Private Homes and Public Others: An Analysis of Talk About Crime in Suburban South Manchester in The Mid-1990s

BRIT.J. CRIMINOL. VOL.35 NO.
2 SPRING 1995
PRIVATE HOMES AND PUBLIC OTHERS

An Analysis of Talk about Crime in Suburban South Manchester in the
Mid-1990s
IAN TAYLOR*
The paper presented here takes the form of a series of essentially personal, interpretative, and
analytical reflections on one particular suburb in South Manchester, where the author has been living
for the last three years. The organizing motive is to attempt a close and detailed reading—a 'thick
description', in Clifford Geertz's words (1983)—of the social character of this local suburb, its
landmarks and 'symbolic locations', the topics of conversation that occur among small gatherings of
residents (in the Post Office, the supermarket check-outs etc.) and the news stories that dominate the
local newspaper press, and then to offer out a 'hermeneutic1 account of the dominant themes and topics
so uncovered. The paper benefitsfrom conversations with the small number of friendly neighbours and
friends made in this area as well as from listening to the talk of two teenage daughters and their
friends. The paper is not the result of any systematic, formal survey work as such, although interviews
nave been carried out with local police, private security companies, local councillors, and crime
prevention volunteers.' Neither is the concern of this particular paper to impose a particular theory,
from somewhere in the existing literature, on these materials, or in some way to 'test3 thefindingsof
the several studies that have been completed by geographers, urban sociologists, or criminologists on
the quality of life in particular localities, on patterns of local crime or localfears (for example, of the
differential impact of the mass media in particular localities). We have referenced some connections
between our hermeneutic reading of Hale and existing literatures in footnotes, but the organizing
concern here is to try to capture and understand the detail of everyday life (including the significance of
the fear of crime) in a relatively affluent, but undeniably anxious, suburb in a major conurbation in
England half way through the 1990s where the author currently resides.
In much of the discussion of the 'fear of crime' in England, attention is firmly on the
inner city, on particular council estates or high-rise developments as the locations
which inspire most public anxiety and official concern. Over the years, many of these
areas (like inner-city Moss Side in Manchester or the council estates of Meadow Well in
Newcastle) have developed unenviable reputations as the homes of a criminal
underclass and also as 'no-go' areas for the population of the surrounding conurbation.
* Professor of Sociology, University of Salford, Greater Manchester.

I would like to acknowledge helpful comments made on earlier versions of this paper by Steve Edgell, Karen Evans,
Penny Frascr, Tim Hope, Ruth Jamieson, and Richard Sparks; the assistance of Superintendent Alan Hutching! of
Greater Manchester Police (Trafford Division) in the provision of beat statistics for Hale; and Superintendent Bill
Haven of Altrincham Sub-Divisional Police Headquarters and Mr Scamus Purcell of West Valley Security for the lime
given me in interviews.
1
The writing of this paper certainly arose, in part, from the much more widely framed investigation in which the
author has been engaged, with Karen Evans and Penny Fraser, into what we are calling "The Public Sense of Well-
being' in two North of England cities. This research did involve very considerable survey work and also a large number
of detailed focus group enquiries, including some discussion with many residents of the suburban residential areas of
South Manchester in general. The research was very generously supported between 1992 and 1994 by the Economic
and Social Research Council.
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IAN TAYLOR
They have taken on the character of what the American social geographer, Yi-Fu
Tuan, has called a 'landscape of fear', equivalent in force and effect to the fear which
was associated, for the respectable population, with the 'rookeries' of Victorian London
(Tuan 1979). A similar kind of aversion seems to have influenced the response of
respectable England in the middle years of this century to the areas which were referred
to, in that period, simply as 'the slums'.
In social commentaries of the mid-century, and in other literature (for example, in
magazines like Country Life or The Lady), the preferred alternative area of residence of
the respectable middle class in England—a refuge from the problems of the larger
urban area—was 'the suburb'. For some sections of the English middle class, especially
in the 1930s and 1940s, the idea of'the suburb' related to the modern, suburban, semi-
detached housing developments which were being built throughout the country in this
period. But in the aspirations or desires of the English middle class, these particular
suburban developments—a kind of lesser equivalent of the suburban explosion
occurring in the United States (discussed, among others, by David Reisman (1957))—
have probably never replaced those enclaves of Georgian or Victorian housing that
exist in each major English city as the ideal site for their 'home'. Apart from the
undoubted solidity and spaciousness of the houses themselves, these enclaves of
Victorian housing seem to function within the English conurbation—after the fashion
of some whole towns like Cheltenham or Bath—as conclusive measures of the gentility
and status of their residents, and perhaps they also proclaim the residents' elective
preference for the idea of what Patrick Wright has called 'living in an old country'
(Wright 1985). They locate their owners within the long history of'the nation'. In John
Betjeman's poetry in the 1950s, for example, areas like these (Broomhill in Sheffield
being one of his preferred examples) were the quintessential definition of Englishness,
resonating permanence and tradition, and thereby symbolizing the homeowner's taste
and social standing. Many of the Victorian areas of our cities, developing as they have
around a cluster of shops referred to as 'the village', have clearly wanted to encourage a
definition of themselves as a kind of semi-rural retreat from the vulgarity and effluence
of the industrial-commercial city around them.
There is no question that a key function of the Victorian suburb has always been one
of social segregation. The price of such housing was one guarantee of such social
exclusion, certainly of the working class and the underclass below it, but also, in the
first half of this century, of the commercial and industrial middle class ('new money')
itself. A particularly central role in the preservation of social cohesion and social peace
in these areas was played by the local constabulary, and in particular by the local
'bobby on the beat', with his antennae finely tuned to the intrusion into such areas of
'suspicious' characters who 'did not belong'. The proper social history and sociological
description of these areas (focusing also on the subtle roles played in respect of social
control and neighbourhood surveillance by the local shopkeeper, the publican, the
stationmaster at the railway station, and even the milkman and postman) has never
been written, but the cultural significance of this version of the English village suburb is
well understood in the detective novels of Agatha Christie, P. D.James, Ruth Rendell,
and many others—all of which is now being recycled in the mid-1990s in the nostalgia-
driven television viewing of the English middle class.
The 'village' of Hale in Cheshire is one ideal-typical example of this English
Victorian suburb. Located, to the stranger looking at a map, unambiguously within
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the massive sprawl of South Manchester, Hale is insistently identified by local residents
and in the local community newspapers as a part of the county of Cheshire. It is
decidedly not in Manchester. Some locals even insist on distinguishing Hale from the
'adjoining' borough of Altrincham, even though Altrincham is a Royal Borough with a
charter granted in the thirteenth century; Altrincham has a rather more mixed
population and is now organized around a middle-brow, pedestrianized shopping
precinct. Hale, by contrast, features, at one end of its 'village' a bowling green and a
stretch of expensive shops (a gentlemen's tailor, a traditional chemist, the post office,
newsagent, and two banks). At the other, there is a quintessential country-style railway
station, on the Stockport to Chester line, originally opened in 1862, as Bowdon (Peel
Causeway) Station on the Cheshire Midland Line—a Grade 2 listed building,
retaining its original canopy and also the original signal box, overlooking the swing
gates which cut across the main road through the village. In between, distributed along
the main 'high street', there is a delicatessen, a village bookstore, a 'proper' butcher (a
family shop working over a counter, 'been there for years'), a greengrocer's, a florist's,
'the Nails Studio', a wine bar, a retailer of Italian shoes, two (each) of hairdressers,
lingerie shops, and travel agents, as well as half-a-dozen estate agents, and also along
this street and beyond the railway station a number of expensive Italian, Chinese, and
Indian restaurants, and one French restaurant. At the corner of this main street and
Victoria Road, a location we discuss later in this paper, there is a branch of the
'Canadian Charcoal Pit' fast-food outlet and a total of three off-licences—all of which
seem to be doing well in the business of selling large amounts of alcohol for domestic
consumption. There are, in addition, a number of money machines for quick
withdrawal of hard cash as required. Not very far out from the centre of the village
there are a number of private schools (the only real competitive local industry in the
area), the Conservative Club, St Peter's Church (the parish church, built out of
Cheshire red brick, and consecrated in 1892), and two large public houses.
