About 12 years ago, I was introducing myself to my new neighbours in the suburb of Pitsmoor, Sheffield. Pitsmoor then was broken sort of place, made up of condemned mid-20th century social housing projects and run-down Victorian terraces. My street housed a mix of dejected white locals like my neighbour, left behind by the death of Sheffield’s industries; a few students like me, finding a cheap place to live; and the immigrants, including the man in the flat downstairs from me, a pleasant Nigerian nurse who worked at the local hospital and played extraordinarily loud trance music between shifts. My new next-door neighbour looked me up and down, sized up the extent of my intrusion on his home, and said, “At least you want to make something of yourself. At least you’re not like them asylum seekers.”
In 2002, “asylum seekers” was a dirty word, something you hissed. It did not mean: people who have struggled and suffered and hoped that the UK at last would be a country that was kind to them. It meant: people who came to take something from us. Pitsmoor did not have much that you could imagine anyone wanting to take. The park over the road was scorched with circular campfire scars and littered with dog shit and condoms, the dusty corner shop did packets of dry goods and economy bottles of cider, and the pub down the hill was outed as a crack den in one of the tabloids. The local church held a playgroup, and only three children went. Pitsmoor then was dying. The people dying there had two major complaints, which they would share eagerly at bus stops: firstly that people they didn’t know and who didn’t look like them or talk like them were getting the houses that nobody else wanted, and secondly that when they went to the doctor’s surgery to have the maladies of their old age patched up, they were having to wait in line behind dozens of “them asylum seekers”.
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