Youth in the multi-cultural inner-city: Learning from experience
I learned as much of my sociology from experience as I did from books. Ethnography has always been my preferred method. I learned to write as much from home-made journalism, particularly for Chapeltown News and Big Flame, as I did from the great literature I’ve consumed since my early teens. So when it came to scraping a living as a writer/photographer in the 1990s I was bound to search out stories that interested me – shaped by my life in Chapeltown, Leeds – and to hawk my experiences around newspapers and magazines. I was lucky enough to find an occasional ear at the New Statesman. For a while, when it merged with New Society (a formative influence on me in the 1960s) it was called New Statesman and Society (NSS). In that period the magazine had an interest in social issues, and it took a few articles from me.
First, I am posting the writing I did for the NSS on the back of being ‘mugged’ on Chapeltown Road in 1993. I soon found out who’d led the gang of 14 year olds who demanded money off me on the midnight street. His story moved me. I wrote about it hours after the experience and I hope the emotion shows. A year of so later I ran into this boy again, and wrote about that. These articles weren’t commissioned; I wrote them and sent them in on spec. They paid me buttons but at least they paid.
Downloadable here – – –
A second story – ‘Riot or Protest?’ – takes my analysis of young people in the multi-cultural inner city in a slightly different direction. It is set in the neighbourhood of Leeds called Hyde Park in 1995. The argument comes out of the experiences I had in the so-called riots in Chapeltown in 1975 and 1981, which I’ve written about in a more academic style. I’ve attempted to shift the discourse from ‘riot’ to ‘violent urban protest’. The most important parts of this article are the record of what these young men said to me. The article hovers between ethnography and journalism. [Nick Davies writes interesting ethnographic journalism about the Hyde Park area of Leeds in Chapter 4 of Dark Heart – The shocking truth about hidden Britain (Vintage 1998).]
Downloadable here – – –