Other than the fact that the area has become, over the years, a preferred area of
residence for an extraordinary number of professional footballers playing for the two
Manchester clubs, Hale is not untypical of a very large number of Victorian suburban
areas in English cities as a whole, though, along with Bowdon, Bramhall, and
Wilmslow, it is one of the wealthier of the stretch of suburbs that extends across South
Manchester. With a population in the 1991 Census of 10,737, it is also significantly
whiter than many comparable areas: 95 per cent of all Hale residents in 1991 were
white, 2.9 per cent Indian/Pakistani or Bangladeshi, 1.5 per cent Chinese and only 0.2
per cent black (in Greater Manchester as a whole the figures were 94.1 per cent white,
3.6 per cent Indian/Pakistani and Pakistani/Bangladeshi, 1 per cent Chinese and 1.3
per cent black).2 87.7 per cent of all houses were owner-occupied, by comparison with
the figure of 64.2 per cent for the Greater Manchester area as a whole, whilst only 7.1
per cent of houses in Hale were rented from local authorities, compared to 16.9 per cent
of houses across Manchester. Unemployment in Hale as a whole, on official measures,
was 4.8 per cent, by comparison with the Greater Manchester figure of 11.3 per cent.
But perhaps the most telling statistic, in terms of identifying the wealth and the social
character of Hale vis-d-vis other ward areas, was the fact that fully 49.1 per cent of all
* The 1991 Census data reported here is taken from the Greater Manchester report Census 1991: District and Ward
Profile (Trqfford). Oldham: Greater Manchester Research/Association of Greater Manchester Authorities.
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households in Hale in 1991 had two or more cars—second only, in the Trafford
Borough, to neighbouring Bowdon. In Manchester as a whole, only 18.9 per cent of
households could make this claim.
Apart from the bowling green halfway down Ashley Road from the train station and
St Peter's Church, the key landmarks in Hale in 1993 are its shops (including the small
Safeway supermarket tucked in behind the bowling green) and its wine bars, off-
licences, and restaurants. The handbook published in 1987 by the Hale Civic Society,
Hale and Ashley: The Past 100 Years, carries photos of all these key landmarks at various
times over the last century. It also provides a wealth of minute detail as well,
particularly as to the ownership of particular shops (notably Weetman's, a long-
established ironmonger's, established by Mr Weetman in 1902 but actually run by the
Gibbons family since 1970). Among the cast of local hoteliers and shopkeepers
celebrated in the handbook, pride of place goes to David Ernest Hewes, who was
stationmaster at Hale from 1890 to 1920, living in the stationmaster's house next to the
station (which is now the consulting room for the local vet).
We are presented in this handbook with an account of a traditional English
Victorian suburb, developing over the 100 years from being a rural village into a sedate
residential neighbourhood for those of taste, all the while retaining an image of itself
constructed around the topography of an Agatha Christie village (post office, bank,
public*house, bowling green, and railway station), and the overwhelming presence of
what local residents would think of as 'nice', 'local' shops, ostensibly run by families
who have always lived in the village. But the reality is that Hale is not, in 1993, a small
community of rural souls, in which the bulk of the local residents all know each other,
bump into each other on the street, and know the shopkeepers, the postman, and the
stationmaster by name. There is one group of local residents who do seem to know each
other, after a fashion: a coterie of leisured bourgeois women who encounter each other
during shopping strolls through the village.3 For most Hale residents, however, so far
from being an intimate little village community, the place is lived in as a commuter
suburb, certainly built around all the landmarks celebrated by the local Civic Society,
but for all practical everyday purposes focused around the specific, utilitarian
consumer amenities catering essentially to privatized and individualistic consumption
(wine bars, the supermarket, restaurants, and off-licences).'* This contradiction is
between the daytime use of Hale—women (and some, fewer men) doing their shopping
in 'the village'—and Hale in the evening: adult men buying alcohol in the off-licences
to take home; young professionals of both sexes, sometimes as couples, patronizing
specific expensive restaurants and wine-bars; older and larger families visiting other,
3
According to the 1991 Census, Hale had one of the largest numbers of'economically inactive' women of all the
wards of Greater Manchester: 24.1 per cent of all female residents of the Hale ward area were inactive, compared to
21.4 per cent for all of Greater Manchester.
4
The privatization we will be describing in this paper has a particular social character: we are discussing the
condition of life in an affluent, English commuter suburb, dominated largely by a white, commercial middle class. We
take it that the kind of privatization we are discussing here operates in a different fashion to the privatization of life that
has been described by Sally Englc Merry in an ethnically-mixed, low to moderate income area in the United States,
which she calls 'Dover Square' (Merry 1981). The privatization discussed by Merry arises out of the close spatial
concentration, in public housing developments, of members of different ethnic groups and cultures in a situation of some
economic and social stress, magnified by the seduction of television. The privatization of Hale is much more a function
of the geographical concentration of highly-mobile 'possessive individualists', particularly of the private sector middle
class: the 'new middle class' whose insecure, competitive, and consumption-oriented 'inner life' (at least in the United
States) has been most trenchantly analysed by Barbara Ehrenreich (1989).
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less expensive restaurants; other citizens double-parking their cars and making rapid
use of the cash-machines; and, later in the evening, young people making noisy use of a
small number of'symbolic locations' in public space. This is a particular configuration
of public and private use of a suburban space, we would argue, that is quite different
from the use of that space in the mid-century (when use of the village more closely
approximated in reality the way it now lived only in the imagination), and a
configuration which, in Hale at least, appears to be in trouble.
One of the most obvious expressions of the disquiet affecting this particular South
Manchester village suburb is the prominence given to crime, and the fear of crime and
disorder, in the three local community newspapers, or news-sheets, which are delivered
every week to letterboxes throughout the area: the Hale and Hale Barnes Independent
(whose mast-head declares that it is delivered to 23,000 local homes), the Sale and
Altrincham Express and Advertiser (with a circulation of 55,000) and the Sale and Altrincham
Messenger, known locally simply as SAM (also claiming a circulation of 54,000 in Hale
and immediate area: 94 per cent of all households). Many homes in the area also
receive copies of the Manchester Metro News, a thick broadsheet averaging 64 pages, with
a massive amount of local commercial advertising and some 20 pages of personal 'want-
ads', produced in three editions targeted at the cities of Manchester and Stockport, and
the Borough of Trafford, within the Greater Manchester conurbation, and claiming a
total distribution (in July to December 1992) of 323,789 per edition.5 The news sections
of these four news-sheets consist almost entirely of news and photos about sports events
and social and professional gatherings in the local area, on the one hand, 6 and crime
stories, on the other,' and, in so doing, they provide a specific and predictable 'image of
the city' and of the local area in a sustained and repetitive fashion, week in and week
out.
