Soon on TV📺
On Wednesday, a crew was on Church Path filming a man pretending to be homeless. I was irritated by this and then came up with an idea. Also, a social club for teenagers is opening in Queen's Park.
I’d like to pitch an idea for a TV programme. The provisional title is ‘Sort your path out’ because, as much as I enjoy watching Stacey Solomon’s BBC series where she helps families declutter their houses, I think that our public spaces need more attention than the content of our wardrobes, toy boxes and spice drawers.
I can already hear Stacey’s cheery voice announcing to BBC viewers :
“This week, we are in Harlesden where a walking and cycling path has been taken over by drug users, fly-tippers and film crews looking for grim locations. We have one week to turn this path into a welcoming space where the community can spend some quality time together rather than complain about the mess on their doorsteps.”
To transform Church Path from an antisocial behaviour hotspot into a community hive, Stacey and her team have their work cut out. They will need to convince BT to remove the phone box at the Church Road end of the path (tough job!), get rid of the chunky armchair that has become a snug place for drug users and cut down the greenery that is coming out of Brent Council’s Curzon Crescent Centre.
In all fairness, I should inform you, readers, that one section of the path has already been improved by the addition of a mural. The new piece of art was inspired by drawings from St Joseph’s Primary School on Goodson Road and installed this week by Bud Studio. So Stacey can live her stencils and pot paints at home, unless she wants to enhance the section of the path that borders onto Leopold Road…
More seriously, one of the reasons so many of us end up piling up stuff in our living rooms and bedrooms is not just because we have had trauma in our lives and are bombarded with marketing messages all day long.
I believe it’s also linked to the dire state of our environment. Litter, for example, is more than just an eyesore, as highlighted by a recent report published by Keep Britain Tidy. Going out of your house for no particular reason than getting some fresh air does require stamina when you have to slalom between fly-tipping and broken paving slabs.
If you add to that we don’t have access to welcoming, inclusive spaces in our neighbourhood, buying stuff in shopping malls (where there are plenty of free toilets, contrary to the high streets) or online can be an attractive distraction from the things we can’t fix right outside of our homes and further away.
Of course, shopping doesn’t solve anything. The rise of dopamine triggered by shopping binges is extremely very short-lived, costly and environmentally disastrous. Things do not make us happy, human connections do. On the subject, I highly recommend a TED Talk video of journalist Johan Harri about the causes of depression and anxiety - "If you're depressed or anxious, you're not weak and you're not crazy (…). You're a human being with unmet needs," Hari says.
My optimistic take is that an increasing number of people are becoming aware that we are not meant to live cut off from one another - or mainly interact with people via our phones - and they are trying to reclaim space or create space for community action. This week, I loved finding out about the way Jasmine Hoffman, who lives in Acton, complained about the ‘no ball games’ signs installed by her housing association, L&Q, to the housing ombudsman.
Closer to home, some parents have also taken matters into their own hands by creating a social club for teenagers. Located on Lonsdale Road in Queen’s Park, Moot is the brainchild of Paul Billingsley and Cheryl Calverley, long-time colleagues and parents of teenagers.
Concerned by the lack of safe and inspiring places for teenagers to hang out, they co-founded a space “to give every teenager somewhere to socialise in real life”. Membership is £80 per month - so it won’t be accessible to all young people in the area - but, as Paul and Cheryl explained to the I Paper, they didn’t much choice but “to operate as a sustainable commercial business” not to be reliant on government or charity funding.
I think that’s a brave initiative taken by two parents in a country where, sadly, youth clubs have become a rarity and loneliness hits record highs among Britain’s young people. As Netflix’s hard-hitting drama Adolescence is gripping parents in the UK (and across the globe), I expect to see more local initiatives to give children and teenagers access to more and better spaces. However, nothing fundamental will change unless the government bans smartphones from schools, bans social media for under 16s and more generally invests money in our children and young people.
The Story 📰
Journalist Mark Wilberforce, who grew up in Brent, wrote about being sent to Ghana by his mother in the 1990s after a British-Ghanaian teenager recently took his parents to the High Court in London for sending him to school in Ghana.
Mark wrote : “I had been excluded from two high schools in the London Borough of Brent, hanging out with the wrong crowd (becoming the wrong crowd) - and heading down a dangerous path. My closest friends at the time ended up in prison for armed robbery. Had I stayed in London, I would have almost certainly been convicted with them. But being sent to Ghana also felt like a prison sentence.”
It’s the best story I read in a long time and I highly recommend you reading it.