If you’re building community centres, then your community doesn’t have a centre.
A guy came in to the bakery the other day, to offer his services as a volunteer. He said that all these community centres in round here demonstrate the problem in the area; it has become a community without a heart, and maybe these centres are trying to revive it in the wrong way.
There’s a closed-down community centre up the road. It’s on the edge of the demolition zone, and it’s called The Breckfield Children and Young People Project. Since it closed, kids have used its windows for target practice, and thrown shoes at it. It seems like a lightening-rod for their anger and frustration.
Now, it may just be a sense of betrayal at its closing, but thinking about what that guy said about building community centres, I can’t help but think that there’s more to it than that. I think the kids saw another capital-C Community Centre as another insult. It said to them “your lifestyle isn’t acceptable. Stop living the way you do, and do something constructive in this improving centre. Stop fighting and doing graffiti, learn martial arts and get a qualification in media. Be better”. Don’t get me wrong. I think the people who start up and run the community centres have the best possible motives. I think they want to help these kids, and I think they offer brilliant activities to those who wish to partake. But.
Maybe if you’re building a community centre to crow-bar everyone into a manageable space, a manageable mindset, it’s because the heart of the community has withered away. Here it has been systematically killed in order to empty the demolition zone. What happens is that those who can go elsewhere, do. Those with happy home lives stay at home. Those with jobs go out. But the marginalised, they still need to hang out. They need to do their own thing. We all have a basic human right to express ourselves.
Just a couple of metres away from the Children’s Centre, someone has graffiti-ed “LIVERPOOL FC” in huge letters. That’s a global community’s centre. Nobody says “come for LFC, it’s improving.” Nobody drew up plans of LFC in for a grant application to foster community spirit in a blighted area. They’re not there to do yoga because the managers got a grant to pay a yoga teacher. They’re there because they love football. They are proud of who they are when they’re there, because it’s part of who they are. Whoever did that graffiti, I would guess a local kid, feels good about himself when he looks out over the demolition zone to LFC. LFC tells its supporters “you’ll never walk alone” – and I think they walk taller for knowing that.