The Park
Throughout 1992 and 1993, particular attention was being paid in these newspapers,
in their coverage of crime and disorder, to a small number of key sites, or symbolic
locations, scattered throughout the borough. In Hale itself, one of these key sites is a
small public park on the boundary between Hale and Altrincham, Stamford Park.8
The recent history of this local park bears comparison with a similar public facility in a
local neighbourhood in Chicago described by Wesley Skogan, in his influential study
(Skogan 1990). Skogan references the heartfelt concern of the residents of Sheffield,
Chicago, about a local park which had recently become identified as a location in
3
In October 1993, a fifth community newspaper, The Courier: Hale, AUrincham and District, owned by The Courier
Group of Newspapers in Aldcrley Edge, launched its first issue. Its masthead proclaimed that The Courier newspaper was
distributed free to 17,000 households in Hale, Altrincham, Hale Barns, and Bowdon. This new newspaper was
remarkable for the sheer volume of advertisements it carried of upmarket restaurants, clothing stores, garden centres
and other consumer outlets, and its avoidance of the crime features that were »o prominent in competing local papers.
6
In the case of die two Altrincham-bascd news-sheets, there is often competition, in terms of content, to carry stories
that feature the operation of the 11-plus examination governing entrance to the area's grammar schools. Selective
education is one of the most visible 'industries' in the Royal Borough of Altrincham and in the Conservative-controlled
Borough of Trafford as a whole.
7
The importance of the local press in the construction of local fears about crime was first identified by Bob Roshier in
1973, although his own study (involving the Newcastle Journal, a regional rather than local news-sheet) did not allow any
detailed and focused investigation of a specifically local process (Roshier 1973).
1
'Drugs Anger Flares', Sale and AUrincham Express, 21 January 1993.
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which public drinking was taking place, and the fears which this perception provoked
amongst residents of the neighbourhood. He then advances the general proposition
that:
. . . parks are places that no one controls; people you do not know come into the neighbourhood
to use them; youths drink and use drugs there; it is difficult to find legitimate reasons or the
means to push the undesirables out; you cannot protect or control your own kids there. In
disorderly neighbourhoods, parks are places you keep your kids out of. (Skogan 1990: 22)
By implication, for Skogan, the perceptions that exist locally, especially among parents,
of the safety of public parks for neighbourhood children, is a key index of the extent to
which that neighbourhood has become 'disorderly', and a measure, therefore, of the
decline of that neighbourhood—the extent to which it has lost die sense of order and
serenity which is the defining quality of the classic American suburb.9
The origin of the considerable local concern about Stamford Park (a concern that is
often recycled in discussions between parents of younger adolescents) in Hale appears
to have been a story which ran in at least three of the local news-sheets in the early
winter months of 1992—which claimed, initially, that the park had become a resort for
young men creating noise, particularly with a transistor radio played late at night in
the centre of the park, and disturbing die residents of the gentrified terraces which
surrounded the park. Pressed to take action about these nocturnal gatherings of young
men, the Altrincham Sub-divisional Police indicated, dirough the various local
consultative committees with which they were involved, first, that there was no
evidence of any offences having been committed, and, secondly, that the general
management of the local park was effectively the responsibility of the Borough Council
and not specifically a police responsibility.10 Some other local rumour in the meantime,
however, had it that the park had become a delivery or dropping-off point for
nationally networked teams of drug traffickers: a local crime prevention volunteer
relayed a story to me, heard elsewhere on several occasions, to the effect that a car 'with
a Wolverhampton registration number' is regularly to be found, parked in or near the
north west entrance to the park. Hard evidence about all such rumours is difficult to
come by: there seems little prima facie reason to believe that the children and young
people occasionally seen in the park are anything but local, and many of them are very
9
Skogan's discussion of the public park as a place of fear is not especially inquisitive theoretically. He does not try to
locate the public park on any scale of'fearful landscapes', after the example of Yi-Fu Tuan, the American human
geographer (Tuan 1979); and he does not even begin to investigate the gendered aspects of local anxieties about public
parks. The majority of the 'youth' who gather at parks like that in Sheffield, Chicago, allegedly to drink or take drugs,
are almost certainly male: certainly, the vajt majority of the young people who 'loiter' in and around parks in the North
of England are young men. The sub-text in the fears of parents, especially of young girU, and indeed the fear of many
girls and young women, about such parks is a fear of sexual attack by men. It may not be a coincidence that the reports
of local anxiety about Stamford Park in Hale occurred just one month after the appalling murder of Rachel Nickell on
Wimbledon Common, London, in December 1992—itself the subject of anguished coverage on national television and
in the national press. These murders occurred some time after the publication of Shapland and Vagg's (1988)
comparative anthropological study of reactions to crime in commuter villages and a town, but that study reports a very
similar set of concerns in all three locations to the physical and social significance of the local civic park to those which
are discussed in this paper and in Skogan (1990).
10
The police's argument about die management of public parks is, in part, an allusion to die traditional role of the
park-keeper, or 'parkie' in England, and to the established division of labour, well-understood in earlier post-war
periods, between local police and 'Parks Department' in respect of the management of good order in local parks and
related public provisions.
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local indeed, from nearby streets—in many cases the offspring, precisely, of'concerned'
local residents." It was by no means clear, in any case, that the public space in the park
was being used in anything other than the ways in which such public parks have been
used throughout the post-war period, and even earlier in the twentieth century—that
is, by young men 'hanging around', playing football into the late evening or listening to
music on the radio.12 Police sources in the Altrincham Sub-Division, who are in other
respects much concerned about youth crime, say there was no evidence of drug-use or
drug-trafficking in that particular locale within the neighbourhood and very little to
substantiate the stories about regular visitors to the park from Wolverhampton or any
other urban areas. The vast majority of arrests made by the Altrincham police across
the borough as a whole, are, indeed, of local people. The police response to the
campaign by some local residents to 'do something' about Stamford Park, however,
seemed to do little to alleviate anxiety during the autumn months of 1993, especially as
the winter nights lengthened. It may be important in understanding these develop-
ments to note that the interior of Stamford Park is invisible, even in the daylight,
because of a perimeter hedge some seven to eight feet in height surrounding two sides of
the park, which has the visual effect at night of a fortified, cavernous 'black hole',
unrelieved by any kind of artificial lighting. The presence of this dark space, with noise
emanating from its central core, will certainly not have reassured the residents of the
surrounding Georgian terraces, especially during the winter months, particularly on
the road opposite the perimeter hedges.
Anxieties about the park as a site of crime may be grounded, at some psychological
level, in deep-structural fears about the dark space which the park becomes at night.
But there is also no question that the conscious anxious discussion of the park, locally, is
very much a gendered fear, most marked among women and parents of young girls,
and very much linked to a generalized concern about young men's colonization of
public places in the area. Reports of public trouble in the local community papers
frequently reference the presence of such groups of young men, sometimes identified in
terms of key signifiers of otherness (like the baseball cap and/or a tin of lager). It cannot
be irrelevant, either, that the fears being expressed at local level about the 'goings-on'
in the park (however slight their basis in fact) followed hard on the heels of a number of
well-publicized, and quite horrifying homicidal attacks on women in parks and public
places elsewhere in Britain. 'The park' was already identified—for example, amongst
students of the local girls' school—as 'a no-go area' for women, whether on their own or
in groups, particularly after nightfall.
By January 1993, the local community news-sheets were carrying reports of
presentations to the local council, especially from elected local councillors, alleging that
the park had now definitely become 'an after-dark centre' for 'gangs engaged in glue-
sniffing, drugs-taking and vandalism . . . making the lives of nearby homeowners a
" Richard Sparks has suggested, in a persona] communication, that a possible reason for the anxiety felt, specifically,
by parents living in the vicinity of the park may be the fear that their own offspring may themselves join in the local
gangs. The stressed nature of the neighbourhood, and perhaps also of the modern households, may create a situation in
which parents create a kind of scapegoat, a 'dangerous Other', out of their own children, especially if and when they choose
to spend some time in the fearful public spaces outside the home.
