First of all sarah, good luck with your project its a big question and bound to raise a cascading set of issues if examined right : and as long as its not some form of council sponsored propaganda, paid for to make us all happier with the reality of multicultural urban london, ie the bad here should really be on equal footing with the good, to be honest I think probably only the english find finsbury park troubling, as the arrivals past or present probably have no idea or a false perception of how english community could/should be, and are probably reasonably happy with finsbury park as they find it, as often they stick to their own “communitys” which is what works for them. Few truly work at integration and make the multicultural “community” work its shady definition.
Re community in finsbury park ?
In my opinion the word “community” is one of the most tarted out, agendered, and debased words in britain, whose sense has been ripped to peices and re-invented for political and multicultural agendas over the years, and would therefore would make a marvellous subject for a play ! if examined right :)
I’m thinking Samuel Beckett here, not an smily token ethnicity engineered youth project, though in Finsbury Park it probably wouldn’t representatively be so token.
I as a british person feel were not really allowed our sense of community to be expressed in London culture, for fear of cultural ostricisation, and being unfairly branded some kind of racist, this is what multicultural propaganda has achieved in the last 40 years for english people in London, only the rich are allowed their sense of english community, by playing from the safety of their, in my castle mentality, with other people who through equal wealth or opportunity have distanced themselves from the possible negative effects of culture and society, violence, crime, a dispiriting environment etc by living in better neighbourhood’s, obsessed with the residents minutiae of their rich ghetto’s, sending their kids to better schools etc (strangely in london these dividing lines can be right next to each other), and the recent arrivals themselves who make up FPK are no doubt aware of and desperate to quickly shift to middle class’dom and emulate such higher class groups in their mask of “community” dance, which is most often just another representation of money itself, truly only the poor have to put up with community or may ever possibly be affected by it in a negative personal way that would warrant its examination, the rich or segregative coagulated communitys interaction with community, tends to be limited to their interests, planning permission etc.
when we talk of “community” in major urban centres like london, the term is generally used to benefit & represent recently arrived groups of foreign immigrants in the segregative version of multiculturalism britain seems to have gone for, finsbury park being probably one of the epi-centres of this multicultural experiment. I think one of the dichotomy’s here is that since “community” often is used to represent these seperate diverse groups, it does by its use, in reality now represent the fracturement of british community ie community now represents the divisions more than the unity it might previously have represented.
The problem with it representing divisions, is that previously that division mean’t class possibly x a small number of religious divisions, now it means class x religion multiplied x ethnicity x culture … its surprising anybody gets on at all really ? but in london that getting on, is achieved by a thorough burying, of base english communal cultural identity in favour of a thousand other cultural religious ethnic groups, and a strong infected spreading to all groups, of the culture of selfishness and time poverty, due to work life imbalance at one end, and entertainment and consumerism at the other, this occupy’s everyones lives so thoroughly as to leave them no time to consider anything as vague as community, politics and what state britain is in ? such things rarely dawn on the imagination, as long as we are kept this way by modern culture, we shall never change anything by voting in UK politics, which is now as anemic as it comes, by its castration at the hands of the uber international fiction which is that bureaucratic mothership called europe.
Community as a word is inextricably linked with the word culture in my imagination, because how can you tell one community from another except by there cultural differences, their customs their ways etc. Sadly british cultural identity seems rarely in urban multicultural britain on the same footing as foreign cultures or activity’s are, or included when the word “community” is used. Such has been the love our culture has had for all things foriegn, mainly engendered by an endless swathe of power and class down bureaucratical propaganda, over the last 40 years which has almost totally dissolved and succesfully psychologically made illegal, british cultural identity as a concept, in urban Modern britain.
