I've met Stephen Lawrence's mother Doreen on two brief occasions, neither of which she will remember I'm quite sure. I will always remember them, though. Both were in recent years and therefore long after Stephen's murder by a racist gang, for which two of its members were at long last convicted this week. Like everyone who meets Doreen, I was deeply impressed by her calm yet determined manner. I also experienced a sort of social helplessness, which arose from knowing that nothing I could say would lessen her enduring grief one bit.
Maybe the Old Bailey verdict will give her at least some sort of release from her suffering. Meanwhile, the legacy of the crime for London and Britain as a whole has been widely debated. One of the best contributions has come from Darryl Chamberlain who writes the 853 blog and grew up in south-east London, where the murder was committed. Here's an excerpt:
The case has cast a long, long shadow. Stephen was in the year below me in our shared sixth form. Our paths only crossed briefly, although a number of my friends knew him. I never heard a bad word of him. A few of them are planning to meet up on Wednesday and have a quiet drink in his memory, taking a break from the careers and families that Stephen never lived long enough to enjoy himself.
But events in Eltham and elsewhere of the early 1990s certainly shaped my view of the world, and I'm sure I'm not the only one...Nearly two decades later, how much has changed?
It's worth remembering that it was the community in Eltham who gave up the names of [Gary] Dobson and [David] Norris in the first place. It was the local Metropolitan Police who decided that the death of a black man wasn't worth investigating properly, not the people of Eltham. Yet SE9 remains a soft target for those who seek to stir and divide people.
Be sure to read the whole piece.
The Guardian on London
Full coverage of the Lawrence verdict and its aftermath
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London blogosphere
From An Accidental Londoner:
And so I came to live in Holloway. Well, actually in a sort of grey, no-man's land between Holloway and Tufnell Park, but as I am safely within easy reach of Her Majesty's Prison Holloway let's call it Holloway. My street is the sort of street on which people wash cars at weekends. (No word of a lie, someone was even sponging away to a radio blasting Car Wash by Rose Royce last week, which made me smile.) Neighbours clutching newspapers and shopping lean on railings to chat about local goings on, while their dogs do their own catching up, sniffing and tail-wagging. The church at the end of the road hosts a decorous tea dance one day and an extravagant Ethiopian wedding the next.
Now read on.
Coming up
It's that joyful time when London Assembly politicians argue and complain about the next financial year's Greater London Authority group budget. By the time you read this an impressive group of leaders of the "GLA family" will have been quizzed about the figures by the relevant committee (a webcast of the meeting should be available via here). On Tuesday, they'll reconvene to probe Boris Johnson himself about them. Mayoral election fever will be in the air. Happy New Year...