11
In identifying the public park as a traditional place of play for young people in England throughout the twentieth
century, it U vital to note that the use of such parks has always been heavily gendered. Like the open-air ice-rinks of
Canada, the parks of England have always been silently assumed primarily to be for the use of young men, especially in
die hours of the evening.
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misery'.13 Undoubtedly, these fears were fuelled by anxious national media discussion
of the issue of safety in parks (and also by national media discussion about the growth of
the drug trade), but the specific construction of Stamford Park as a site of drug-taking
and vandalism in the local news-sheets of Hale and Altrincham seemed also to convey a
recognition, by local journalists, of the specific fears and anxieties of residents who had
bought into this area, specifically, for a sense of 'peace and quiet'—to escape these
problems. There seems here to be shared imaginary understanding among journalists
and local residents about their desires for a quiet life in the suburb and also, in this
instance, in-the English village—albeit that this particular 'village' is also in a
geographical sense inseparable from the sprawling conurbation of Greater Manchester,
and its 2.6 million people.14 There are powerful ideological themes at play here (of
respectability and serenity of the English suburb and village, and the cultural capital
which residents of these areas may feel accrues from owning property in such areas).
The ideology may indeed involve some suppression of awkward points in the history of
suburbs and villages, as well as some highly exaggerated fears with respect to the
behaviour currently taking place in the local neighbourhood (in this case, in one local
park): there is some local feeling that local children resent the constant criticism of their
occupancy and use of this cheap public space.15
It is not our concern, here, to argue that there is no relation between local fears about
crime in neighbourhoods or suburbs, but it is our concern to suggest that there is no
straightforward relation between these fears and very specific, symbolic locations. The
fears of the residents living around Stamford Park may be best understood as a complex
effect of the psychic investment brought to the idea of a private life by residents who, in
the late 1980s or early 1990s, have bought into a particular type of suburban street (in
this instance, a block of four quite elegant, gentrified Georgian terraces—'mid-market'
properties in the local housing market—confronted by a large expanse of empty
parkland surrounded by high hedges, unlit at night, and echoing with human voices).16
There may be a sense, too, in which that anxiety over 'what goes on in the park' may be
" The result of the local residents' campaign, when taken up by councillor Mrs Stephanie Poole was a series of reports
in all the local news-sheets. See 'Park is Plagued byjunkies', Manchester Mttro News 29January 1993, p. 17, and also the
lead article 'Drug Anger Flares', Salt and AUrincham Messenger, 21 January 1993.
" The prevalence of such fears, and the role in their construction of community newspapers, is not obviously confined
only to affluent suburbs. Iiska and Baccaglini (1990), comparing the reportage of crime across 26 American cities,
concluded that the most influential feature on levels of local fear about crime was the amount of coverage given to
homicide cases in local newspapers: where the coverage of local homicides was intense, local fears were as well—and
where coverage of homicide cases in other cities was intense, local fears tended to subside: people felt safe 'by
comparison'. A study of crime-reporting in the British national daily press reaches similar conclusions with respect to the
reporting style of different newspapers, and the influence of such styles on readerships (Williams and Dickinson 1993). It
is beyond the scope of this study of Hale to examine systematically the influence of national, city-wide, and local
newspapers of local fear of crime: in particular, we know very little about how the local broadsheets distributed to
private homes (of which there are now five in the Hale area) are actually read.
15
So, for example, a group of young people made the effort to contact the Manchester Metro Mews, with a view to
challenging the local residents' claim that Stamford Park was a site for drug-use. A teenager from Hale, referred to as
Simon, informed the MMNthat 'there'i a group of us who get together, about 11 to 18. We have to meet there because
there's nowhere else the younger ones can go, but we don't cause trouble and we don't take drugs'. Andrea Kuhn, 'Boys
Hit Back in Park Drugs Claim', Manchester Metro News, 28 January 1993.
16
We have not attempted in the text to reference any of the important work of urban geographers like Jackie Burgess
on the significance of parks as open space. Burgess's enquiries, with others, into open spaces and what she calls 'the
urban green' (in a study of Greenwich) concludes that the most valued of such spaces are those which provide a
comfortable physical or aesthetic environment for adults, 'adventure in safety' for children and adolescents, while also
enhancing human sociability. What a clearly not valued are 'the barren institutional landscapes of closely-mown grass'
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one expression of the local awareness that the amenities of the local park are themselves
very uncertain and contingent. Cuts in local authority recreation department budgets
and the accompanying reduction in the number of park attendants and park managers
(or 'parkies' as they are known in the North of England) has made it more and more
difficult for gardeners employed in municipal parks throughout England to maintain
play facilities, seats and other park furniture and gardens in the face of increasing
vandalism. The point can be overdone (since there are many contrary examples
throughout the country) but some observers believe we may be witnessing, in many
local areas throughout England, the demise of the municipal park, which was so
important a source of aesthetic pleasure to the populations of these suburban areas in
Victorian times.17 Hale's Stamford Park is by no means in disrepair (the children's play
area, for example, is equipped with swings and climbers made of sturdy Scandinavian
wood), but there are several areas within the park in which redevelopment has stopped
and/or litter and vandalism are apparent.
There is also no doubt at all that the colonization as such of this public space at night
(like the Victoria Road location discussed later in the paper) by groups of young people
(who all insist they have nowhere else to go)—with its consequent extrusion of noise in
the quiet suburban surrounds—is in itself a major factor in the anxiety expressed by
local residents: at night, the park quite clearly no longer belongs to the adult residents;
it is, in effect, under youthful occupancy. The anxieties which this provokes may also, of
course, be underlined, in an anonymous and privatized local suburb, by the fact that
these young people are not always known to the adult observers, especially to those who
are newly arrived in the area.
The Pub
The escalation of concern, in the local news-sheets of Hale and Altrincham, about
young men in Stamford Park followed hard on the heels of a similar campaign over
young men, neighbourhood disorder and 'drugs'—associated, so far as a group of local
residents were concerned, with the Cheshire Midland, a mock-Tudor-fronted public
house situated directly across the road from the historic railway station in Hale.
The escalation of local concern began late in 1991 and extended into the first few
months of 1992, and primarily involved a series of complaints by residents of the
substantial Victorian houses behind the Cheshire Midland about the level of noise
emanating from the public house itself, and, especially on weekends, from the forecourt
outside the public house after closing time. The local residents' association which
dotted with cheap playground structure! that characterize so many landscapes in the mid-1990s (Burgess el al. 1988:
472). It is hard to deny the applicability of this description to the vast central stretch of Stamford Park, for alJ that it also
provides at one of its perimeters a viable children's playground and a fine display of flowering shrubs.
17
cf. the discussion of die demise of Victoria Park in Hackney, East London, by David Nicholson-Lord. Opened in
die 1840s, this particular park had become one of Britain's most visited parks by the last years of the century,
particularly because of its baching pool. In 1892, 303,516 people turned up on Whit Monday. It was one of the
hundreds of municipal parks, established by local municipal endeavour or by private benefaction, that Parliament
believed would contribute to national health and well-being for all and also provide an alternative source of recreation
and play, without charge, for 'the lower-classes'. In 1993, however, Victoria Park, even though it still has a resident
warden and functioning toilets, is a no-go area after dark, and in the day is covered in litter and dereliction. Elsewhere in
England, four out of five councils have slashed spending on parks or plan to do so; one in three expects job losses. David
Nicholson-Lord, 'The Once-glorious Municipal Park Languishes on Death Row', The Indeptndeni on Sunday, 29 August
1993.
