Focusing on primary school children and leaving the olders to police enforcement

This chapter outlines the support offered by residents and professionals as 13 and others were in their element. Initially, the chapter explores how the residents’ tenacity to ensure they had control of the newly reopened Centenary Hall helped give them the space to develop their own activities to support young people. This allowed Dorothy to impart her experience and care to a new group of parents, who are still active today.

Yet the account will consider how Dorothy’s decision to focus on 6- to 11-year-olds left Ashley and Eli’s group with very little informal support and guardianship. Instead, attempts to deal with this age group came through the ‘community-led’ Operation Shield, a joint police and council initiative aimed at presenting ‘gang affiliated’ young people the option of engaging in local support or face additional police enforcement. The account questions the influence of this ‘community involvement’ and whether the operation offered the support the young people needed.

The chapter finishes by discussing how even when local trusted individuals did engage with young people, their actions were isolated, amounting to advising specific young people and not enough to change the prevailing street culture.

Residents standing up for themselves

Although the local authority did not trust residents to run critical services, they did want their involvement as long as it conformed to a particular professional structure (Pestoff and Brandsen, 2019; Andreassen et al, 2014; Fledderus et al, 2015). Within this space, it was apparent that those operating within the rules of the professional field had greater access to economic and political capital (Alexander, 2021b). Although the residents’ committee initially rejected this field, some soon understood its dominating character (Bourdieu, 2002) and started to see its value. The residents’ transition from solely operating in an informal way to utilizing a professional ethos is most clearly seen in their struggles to gain the right to manage Centenary Hall.

In 2010, the council agreed to invest £170,000 of Section 105 money into the hall, and, initially, the residents were promised a ten-year lease on the building.