The Evolution of Upton Park

When I was young Upton Park was synonymous with villainy. It was from there that some of the worse gangsters, black marketeers, robbers came from. Billy Hill, supposedly ‘King of the Underworld’ recruited many of his henchman from the area. Their names were legend. ‘Woodbine’ Georgie Woods, Teddy Machin, ‘Porky’ Bennett, Jackie Reynolds, all names bandied about as the ultimate in villainy. They would congregate in the ‘Queens’ a pub they regarded a sort of headquarters, a place where deals were done and ‘meets’ made. But that was 40 years ago.

As Asians started to colonise the area, a shop here, a restaurant there, a few market stalls formerly run by Jewish and cockney costermongers, became Asian, many of the original inhabitants started to move to Wanstead, further East and then, if they were rich enough to Loughton and Chigwell or the poor to Basildon and Harlow. Slowly but inexorably like an unstoppable tide all the old shops went to be replaced by Indian or Pakistani establishments. One or two die hards like the local pie and mash shop hung on catering mainly for the marauding hordes of West Ham United football supporters.

I drove through Green street the other night. Necessarily a slow drive because the crowds were so great, a mass of people and brightly coloured shops, exotic smells and sights only the red buses a reminder that this was London.

Many of the old locals left behind, unable or unwilling to move resent the way the area has been ‘hi jacked’. They find it difficult to comprehend that a neighbourhood they were comfortable with, where they had spent their childhood and their formative years, where they knew everyone, when the market resounded with cockney banter, where they felt safe, unthreatened and could stay with family round them till they died had become so foreign, so alien, so frightening.

The Indians and Pakistanis that live there now have made it their space. They, no doubt, feel as comfortable happy and as ‘at home’ as the previous inhabitants. Who can blame them for making an area into an image of their former homeland.

But it seems to me that these changes take place with no sympathy felt by the world outside for the displaced. There is no obvious answer but surely it would have been better to have gone more slowly, more gradually with the mosque building, surely it would have been better to have insisted that the newcomers kept to the rules of our land, now indisputably their land, to allow everyone to adjust. The legislation up to recently and even now, as far as I know, has all been in favour of the incomers. They build without planning permission, additions to their houses, when they had their little ‘corner shops’ everyone was quick to point out that they fulfilled a need by opening ‘all hours’ conveniently omitting to state that when these corner shops were run by the originals councils were quick to prosecuite them whenever they opened beyond the council and Government stipulated times. The unfairness of it all is only now becoming apparent when these communities ride a cart and horse through every rule that governed us and our behaviour for so many years.

The world is so full of problems, so full of refugees that I sometimes imagine that the United Nations in private just throw their hands in the air and wonder what on earth to do next. I hope they don’t, I’m sure they don’t, but the world is such a daunting place that the example of Upton Park might seem trivial but I believe if governments are firm `and fair and everyone sees them to be fair, these problems can be, if not solved, alleviated thereby easing tensions and help all people and all races like each other a little better.