After Benefits Street, no wonder people on Immigration Street are camera-shy
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Version 0 of 1. Just ahead of last night’s Immigration Street on Channel 4, I held my breath hoping that Love Productions – who also brought us Benefits Street – would not do a hatchet job on the neighbourhood where I was brought up in the 1970s. The opening sequence made my heart sink: “Get out of this fucking area. Next time, gunshot,” a youth was heard shouting at camera crews. What was meant to be a documentary about immigrant families in Southampton’s Derby Road, telling us their experiences of moving to one the UK’s most ethnically diverse areas, turned into a documentary about a documentary – in which some locals, already angry about how they might be misrepresented, made the production company pack up and get out of the area. Naturally, the film crews captured some of this anger. But what was to have been a six-part series was reduced to a single episode. That footage will overshadow some of the more positive characters the programme told us about. Rafique, for instance, a larger-than-life British shopkeeper of Pakistani descent, who said his parents first arrived in Derby Road in the 1950s, couldn’t help crowing about the “work ethic” of immigrants. And Delroy, a Jamaican who cooked for his friends and neighbours every Wednesday, was probably around when my family lived in the area. Although a handful of people did agree to take part (despite being threatened with violence by people claiming to be locals) I can understand why many residents didn’t want the programme to be made. Love Productions, heavily criticised for making Benefits Street, seemed more even handed this time round, but the project was bound to be met with suspicion and anger. For years Southampton’s Derby Road area has been stigmatised as a crime-ridden dumping ground for immigrants. Since the 1950s, newly arrived families from the Indian subcontinent, the West Indies, Africa and, more recently, eastern European countries, have made it their home. A 10-minute walk from the city-centre, it is where you’ll find some of Southampton’s cheapest rooms to rent. Although the police consider it a low-crime area, locals know that when the media spotlight falls on their scrappy bit of town it’s usually because someone is doing a story about drugs, prostitution or violent crime. To that list you can now add immigration. My Indian-born parents moved to the area in 1970. Living in Northumberland Road, which runs parallel to Derby Road, I recall the men in the households around us were working in low-paid jobs, either in factories or in the docks. Their earnings were spent by their families in local grocery shops, halal butchers and sari shops. Anything left over was sent back to relatives in their home countries. There were one or two white families on our road, and on Derby Road I remember a sweetshop being run by one. My family’s experiences of living in the Derby Road area were mainly positive. It was when we ventured out into the city that we felt vulnerable, especially to racism – either through abuse in the street, by people calling me or my sister “darkies”, or from the more subtle types of discrimination that my parents faced in the workplace. I’d never say Southampton was a hideously racist place, but I grew up feeling that the majority-white population seemed quite content that most of its black and Asian people were tucked away in one corner of the city – or in “the jungle”, as they called it (a term later reclaimed by Derby Road locals). Being a poorer area, Derby Road had its problems. Drugs weren’t that difficult to get hold of; sailors on shore leave meant that the many brothels did a brisk trade; and illegal drinking dens, or shebeens, opened as quickly as others were shut down. That some of the illegal activity in the area was organised by immigrant gangs gave people outside the area a negative view of the city’s ethnic-minority population. Immigration Street did acknowledge that Derby Road’s families had helped drive out the sex trade in the late 1980s. And things have improved since. But the locals certainly don’t want a repeat of last year’s Benefits Street, which demonised a whole community. The impact of last night’s screening remains to be seen. The programme makers will probably say they were prevented from giving a voice to Derby Road residents. But ask the residents, and they’ll tell you they don’t know if they can really trust anyone to accurately tell their story. |