The population and class group, who mainly dealt with the consequences of immigration of these foreign community’s, were not the same class and corporate power group who implemented the policys in favour of it and agenda behind it, and this was a crime that goes unrecognised. Remember referenda in which such major decisions have been made were never put to the british public at large, the only democracy we got, was to vote, a different set of idiots into power, every four years. The last expansion of democracy int his country was probably the women gaining the vote in 1907, for some reason since then, its been deemed that democracy in britain was somehow fit for purpose. Which having lived through the last 4 decades and seen whats been going on, I obviously conclude the opposite.
Sometimes I feel like I woke up in my village and all the villagers had been replaced with people from some other tribe ? obviously this is an illusion, on the basis that I only arrived in finsbury park from the South Coast 12 or so years ago myself and it was pretty much the same mix then as now, except now for the loss of some irish and some additional africans, but in reality its a stifling disenfranchising place if you like english culture or have been propagandised through your growing years to appreciate english culture being around you and enclosing you in the community sense, there is little englishness here from an easily visible, audible or behaviourial perspective, to draw cultural psychological succour from.
And that communal emphasis or encouragement which is shown seems endlessly bent to mean celebrating the foreign, as though magically the native is somehow automatically catered for culturally ? whereas in reality FPK is a non culture, much like modern london where really its money that makes communitys and divides them from each other, opportunitys like wise, and is a terribly segregated place, in which people are too busy fending their own interests, to ever truly develop a wider community (perhaps not as bad as some other cultures but i only measure britain by a recollection of its recent past). This is mirrored by cultural ethinic and religious breakdown of londons schools, and how foreign bodys of people tend to cluster voluntarily together, in this supposed multicultural society.
And for the english and foreigners who desire it who find FPK too fractured, disjointed and irregular, there is the temptation to leave to a more english environment than FPK, if only to feel relaxed generally, hence why so many rich people ultimately move away from London as this “community” is not that attractive a long term prospect, certainly I see every 3 or 4 years a new generation of young renting work types with funny t-shirts arrive and depart the fancier pubs Dairy, Larrick etc and pay their rents to the landlord classes of which there are now too many, hence the impossibility of property prices for young or single people in London.
As once I myself arrived but did not depart, the question is who remains ? is this who your supposed community is ? well the “White Lion & Mortimer” will tell you one kind of community group who remain, the mixed and various poor to middle class, mixed with oaps and aging drunks most who could claim to have been the core community of the PUB for a long time, once propagandised to be the epicentre of working class communitys, though allot of the recent arrivals do not consider the PUB as a community centre, for them it is church, as is the case of the african gospel group who make such a racket. Perhaps Joanne who sits outside tescos ? shes seems a fixture of whom I know, perhaps the lady who tends a million pot plants, or are these characters too obvious because they stand out ? perhaps its the ones who dont get much attention ?
the question is how you handle it, certainly from my perspective I see no community, I just see a mess and not a happy one either (possibly a self projection but certainly I think verging on a real appraisal of whats actually occurring), thats maybe because im refusing to be forced into community meaning, lets play happy clappy with all the immigrants of London, mainly because im a bit of a curmudgeon, but also because the only way I can maintain any sense of english culture and sanity in finsbury park is not to embrace without measure, everything and everyone in the reality of FPK, but do bear in mind I love cultural difference, which is what made visiting Colombia such an interesting experience, because here was a place proud of its own culture and not too heavily internationalised or blanded away, what I dont like culturally is this new form of european trans-international wealth culture, in which people who have second homes abroad or here, generally have no loyalty to anywhere except themselves and where the opportunities are better, that certainly is not community in my opinion. The people who keep 2 or 3 passports at the ready etc.
Neither is multicultural britain, “community”… to most who are really in it, its a compromise we all deal with.
Truly this email could go on for about 20,000 words so id better stop. suffice to say I think that community in the Finsbury Park sense is a false term, its more a temporary dormitory for the upwardly mobile, or a prison for those failing to afford, getting out of it. Obviously the beneficial community aspect in my opinion always flows from small and unwarranted charitable kindness’s we do for each other, without needing the necessity of a reason.