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emerged on the street which directly abuts onto the rear of the pub were actually
arguing for its closure—on the grounds, once again, that it had become a centre of
drug-use.18 Police investigations of the source of'the problems' at the Cheshire Midland
suggested that the evidence for drug-use in and around the pub was minimal, but that
there was clear evidence of noise and local disturbance: one key problem, according to
police, was the kind of music being played on the juke-box in the Cheshire Midland
(the current Top Twenty) and also a particularly strong lager which the pub landlord
had elected to sell (quickly named 'loopy juice' by local police officers). When the
landlord of the Cheshire Midland refused requests from Altrincham Sub-Division to
change either aspect of his regime, local police contacted Samuel Smiths of Tadcaster,
the brewery which owns the Cheshire Midland: the landlord was quietly replaced, the
'loopy juice' removed and the juke-box restocked with a mix of Chicago Blues and hits
from the sixties. At the same time, the police laid on 'a show of strength' outside the
Midland on a number of Friday and Saturday evenings, including some officers on
horseback from the mounted branch, motorbike officers, and squad cars. Local
residents were persuaded of the seriousness of the police response, and the pub itself lost
some of its local reputation as a centre for unruly young people and drug-taking.
Victoria Road at Night

To identify the significance of diese two symbolic locations of crime in the imagination
of the residents of Hale only takes us so far. The public house (and the gatherings that
occur outside the pub at closing time) has nearly always been an important source of
local mythology about disorderly behaviour, disorderly people, and disorderly places
in English cities as a whole: the disorderly pub, like 'the problem estate', is a fixed
feature of the lexicon in nearly all local talk about crime in England. The specific local
importance of the Cheshire Midland in Hale lies in its geographical location directly
opposite the entrance (and exit) of the British Rail station (and a natural port-of-call
for returning commuters, as well as for other people coming out from the centre of
Manchester by rail)'9 and its direct proximity to a space already colonised by youth.
The pub is only some 50 yards from the junction of Ashley Road, the main shopping
street in Hale, and Victoria Road—the junction, as we mentioned earlier, on which are
located three wine stores, a Bank of Scotland money machine and a branch of the
Canadian Charcoal Pit, which stays open until midnight.
This junction adjoins the level crossing of the Hale railway station, which cuts across
the main Ashley Road. The warning lights and alarm on this crossing provide a regular
" The ad hoc association of local resident] which organized against the regime of the Cheshire Midland in 1992 is a
perfect example of the kind of suburban social movements which have become so influential in local concerns over crime
reduction in Britain during the 1990s. For an analysis of these ad hoc interest groups as an instance of a 'new social
movement', see Taylor (1994).
19
In police accounts, the significance of the rail station in Hale is that it is one obvious route for the villains from city
centre Manchester making their way out to the suburbs, and the big houses of HaJe, AJtrincham, and Bowdon, for 'easy
pickings'. In this police lay theory of the geography of crime, it is also significant that the suburb of Hale adjoins the
M56 motorway, so making it easy for villains, especially from Merseyside, to drive quickly in and out on a run of
burglaries and other thefts. This theory is not without tome support: one well-known local victim in 1994 was the
Manchester United and Ireland footballer, Roy Keane, whose Golf VR6 was stolen, in January, by a Liverpool-based
gang and later abandoned. This mythology regarding the activities of organized gangs of thieves and burglars from
Merseyside, widely held by police throughout the North of England, will be discussed in forthcoming work arising from
our ESRC-funded research at Salford.
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and familiar daytime rhythm to the village and a modest local urban spectacle. At
some point in the past, the existence of the rail line across the main road necessitated
the enlargement of the junction to accommodate cars and road traffic awaiting the
passage of trains. The result is the existence of a large urban junction, surrounded by
wide pavements that provide a natural (actually, man-made) space for night-time
gatherings of young people 'just hanging around'. An additional feature of the junction
is the forecourt of an expensive car display rooms, Messrs Drabble and Allen, with a
selection of desirable cars routinely left outside its showrooms for the weekend. The
public car-park opposite the car showroom, outside the railway station, additionally
provides a convenient space for young people from the suburb's wealthy families to
park their own cars, listen to the tape-deck or radio, and consume a late-night pizza.
The junction is a public place that is routinely colonized by young people, especially at
night, in ways which many local residents—observing or listening from the streets
around the junction—clearly find unsettling and disturbing, irrespective of particular
incidents. When incidents do occur in this public space (as it did in the case of an
assault on a 40-year-old lorry driver from Glasgow visiting family friends in Hale,
outside the car showroom, in May 1992), it makes for extraordinary, but in a sense
predictably fantastic, coverage in the local news-sheets:
LOUTS RULE OK!

'It's as bad here as Glasgow!' says mugged Scots driver.
Lager louts are turning parts of Hale into an echo of the notorious Gorbals at its most brutal
. . . that's the verdict of a Glasgow man who has been a victim of the louts.
Drunken gangs—both boys and girls—are bringing terror to what was once a tranquil area.
Local folk say the youngsters get tanked up at pubs, move to fast-food outlets at closing time
and then go berserk.
They have been accused of regularly vandalising gardens and vehicles along Victoria Road in
particular.
Several drunks in the gang climbed on top of a Mercedes and damaged its roof by dancing on
it.
A fortnight ago Mr James MacFarlane came down from Glasgow with his father to spend a
short holiday with his sister in Victoria Road. With his sister's husband and a friend, also down
from Glasgow, they had been for a drink and were making their way home when they were
attacked near the Drabble and Allen Garage . . . The father required 15 stitches in a head
wound and James is so badly injured he is still off work . . .
The police and community consultative group for the area has talked about the attack and
police say they aregiving close attention to the neighbourhood.20
The records of the local police actually provide little evidence that assaults or other
predatory crime are a regular occurrence on this particular corner of Hale Village.
There are regular complaints from local residents, especially on weekends, with respect
to noisy gatherings of young people and drunks (sometimes of more adult years) and
also, it must be said, in the mornings, the occasional sighting of needles discarded in the
street. The prime source of complaint with respect to the corner as a whole is, however,
noise; and, indeed, it must be said that the Ashley Road/Victoria Road junction is one
of a very small number of public locations in the whole of the suburb in which the
10
Sale and AUrincham Messenger, 22 May 1992, p . l .
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sound of human voices, or human activity of any kind, can be heard after nightfall. As
in the case of Stamford Park, the local concern over 'Victoria Road' seems in some
sense to be a concern over one of few public spaces that is not completely regulated or,
indeed, simply closed after nightfall. So we are not talking here of the kind of street
space that might be found in the warmer climes of southern Europe, or, increasingly, in
some parts of northern Europe where cafeterias and bars have increasingly opened up,
often associated with other facilities provided for public leisure (like the local
gymnasium, sports centre, or youth centre). There are very few such facilities across the
suburbs of South Manchester, especially for young people. Instead, there are rows
upon rows of sedate or stately private homes in which an adult population pursues a
range of private activities and then, in public space, a small number of pubs, parks, and
street corners (like the corner of Victoria Road), grass verges, war memorials, and
other local landmarks which can be routinely colonized by young people. These
processes (of suburban privatization and the ongoing surveillance of young people
occupying public space in such privatized suburbs by adult residents themselves) have
been described in some detail in a study of one dormitory suburb in the United States
by Baumgartner (1988).
