Fig.4

Brixton, in South London borough of Lambeth (Fig.4) is home to the largest concentration of people migrating from Africa and the Caribbean although it always had a large white population too. This locality provided the private rental reception area for Caribbean migrants till the 1950s to 1970s. After this period, we find a continuous history of disinvestment and the ghettoisation of the black British and Caribbean population. The area gradually shrank in size, and it became the battleground between the police and the black population. Over the following two decades, one by one, these old housing districts were knocked down and replaced by new enclosed estates, viz. Moorlands estate on Somerleyton Road. In the 1980s Brixton began to transform, in the words of one writer, "from a riot-torn battleground to a gentrified playground."

However, most noteworthy was the spatialization of this emerging Brixton, and especially, the emergence of a frontier as what became known as the "frontline" (Fig.5). Following riots between police and Afro-Caribbean youths in London through 1970s and 80s, a territorial line emerged in several neighborhoods. These frontlines, such as Railton Road in Brixton and as we will see later, the Broadway in Southall were simultaneously defenses against police incursions in the 1970s and at the same time strategic "beachheads" established by the police. They also became gentrification lines in 1980s. London Metropolitan Police launched their dimension of this frontline strategy in the early 1980s. Citing "the growth of multi-ethnic communities" which were responsible for producing a "deprived underclass," it anticipated "crime and disorder," and identified eleven "symbolic locations" in the city, including the frontlines, where special tactics would be required. For each location, "there was a contingency plan to enable the police to swiftly occupy the area and exert control."

Fig.5

In popular understanding, the term described the place where people met on the street to talk and relax. It was for the police, "a front line of confrontation by the black and the white." They also perceived this to be used to ‘dispose stolen property’, a ‘criminal area’. Similarly although everyone accepted that the frontline covered some part of Railton road, several different meanings of its precise boundary were offered. It did not mean the same for the old and the young, black and white, police and policed.

Gentrification became a major political strategy whereby some of London’s central boroughs, viz. Lambeth and Tower Hamlets, were widely alleged to have fostered the privatization of public housing in order to move Labour-voting council tenants out and Tory-voting yuppies in. The results were dramatically visible in 1990 local elections in England: "at times it looks as if London is being turned inside out, like a glove. In stead of Tory suburbs and a Labor inner city," suggests one commentator, "Tory voters are reclaiming the city center and driving the labor voters out to the fringes." Indeed this political reversal was so noticeable that one writer drubbed it the "London effect."