This chapter will draw on data from my own ethnographic research (see also Chapters two and five) with regard to youth crime/prevention and policing in one east London borough, and the findings from a number of recent empirical research studies that explore the realities of urban youth violence in the UK away from the label of the street gang. In particular, I will be looking to revisit and further discuss the role and significance of ‘Road culture’ (see Gunter, 2008, 2010) in the lives of young people growing up in poor neighbourhoods. Drawing on the voices and direct experiences of young people, this chapter will demonstrate that contemporary Road-based subculture plays a largely positive and creative role in young people's lives.

Nevertheless, the chapter will also revisit and discuss the violent social worlds and hyper-masculine modes of behaviour associated with ‘life on Road’. Whereas the current policy, prevention and policing agenda on serious youth violence in the UK is focussed on gangs, the discussions by the young people themselves about ‘on Road’ culture (as have been the findings of a number of recent studies examining urban youth violence) demonstrate that while the threat of violence was everywhere, its cause was not necessarily gang related. Rather it was about territoriality and specifically the ‘code of the street’ (Anderson, 1999) whereby young males living in particular urban neighbourhoods can easily find themselves caught up in violent confrontations (or beefs) with their peers, and for a myriad of petty reasons usually linked to some kind of perceived ‘disrespecting’. Consequently, Road life survival is dependent on the adherence to a ‘street logic’, which demands that any young person caught up in beef is able to defend (back) themselves, or their friends, against the violent threats of others by any means necessary (Gunter, 2008).

Road life realities I: leisure and pleasure

In contrast to contemporary media-driven portrayals and discourses that criminalise and misinterpret the ‘urban music’- based Road subcultures of marginalised young people, my earlier research findings revealed that Road culture largely played a ‘seductive yet humdrum and functional role’. Indeed, as opposed to the ‘spectacular’, Road culture served as a means by which the young people ‘derive camaraderie, entertainment as well as a strong sense of identity’ (Gunter, 2010:93) and attachment to neighbourhood life.