The Living Museum: The Brixton We Grew Up In

As a child I witnessed what could only be described as the potty mouth of the society around me.

The streets had their own vocabulary, and children absorbed it without thinking.

Words and nicknames floated through ordinary conversation, repeated in playgrounds and on street corners simply because that was the language that surrounded us.

At that age we didn’t understand where those expressions came from or the weight some of them carried. Children repeat the world they hear long before they understand it.

Racial slurs and crude labels were woven into everyday speech in those days. They appeared in the names people casually gave to the shop on the corner, in the shorthand used to describe people, and in the chatter that drifted through pubs and living rooms.

Children repeated those things without intent. If you listened closely to kids, you could often hear their parents’ politics, their frustrations, their humour, even their prejudices echoing straight out in the playground.

But there was another side to it too, something that people often overlook.

Children might repeat the language of the adult world, yet when they actually played together most of those lines meant very little. Alliances in the playground were fluid.

One minute a group of children from different backgrounds were playing happily together, the next moment the same group might gang up on someone else for whatever difference stood out that day. Everyone had their turn at being the outsider. It was the crude pecking order of childhood rather than organised hatred.

The strange beauty of growing up in Brixton was that there were so many cultures around us that racism never really settled properly in the playground. There were too many backgrounds, too many families, too many different stories.

If someone tried to draw a simple line between “us” and “them,” it fell apart immediately because everyone was already mixed together.

Most of the racism we heard about came through the newspapers and the television. You would see Union Jack banners and the marches of the National Front on the news.

Reports spoke about trouble on places like Old Kent Road or around Vauxhall, with skinheads and demonstrations. That was the image people saw from outside. But it wasn’t the day-to-day reality of the streets we were growing up on.

On our street there really wasn’t much room for racism. You might find the odd bloke in the pub who fancied himself the local Alf Garnett, grumbling quietly over a pint on a Sunday, but it wasn’t something people wore with pride.

Most people understood that life in Brixton simply didn’t work that way.

What we had instead was a neighbourhood.

Parents on our street looked after all of us. If you came in soaked from the rain someone’s mum would dry you off with a towel and put food in your hands without a second thought. Coats and jumpers wandered from house to house. “

Are those Johnny’s gloves “Whose football boots are these?” Nobody worried too much about it. Things moved around because children moved around. The whole street functioned like one extended family.

The mothers of our friends took us into their homes, and those same friends were welcomed into ours. We ate at each other’s tables, played in each other’s front rooms, and grew up watched over by more than just our own parents.

The kids whose names were scribbled across our plaster casts when someone broke an arm were the same ones we played conkers with, the same ones we ran around the bomb sites with, the same ones we sat beside in classrooms drinking those little school milk bottles.

We shared Guy Fawkes bonfires, scraped knees, footballs in the street, and the same pavements. When you grow up like that it becomes very difficult for anyone later to convince you that the people beside you are somehow your enemy.

Faith was another part of that mixture. At school there were children from all sorts of religions and backgrounds. Some went to church on Sundays. Others went to the temple, or the Kingdom Hall. Their families took those traditions seriously.

Yet on Monday morning everyone was back together again in the same playground, getting on just fine.

And there was another quiet joy to all of it: food.

Back then the variety of food in the shops was nothing like it is today. Supermarkets weren’t full of ingredients from all over the world. So going to a friend’s house could be a little adventure.

One family might cook something you had never tasted before. Another house might smell completely different when you walked through the door. Sitting at someone else’s kitchen table was often the first time you encountered a new culture, not through a lesson or a speech, but through a plate of food.

Looking back now, that was the Brixton we knew.

Not the one that appeared in headlines or television reports, but the one we lived in every day. A place where cultures mixed naturally, where children crossed each other’s doorsteps without hesitation, where parents kept an eye on every kid in the street, and where friendships were formed long before anyone tried to divide us.

We didn’t inherit that community.

We built it together.