The worst thing about living in Lambeth...

And whilst on the general subject of the differing priorities of patrician and plebeians…

A few weeks ago there was a larger than usual spate of teenagers being shot to death by other teenagers in this part of London.

As is usual with this kind of flap, the media spent a week or two covering every subsequent gun related incident, fatal or not, in great detail; trying its best to give the impression that the situation was suddenly spinning out of control.




The police and politicians did their bit by announcing a series of bullshit initiatives that wouldn’t achieve anything other that to throw up a smokescreen until the newspapers got bored of the story and moved onto something else

Which is, of course, what happened

Needless to say, shootings and stabbings are still taking place but they are back to a more even spread and therefore not worth reporting nationally.

The same weekend that the spate of shootings was all over the media dozens, possibly hundreds, of yellow signs suddenly appeared, mushroom-like, all over Lambeth.

"Beware - Street robbers are targeting persons using MP3 players in this street" (Kennington Police Station in the background)

The signs are printed with stark warnings such as…

They want your pod. Beware

Attention. Beware thieves and pickpockets

Under which, in smaller lettering, are the strangely far from reassuring words…

Working for a Safer Lambeth / London

Anyway, I was in the process of photographing one of these signs at the bottom of my street - awestruck by the sheer fear-inducing perfection of this latest woefully ineffective and presumably quite expensive publicity campaign. I was standing there thinking that the only useful purpose the signs might serve is to distract people from the number of drug-related murders that had taken place recently…




A group of four, very white, very comfortably comfortable looking people walked past me. And as they passed I caught a fragment of their conversation

‘… the really difficult part about Jonathan having moved here is that it is so hard to find a really good fudge shop…’

WTF!?

Methinks Jonathan and his friends may be in for a surprise or two...

The solution to all of Inner London's ills?

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