).
The picture in Oldham is grim but by no means unusual. 'There's a new social class now that's growing up from underneath all the others,' said resident June smith, 'It's the underclass. They're today's teenagers and they have no future.' 'You can't regenerate a community by ripping out its heart,' 'Communities take generations to build up and the council has destroyed ours by knocking bits down, selling bits off and leaving the rest to rot.'
'Unless someone rescues that little lad and gives him a second chance, he's doomed,' said Dawn, who has lived on the Fitton Hill housing estate in Oldham for 17 years. She is too scared of her neighbours to give her full name. On an estate where deprivation and violence are commonplace, the boy's bleak, hopeless life is the norm and, if he takes his ambitions from those around him, his life chances are near to zero. In a few years he could seek to emulate Jack Johnson, a 12-year-old local boy recently arrested for the fifty-fifth time. He has already been given up for lost by his mother, his school and the local council. Jack in turn has little to model his life on except the family living around the corner, three of whose four children are heroin addicts including the youngest, who had an abortion two years ago when she was 11. The only child in this family not using heroin is a 16-year-old girl who had a child last year with a local lad. The baby has never seen its father: he was arrested for drug dealing before his son's birth.
Two weeks ago, the local newsagent was robbed by a 14-year-old boy high on drugs, wielding a butcher's knife and a plank of wood spiked with nails. The local church has barricaded its windows and surrounded itself with razor wire. Looming at the heart of the estate is the residents' apex of fear: are blocks of flats where bloodied tissues lie in pools of urine and tinfoil stained with crack drifts around the stairwell like autumn leaves.
The lives of Jack Johnson and his ilk are far from unusual: there are thousands of people across Britain eking out lives similarly marked by violence, educational underachievement, unemployment, sickness and disease. At the heart of almost every thriving city in Britain lies a second city, hidden from visitors' eyes, where, as Dawn sadly says of Fitton Hill: 'Decent, proud and law-abiding residents are kept prisoners in their own homes through fear of the gangs that rule the streets.'
There are around six million people living on council estates in Britain, many in properties that are rundown, isolated and abandoned. The Government's £12.5 billion flurry of initiatives promising a joined-up approach to communities, crime and criminal justice has produced a mish-mash of projects that have proved difficult to deliver on such barren ground. More police officers, community officers and a ban on handguns have made no dent in the growing level of violence in deprived urban areas. Street robbery and gun crime has risen, while Fitton Hill residents say they have yet to see the benefits of the much-vaunted Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Asbos).
The picture in Oldham is grim but by no means unusual. 'There's a new social class now that's growing up from underneath all the others,' said resident June smith, 'It's the underclass. They're today's teenagers and they have no future.' 'You can't regenerate a community by ripping out its heart,' 'Communities take generations to build up and the council has destroyed ours by knocking bits down, selling bits off and leaving the rest to rot.'
Fitton Hill