Baumgartner's study of 'Hampton'—a pseudonym for a quiet residential suburb of
16,000 people situated between New York City and an unidentified smaller city on the
Eastern Seaboard of the US—is presented as an analysis, specifically, of what she calls
the 'moral order' of the suburb. Baumgartner argues that the moral order of this small
suburban community is based upon a powerful and widely understood pattern of
restraint and non-confrontation: everywhere throughout the suburb, there is a
tentative and minimalist neighbourliness which extends very short distances only,
along individual streets and avenues. The absence of any places of public resort, and
the absence even of public pavements (sidewalks), means that the residents of
Hampton very rarely have to enter into intimate relations with other local people, but
the restricted size of the suburb also means that most residents do know each other by
sight (for example, from seeing each other in the supermarket). The racial and social
homogeneity of the suburb also means that Hampton's residents have very little
contact with individuals from America's most feared 'other' population, the black
underclass: the consequence, Baumgartner implies, is the construction of another fear,
'strangers in town'.21 The presence of strangers of any description is nearly always
handled, on the surface, with tolerance, especially in face-to-face encounters: at the
very worst, locals may engage in various polite forms of avoidance. According to
Baumgartner, however, this show of civility or equanimity should not deceive:
Hampton residents make about the same number of phone calls to the police 'for
assistance', per head of population, as do the residents of the city of Chicago (just under
two calls a day per 1,000 people) (Baumgartner 1988: 117). The bulk of the calls to
police in Hampton, however, are for 'non-legal assistance'—notably, to report the
presence on the street or in the neighbourhood of strangers and urgently to request the
11
Interestingly for our purposes, Baumgartner does devote six pages to a description of the anxieties provoked in
Hampton by gatherings of young people, going so far as to retrieve Herbert Gans's remark in Levittewners(Cans 1967)
that 'young people take the place of the underclass in suburban communities' (Baumgartner 1988: 110). But the
treatment of Hampton's responses to young people remains largely descriptive, and the emphasis in Baumgartner's
account is on the suburbanites' fears and anxieties being focused on strangers and intruders as such, rather than on their
social standing or ethnic background.
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surveillance of such strangers by police. In the case of our South Manchester suburb,
interviews with local police confirm that very large numbers of phone calls are made
every weekend from the privacy of local homes in Hale to the police force requesting
police action—far more, by size of local population, than in other areas in the Greater
Manchester conurbation. A large proportion of these calls are, indeed, to do with the
reported presence of'strangers' in the area, often announced by noises in the street. It is
as if the primary task of local police in this area is to patrol the remaining public space
of the area in order to keep it free of marauders from other unknown or fearful
'territories' outside the confines of the village itself—most notably, of course, in the
local imagination, from inner-city Manchester.22
Noise and Rumour

This is not the place to advance either a sociology of the private suburban household in
1993 or a critical discussion of the moral character of its self-evidently increasingly
privatized existence, cut off from any wide range of public activities or public
interaction.23 What we do want to suggest about Hale, and most other village suburbs
in South Manchester, however, is that they may be less well placed than their
counterparts in North America in terms of preventing the intrusion of public troubles,
or a troublesome section of the larger public, on to its own streets and, even, into its
own homes (in the form of burglary and other thefts).24
Partly, the likelihood of intrusion into the suburbs of Manchester is a matter of
historical patterns of urban development and, in particular, of distance. Many of the
suburban areas that are the subject of commentary in the United States have emerged
on the extreme perimeters of the American conurbation—zones of residential develop-
ment established at the greatest possible distance from the downtown 'business core'. In
the last two decades, the vast bulk of new residential development has been in self-
contained soi-disant 'communities' designed on a drawing-board, built near to out-of-
town shopping malls and/or places of sport and leisure. These have recently earned the
general title of'edge cities', built at the edge of the troubled, declining old industrial
and commercial conurbations (Garreau 1991).
Urban development in England over the last century, and in the recent past, has had
a much more haphazard and uneven history. So the segregation of one neighbourhood
or area from another in the conurbation of Greater Manchester is by no means as clear-
22
The imagery of the intruder and stranger working his way into the English suburb in the 1990s has not been the
subject of study, but it is fair to conjecture that the Home Office campaign of 1992 against car-theft, with television
commercials equating the car thief with a hyena, has probably had some effect at the level of popular consciousness.
23
The private life of the bourgeois family has recently been the topic of sustained defence, in respect of its more
cautious lower-middle class expression in the United States, by Christopher Lasch (1991), but it is also worth recalling
the indictment of this same family form by feminist writers, for whom the family is a key site of patriarchal oppression
and different forms of private violence (Barrett and Mclntosh 1982). The earlier analysis of the anti-psychiatry school in
die late 1960s insisted that this kind of private life may often be productive of schizophrenia and/or many other
pathological individual adaptations (Laing 1971). There is an urgent need for systematic empirical study of the
suburban fortress family of the 1990s, linked into the world through television (and by school or work place) but with
little direct experience of a broader 'life in public places'.
24
The only exception to the generalizations that follow about the relative indefensibility of the English suburb
compared to their North American equivalents may be the new private housing development! that have emerged, in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, in and around English cities. These are very much a minority phenomenon in England, but
the privatization of the task of social control within already existing suburbs is certainly gathering pace.
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cut as it is in most American cities. Many (though not all) of the grand Victorian
neighbourhoods of Manchester are actually quite close to the downtown business core
(Didsbury, Chorlton, Higher Broughton, Prestwich and Withington), conveniently
located for the professional classes of the late nineteenth century at a short distance
from the commercial offices of the 'City of Cotton'. Many of these areas are now
experiencing the strains and stresses of their proximity to other housing areas (Moss
Side, Whalley Range, Burnage, Lower Broughton, and Ordsall) whose residents are
now experiencing the full effects of de-industrialisation in the 1980s, massive job losses,
and the new poverty and inequality of free market Britain. Many (though not all) of
these areas consist, primarily, of the infamous public council estates, built in the 1950s
to 1970s in between, and around, already-existing areas of housing first established in
the Victorian period, in the name of what in the post-war period of social reconstruc-
tion was called 'housing mix'.25
In Hale and Altrincham themselves, seven or eight miles out from Manchester city
centre, the range of housing extends from the manorial-style private homes of Bowdon,
complete with their own private driveways and flagpoles, to quite modest council-
owned semi-detacheds and small two-up-and-two-down terraced houses (exhibiting
different degrees of neglect—for example in Broadheath—and gentrification—for
example around Stamford Park), all within a distance of one to one-and-a-half miles.
The vast bulk of the housing stock, however, consists of solid Georgian or Victorian
terraced houses of essentially bourgeois character. But it is important to stress that few
of these private houses have the massive amount of internal space and huge garden lot
that characterize suburban housing in North America. The size of 'the space to be
defended' of the average Hale residence is quite limited: in very many cases, indeed, the
house abuts directly on to the pavement, with only a small garden between the front
door and the threatening outside world. These modest residences of the young
professional or the elderly respectable citizen dominate an area, moreover, which is also
the home to less affluent citizens of the suburb—who live, perhaps, 'one street over' in a
block of houses that would be seen, locally, as not quite so nice or desirable. The
unemployment rate in the adjoining ward area of Altrincham, for example (one
measure of poverty and social distress) was 7.0 per cent in 1991, and 8.4 per cent
throughout the borough of Trafford as a whole, whereas it was only 4.8 per cent in
Hale itself.
