Estates spawn death of hope

CAHAL MILMO visits the North Peckham Estate, where children have fun by killing

LONDON - Michael gripped his father's hand and struggled with his schoolbag as they made their way up a dank and littered stairwell, just a few hundred metres from the place where Damilola Taylor met his death.

"I never want to go home on my own," said the 9-year-old schoolboy. "The older boys are waiting - they call you names and they might even hurt you like they did to that other boy."

Damilola, sentenced to die alone by his hooded attackers, was living in an equally benighted place.

The North Peckham Estate - in fact five separate housing areas squeezed together into one sprawling mass of urban blight - is now in the process of being demolished.

Winston Miller, Michael's 37-year-old father who arrived in Peckham 11 years ago from Cameroon, surveyed the fire-blackened rubbish chute - a favourite target for arsonists - and the accompanying melted ceiling in the corridor leading to his cramped flat.

"If you keep an animal in bad conditions for long enough then it forgets to expect anything better. This for me is the story of these estates," he said.

"People are given no expectation here - they live surrounded by graffiti telling them to go home.

"Their children are allowed to get out of control and they then enjoy themselves by killing a little boy like my son with a broken bottle."

What Damilola thought of his new home when he arrived from Nigeria four months ago went with him to his lonely grave, but residents in this corner of south London, where inner-city regeneration sits uneasily with urban blight, painted a picture on his behalf.

It could not have been more grim.

After dark, they said, groups of older teenagers accompanied by children as young as 10 emerge into the courtyards and underground garages to amuse themselves.

Mostly they just hang around, laughing and smoking.

The empire of these roaming youths - who go under such pseudo gangland titles as the Peckham Boys and the Ghetto Boys - consists of little more than a concrete jungle.

Less than a minute away from the satellite television vans and radio cars that this week descended on the Gloucester Grove housing block where the Taylor family lives was a graveyard of gutted motorcars and festering rubbish bags.

In some North Peckham blocks, including St Braivel's Court where Damilola was trying to return on Tuesday after a computer class, almost no ground floor flat has its windows intact.

Racist graffiti, abandoned mattresses and flickering 40-watt bulbs in the corridors complete a crushing atmosphere of neglect.

Half of the homes are empty.

For Karen Davies, a mother of three who has lived in Peckham for 20 years, it was hardly surprising that a culture of barely repressed violence has emerged from such a ghetto.

"The death of this little boy was a tragedy waiting to happen. You see children as young as 12 carrying weapons ready for use - it is their idea of entertainment.

"But now I will not let my children outside after 4 pm. All I'm interested in is getting them inside after school and I won't let them out again until the morning."

With perverse irony, the spot where Damilola was attacked stands opposite some of the smart new housing that represents the brave new world of the Five Estates regeneration project.

- HERALD CORRESPONDENT