Won't you be my neighbour?

Before arriving in the UK this time around, I knew very little of South London. This Summer, when the College informed me I would be living in a complex of dorms (British: Halls of Residence) in Camberwell, a neighborhood in the the borough of Southwark in South London, it meant little to me. Wikipedia and googlemaps quickly informed me that, no there is no tube station nearby. Ok, buses it is then, and only a short 30 minute journey to central London and my academic department. This all seemed well and good enough to me, sitting soundly in the basement of AU library in Washington at the time, clearly working hard.

By the time my flight had touched down at Heathrow and I had found my way out of the maze that is that ridiculous airport, I was a little tightly wound. As in, really tightly wound. First, I hate to fly, and view it as nothing short of a miracle everytime I complete a trip without the plane breaking apart and scattering my tattered remains over the North Altantic. Second, I had over 110 lbs. of luggage to schlep behind me, split between two large suitcases and my backpacking-style backpack. In any case, I knew I had to make my way by tube to Waterloo, where the College said I should the get a black cab to the halls. The guy on the train (that kept mysteriously stopping because of pulled emergency alarms, while no emergency was ever found) with the bandana over his face barking crazily into a cell phone didn't really make me any more comfortable. When I finally got to Waterloo I had already had to change lines which included my schlepping said luggage up and down two flights of stairs because the elevators were mysteriously malfunctioning. When the cab driver said "Where?" and quizzically consulted a map when I gave him the address of the halls, I was not encouraged. By the time we finally found the residence halls, he informed me that he wasn't used to making trips "this far out" even though I am a mere 2 miles from the river Thames and central London. Hm.

Camberwell is an area that seems alright to me, really. It is situated in a part of London with large communities of immigrants, mostly African and Carribean, but also a good dose of Polish and others thrown in. There are plenty of places along the main shopping street to get my hair braided and cornrowed, in both Ghanaian and Caribbean styles one salon window proudly proclaims, as well as pick up cheap ethnic eats. This translates to a lot of fried chicken, Jamaican patties (like empanadas), kebabs, fish and chips, and really just about anything fried that you could want. Mostly, though, lots of fried chicken. This makes me feel at home, reminding me especially of DC but also New Jersey as well: I like fried chicken. The area seems fairly safe to me, I have often come home by bus late at night and walked the 10 minutes from the stop to the halls without really seeing anyone, or else seeing only other people making their way home at that hour, not threatening or shady looking at all.

Apparently, I am wrong. I've had comments from a number of British people, referencing shankings and exhorting me to be careful, because South London is a rough place! A pair of English people at a bus stop just last night struck up a conversation with me, after the three of us had guided two tourists to the correct bus stop to get them where they wanted to go. The two had said, "Poor Americans, don't know where they're going and too cheap to pay for a cab!" I rounded on them, proclaiming that 1. Those people were not Americans, as I could tell by the accent. (The Brits quickly agreed they were probably "Euro Trash"), and 2. there isn't anything wrong with being American anyway. They also quickly agreed to this, and started up a jovial exchange, no doubt greased by the great British equaliser: Alcohol. When they found out where I lived the man asked, jokingly, "Oh, so you haven't been shot, yet?" I said no, and asked where they were going. Pimlico, which is a much fancier area, and the two lamented that they can't get any decent fried food in their area to snack on after a night out. After a few more jokes about my having to take the "Penge" bus (Penge being the final stop, with the automatedly cheerful British female voice announcing at every stop that this is the "One Seven Six, to, PENGE" with an especially sing-songy emphasis on the Penge), they were off, and so was I. Another safe uneventful trip home, this time at nearly 3am, and not a shanker or shooter in sight.

I wonder why the neighborhood gets such a bad rap, seeing as I've looked up the crime statistics and it is in the fairly average middle-range for London. I think I might, as a foreigner, be missing some crucial natural insight. I'm not sure if it is a matter of simple racism, given the "darkness" of the area, which might lead white British people to think of it as especially "dodgy." Maybe thats a very American assumption to make (though I don't for a second think that people here are any less racist than those back home), but whether the association between violence and race is as strident in the British psyche as in the American, I don't know. The tabloid press here seems to have a new story everyday about a violent, gory, and totally random stabbing in some part of London. These seem to inevitably be put down to "Chavs," a category of people I would say is roughly equivalent to the American "white trash" idea, but with a very specific fashion sense and overall demeanor. Think of a Staten Island guido, but paler, and with a giant sparklingly white baseball cap and equally blindingly white sneakers. With a knife. And they will stab you if they don't know you, or you look at one of them, or breathe. This, I think, is probably the tabloids playing into classism, regional biases, the urban/suburban/rural divide, and god knows what else. Chavs, though, are the default people everyone loves to hate and blame for most of society's ills, in addition to immigrants, especially brown ones. Though, while not absent by any means, they don't seem especially conspicuous in my neighborhood, and I don't know whether or not they are the source of other Londoners' knee-jerk reactions against South London.

My question is, whom shall I fear? Not knowing how it works here, who am I "supposed" to be afraid of when walking home late at night? Should I shrink in fear from the white guy with the slouchy jeans? Should I cower from the Kenyan? What about the guy with the beard and cap, who I can only describe, vaguely, as perhaps Arab, or Persian, or some other brown group of people who happen to be Muslim?

Or maybe, really, I'm lucky, because all my culturally built-in categories of who to fear (in DC, you know who not to mess with, whether this "knowing" is right or wrong) don't really apply here. So I can fear everyone, or fear no one. I choose to do the latter, yet being street smart, while not blindly suspecting every person walking down the street after dark of being a brazen shanker.

Welcome (English), Fàilte (Scottish Gaelic), Croeso (Welsh), and Y'alright (Londonish)!

Hello, all. This will be my very stereotypical study abroad blog. In it, you will get to hear thrilling tales and theoretically amusing musings on my life as a graduate student in London, one of the great world capitals. Some of it will be relatively specific to my life, such as what it's like to be a graduate student in one of the constituent institutions of the University of London (henceforth, the College, to avoid defamation). I will avoid overly personal rantings, and keep it somewhat informative, taking a pompously scholarly view of the life of a foreigner in modern Britain. I hope my anecdotes will first of all entertain you and make you laugh, and just maybe get you thinking about things you took for granted. Or, you might click once and never return again, but I hope that isn't the case.