The proximity of the village suburb to other so-called less desirable areas within the
larger conurbation seems to us to be a defining feature of English cities, particularly
those with a significant expansion in the last century-and-a-half of industrially-driven
growth. In such circumstances, we would argue, the idea of belonging to the suburban
community, and the capacity to identify people who are strangers or intruders into it,
are much more ambiguous questions than they are in North American suburbs like
Hampton. In this sense, the maintenance of personal privacy, security, and serenity is
25
This public housing development of 1950—70 has had the effect of modifying the pattern of spatial segregation (or,
at least, the visual separation ofspaccs) in Manchester, famously described by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class
in England. For EngcU, a defining feature of the Manchester conurbation was '. . . the fact, that by unconscious tacit
agreement, as well as with outspoken conscious determination, the working people's quarters are sharply separated from
the sections of the city reserved for the middle class; or, if this does not succeed, they are concealed with the cloak of
charity . . . I have never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working class from the thoroughfares, so tender a
concealment of everything which might affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeoisie, as in Manchester' (Engels
1845: 85,87).
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rather less well guaranteed than it would be in Baumgartner's Hampton: it are not an
entitlement accruing from the fact of residence in the area and/or the ability to afford
the kind of mortgage such residence involves. It is interesting to hear the unsympathetic
attitude shown by some local subdivisional police (few of whom could actually afford
themselves to live in the area) towards the 'claim to order' that is involved in calls to the
police from the area's residents (especially in cases where there is noprimafacie evidence
of offending). Several police officers with whom the author has contact—especially
those who have worked in other divisions of Greater Manchester Police—speak instead
of such calls as arising out of what they call the 'low level of tolerance' in the area.26
Buying Peace of Mind in the Suburb

One of the biggest growth industries in the suburbs of South Manchester in recent years
has been that of private and domestic security. The vast majority of private houses have
been fitted with burglar alarms and other security devices, including, in particular,
laser-operated outside lighting and close-circuit television anti-intruder systems. There
are regular mailings of publicity through letterboxes, advertising new devices available
from some local or national entrepreneur in the security industry.27 These devices are
marketed as an effective deterrent against burglary, although all that can surely be said
about these systems is that their introduction has coincided historically with a growth
of residential burglaries. (So also, it should be added, has the growth in the number of
alarms fixed to private cars coincided with a growth in the level of car theft). What is
certainly the case is that the deployment throughout suburbs like Hale of burglar
alarms, attached to domestic houses and commercial buildings alike, has introduced a
new noise into what is believed always to have been a quiet, serene suburban village:
the noise of the alarm sounding off has joined the noise of a police siren, ambulance, or
fire engine in the noise-scape of the suburb—a routine irritation and a constant
reminder either of the inescapable presence in the suburb of criminal others (in local
folklore, as we have suggested, from inner city Manchester or from Merseyside) or the
unending local war against crime.
The constant sound of alarms is one of the important reminders, we would argue,
that the serenity and security of suburban life in South Manchester is a tentative and
contingent question. So also is some of the 'talk about crime' in the area which is
regularly encountered in local shops. This kind of talk clearly needs to be understood as
a form of rumour and myth, with an indirect relationship to real events or incidents, and
clearly linked, in some way, to the coverage given to local crime in the community
newspapers. But not all of it: the young women who work in the local hairstylists insist
that the main street, Ashley Road, is regularly visited by 'a gang' from Liverpool, going
26
One anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of this paper enquired whether the frequency of such anxious calls to
the police might, indeed, be attributed to 'lack of tolerance' rather than 'a fear of encroachment by strangers' (as if these
are self-cvidently discrete sentiments). It is not the author's purpose to try and separate out such anxieties as some kind
of essentialist and different phenomena, nor to try here to relate these anxieties, in a detailed explanatory fashion, to
more material concerns, like the suburbanite's fear for the resale value of his or her housing investment, though there is
no question that this could help to ground the analysis materially, especially of fears and anxieties in individual local
areas or streets with fluctuating local or conurbation-wide reputation.
27
In June 1993, for example, a company trading under the title DTB (Down to Basics) (Proprietor: Geoffrey H. L.
Berg MA (Cantab)) dropped leaflets through the mailboxes of houses in Hale, advertising CCTV systems for domestic
households, at 'a mere £999' for the front door, and 'the entire property of your home' for £2,999.
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from shop to shop 'extracting fnoney with menaces'. When one of the two bakers,
Hill's, had its display window broken in July 1993, a wooden cover appeared the next
morning over the window, with the ringing declaration, in white paint, 'Ram-raid on
Hills'; it transpired later that an elderly pensioner had lost control of her brakes while
trying to park her new Honda automatic. The complex and sometimes rather opaque
unexpected relationship between actually-occurring incidents of crime and talk about
crime in an anxious, highly privatized locality like Hale is clearly a matter for very
detailed study.
It seems clear too, that the character and direction of local fear is also routinely
updated, almost on a daily basis, through the brief conversations (the 'restrained'
interaction identified by Baumgartner for her American suburb) which seem to be
characteristic of specific shops (the baker's, post office, the supermarket check-outs,
hairdressers). Also important in this respect are the conversations between parents with
school-age children: stories brought back from school by these children are a
particularly powerful form of reportage, no doubt involving very specific elaborations,
as a result of schoolchildren's discussions in their schools, of incidents that are said to
have occurred within the area. Among school-girls, particular attention is obviously
paid to the threat or fear provoked by predatory-looking men hanging around schools
('stranger-danger') or, sometimes, to particular individual incidents (of 'flashing',
'kerb-crawling' etc.). Schoolchildren seem to bring home, in particular, stories about
particular incidents which are beyond routine expectations for the area: foremost
amongst these was the assault early in 1993 on a postman, on Westgate, a quiet side
street, resulting in the theft of mailbags which had just been collected from the main
post office, with the postman sustaining injury and requiring hospitalization. For
reasons which are at present'unclear, this assault and theft seems to have attracted far
more troubled comment in private households, as a result of discussions between
schoolchildren, than it did in the local community news-sheets.
Whatever the specific dynamics of local fear in Hale, it was no real surprise in 1993
when the suburb joined the list of suburban areas being targeted by the private security
industry offering various new forms of private policing. Individual letters, dated 6
August, arrived in all letterboxes from West Valley Security Ltd:
If you are worried about the escalating levels of crime in the Bowdon area and want to do
something worthwhile to protect yourself and your family, do consider West Valley Security
Ltd.
West Valley Patrol is a total professional mobile security patrol and alarm response service.
The primary function of the company is to provide 24-hour professional security patrol and
response service for residential property protection and life safety. We will patrol the
communities within our response area to ensure neighbourhood safety and privacy from
unwanted intruders for our customers.
The letter, from S. A. Purcell, Development Executive, then explained that residents
of the area could be connected up to West Valley Security through their existing alarms
or telephones, and that any contacts made to the service would result in a response
within minutes. All the patrol officers are claimed to be 'highly trained in security,
arrest procedure and first aid'. 'For instance, all the vehicles will carry a full emergency
first aid kit.' By way of some clarification of the legal role of these private patrols, the
letter then indicated that 'any emergencies' would be reported to the 'proper
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authorities whether it be police, fire or ambulance'. Within a few weeks, two American-
style police cruisers in bright green and white livery, with a flashing roof light, became
a regular sight on the main streets on the suburb. Later in the year, in December, West
Valley's initiative was followed up by a more locally based entrepreneur actually based
in Hale, Tribune Security, offering a mobile foot patrol 'designed to individual
requirements', closed circuit television, and general security advice.
It is not clear what effect the circulation of such correspondence to homes, or the
actual establishment of a mobile patrol of private security officers circulating around
the suburbs in marked vehicles, may have—whether in respect of the ongoing level of
burglary or other crimes, or on the level of local fear and anxiety. It is certainly
important, however, to see the move to private policing in the English suburb as a part
of a general process of transformation in the character of the suburb and its policing,
and also in the reconstruction of the ways in which the suburb defends itself as a place
of peace and security. It is not that the introduction of private policing is the one and
only key moment that should be examined in and of itself: we are confronted with a
larger social process in respect of the relationship of public behaviours and disorder to
affluent areas of private residence, and the changing expectations which suburban
populations start to articulate vis-a-vis the state (the local police) or the market (private
security agencies).
