Wish You Weren’t Here: Postcards from the edge of London in the age of Brexit AndyMacaskill Journotopia SpecialReports
Postcards from the Edge of London in the Age of BrexitPostcards from the Edge of London in the Age of Brexit
During Ford’s heyday in Dagenham, globalisation meant jobs. Today, on the neglected fringes of a city that has been transformed by borderless wealth, globalisation means immigrants. For the past 15 years, new arrivals from the European Union and beyond have poured into the once-predominantly white British community, which has been whipsawed by one of the fastest demographic shifts this country has ever seen.
Kilinc fled Istanbul 20 years ago after his girlfriend left him. “She broke my heart,” he says. “I was really, really depressed. But when I was far from her, I felt better.” In London, he worked at his sister’s kebab shop, met and married another Turkish immigrant, and got British citizenship. Kilinc says immigration has been bad for business: “The foreign people coming here are not eating this kind of food anymore.” Brexit could make things worse. The price of food imported from continental Europe might go up. The Lithuanians and Romanians he depends upon as waiting staff might go home.
For the last 33 years, she’s arranged thousands of funerals, sometimes for several generations of the same families. Now 75, she still lives in an apartment above the shop. “I’m a bit of a fixture,” she says. Her desk is crowded with thank-you cards sent by grateful customers. “Some people say I’m an angel,” she says. “Well, me wings must have bloody fell off. I’m just a person that cares.”
Dagenham was meant to be a working-class paradise. In 1921, on what was then farmland, work began on the Becontree Estate, the largest public housing development in the world. It provided 26,000 houses with indoor toilets and neat gardens, luxuries to families displaced by postwar slum clearances in London’s East End.
Afterward, he says, the world will change. Dagenham will change. People won’t die in their 50s or 60s; they’ll live for hundreds of years. Pain and suffering will vanish. Satan will be bound, along with one of his masterworks: the European Union. Ken Brown, 63, runs the club, which was founded in 1934 for Irish workers who emigrated to work at Ford Dagenham. The bar has flat-screen televisions showing football and boxing, a pool table and a small stage at one end. The smell of bleach lingers.
Brown’s son drives a black cab, which have been a traditional sight in London for more than a century. Cabbies famously memorise its streets for a test called the Knowledge. They’re now being undercut by Uber, many of whose drivers are nonwhite and immigrants – and rely on GPS. People who live in Barking and Dagenham die sooner. The healthy life expectancy of men is 58.2, or five years less than the London average. With women it’s 60.7, or nearly four years less than the London average.“If you lived here, wouldn’t you want to get out?”Inside a community center built almost a century ago by two peace activists, boxers form a circle and introduce themselves.“I’m Reece from Nigeria.
“My mum always told me I can do better things than Dagenham,” he says. “My mum said, ‘You have the potential to go somewhere.’ So that is what I took as my drive to get somewhere, and I am hopefully making it. Actually, not hopefully, ILee describes Dagenham as a place where people look for good jobs and can’t find them, but where it’s easy for teenagers to earn 2,000 pounds a week moving drugs around for gangs.
Online reviews from The Bull’s days as a pub are unflattering . Osunbor spent a small fortune refurbishing it. “It was a disaster area, inside and outside,” she says. Some customers complain to Osunbor, 59, that Britain has become a more hostile place since the Brexit vote. She also thinks racial tensions are rising. That makes her worry for her six children, four of them British-born, who she says have little interest in Nigeria.
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