Crime and the English Suburb in the Post-War Period

In earlier post-war studies of the English suburb, crime (in the form of burglary,
physical assault, or car-theft) very rarely featured as a significant topic of discussion.
There is no mention at all of crime, for example, in Ray Pahl's pioneering study of the
commuter villages of Walton and Tewin, Hertfordshire, published in the mid-1960s
(Pahl 1965), even in the analysis of the segregation of areas by social class and status.
There is very little discussion of problems of crime in the series of texts published by
town planners and architects later in the 1960s and in the early 1970s, extolling the
architectural and spatial virtues and communitarian possibilities of the middle-class
suburb (cf. for example, Taylor 1973). There is some discussion, however, in some of
these studies, of troublesome or disorderly aspects of the suburb: Ruth Crichton's study
of the Stratfield Mortimer suburban village in Berkshire indicates that one of the most
frequent subjects of discussion among her 139 respondents concerned:
the hooliganism, or, if that is too strong a word, the misbehaviour of some of the young people.
Most of the trouble seems to come from a gang or gangs of youths aged 15 to 18 years, who live in
council houses. (Crichton 1964: 71; emphasis added)
This was not merely Crichton's own opinion:
From conversation with residents, the police, the housing officer and the probation officer, there
seems no doubt about the relationship between bad behaviour and a concentration of council
houses, (ibid.)
Crichton's accounts of the source of trouble in Stratfield Mortimer is quite consistent
with a series of other accounts of the problems of larger towns and cities in the 1960s,
1970s, and beyond, organized around a mental map of the writer (often a suburban
resident himself or herself) which then contrasts the essential pleasures and serenity of
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IAN TAYLOR
the suburb itself with the intrusions of bad behaviours from outside the suburb, most
notably from 'the estates'.28 The behaviours which were identified as a source of
comment and disapproval 30 years ago make for interesting reading today:
Some of the nuisance is relatively harmless—there is a ring at the front door, the housewife takes
off her pinafore and puts on her smile, opens the door, and hears a snigger behind a hedge.
(Crichton 1964: 71)
Crichton acknowledges that 'such tomfoolery must go on everywhere and is easily
forgiven'. But, she continues:
. . . when boys empty the contents of the dustbin into a ditch, 'pinch' the washing from the line
or lift the front floor off its hinges and deposit in a neighbour's fence, a more serious view is
taken. (Crichton 1964: 71-2)
The contrast in respect of'misbehaviours' that are occurring in the English suburb is
inescapable. In the case of the two police beats that cover the whole of Hale, South
Manchester (M Division, beats 3 and 4), in the 17 months between January 1992 and
March 1993, for example, there were 386 house burglaries reported to the police, two
aggravated burglaries, and 142 burglaries of other properties (an average of 22 per
month). Also reported to the police were 22 robberies (of goods worth more than £10),
36 other thefts (from garages and sheds), 439 thefts from motor vehicles and 79 thefts of
motor vehicles. On the two beats in question, in other words, there were a total of 1,268
offences reported to the police. It is not possible, using existing police records, to extract
information down to the level of individual beats for the earlier post-war period: what
is clear, however, is that the levels of burglary and car-related crime, in particular,
have no precedent. Thefts of cars in Hale and Altrincham will have contributed to the
overall rate of car-theft reported by Greater Manchester Police, which (at 4,001 per
100,000 population) was the third highest level in 1991 in all police force areas in
England and Wales (Labour Party 1992). The level of recorded crime in the mid-1990s
in Hale, as well as in the wider Greater Manchester conurbation, is far in excess of
anything reported in the first three post-war decades. More important to our
argument, perhaps, is the widespread belief voiced by residents of such suburbs, in
casual conversations as well as in more extended exchanges, that the character of such
crimes has changed: burglary is perceived as a far more serious infraction of a personal
household than mischief conducted through the front door letter-box or some minor act
of vandalism, and, in a society which has become so reliant on cars, the theft of motor
vehicles is seen as a major infringement. More seriously, local discussion does focus on
serious instances of violence (like the assault on a local postman) 29 and there is a
widespread belief that these offences could not have occurred in the earlier post-war
period. How these references to actual or perceived rates of crime relate to actually
occurring levels of offence behaviour as such—as against being a product of the
generalized anxieties produced by an anonymous and privatized household existence
28
The role of the 'estate' aj a perennial source of disorder and trouble, but more especially its key role in taJk about
disorder and trouble, has been powerfully discussed by Beatrix Campbell in her recent quite excellent study of Britain's
dangerous places (1993, ch. 8).
59
Local belief in the Hale and Altrincham area that crimes were getting more serious were fuelled during 1994 by an
incident involving the firing of a gun at a gypsy encampment on the edge of the Hale/Altrincham boundary in June and
by the discovery of the body of a 66-year-old woman, dumped behind die main shopping street in Altrincham, in July.
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(as emphasized throughout this paper)—is a critical issue of cultural as well as

criminological explanation.
Local Crime and Local Struggles

One of the pressing political issues at national level in all the major post-industrial, or
de-industrialised, societies—but particularly those societies whose governments have
committed themselves to radical experiments in the freeing of market forces—has to do
with the level of anxiety about public space that is reported in a larger number of
surveys of the public. This does connect with (although we are arguing it does not
reduce to) the actual level of reported crime in particular countries or particular cities.
The character of these national or international debates about the management or the
reduction of these levels of crime is not our concern here (cf. Taylor 1993). The concern
here is the question of the level of crime in particular localities, and also the reputations
of particular localities in respect of crime, in the 1990s, as it also is for community
leaders and other concerned citizens in particular localities, in several important
aspects. There are grounds for believing, for example, that the levels of crime obtaining
in particular localities may be a significant factor not only in respect of home buyers'
decisions as to whether to move into—or out of—particular urban or suburban areas,
but also in respect of decisions taken by industrialists or other commercial companies as
to whether to relocate into particular localities.30 This problem is well understood by
the various multi-agency crime prevention associations that have been established at
local level in England over the last few years, in which representatives of public and
private sector organizations attempt to collaborate on local strategies of urban
redevelopment.
But the locality has also become the site, in another important way, of struggles
between a particular kind of public interest (the local police) and private interests
(specifically, the new private patrol of West Valley Security Ltd), and it is in the
elaboration of this struggle between interests that the local news-sheets have taken on a
new and important significance as a site in which a national or global issue is being
debated locally. Throughout 1993 and the first half of 1994, for example, Superinten-
dent Bill Havers, officer-in-charge of the Altrincham Sub-Division of the Greater
Manchester Police, was in effect engaged in a week-by-week 'war of position' with Mr
Seamus Purcell, the Development Executive of West Valley Security, on behalf of the
very idea of publicly-provided policing in the suburbs. In two separate articles in a
single issue of the Sale and Altrincham Express and Advertiser, M r Havers went on to the
attack on the issue of effective local policing, but in two different ways. He first
launched a headlong attack on the West Valley firm, on the grounds that the launch of
this private force might provide the government with an excuse to implement plans in
the Sheehy Report to cut the overall size of the national police force, and also on the
grounds that the £31 monthly fee to be charged by West Valley would be a waste of
money, in that it would not provide the range of services provided around the clock by
30
The question of crime and urban reputation has other, quite fundamental consequences: in Manchester, in the
summer of 1993, there was unmistakable nervousness over the effects that press reportage of firearms-related crime in
and around the Moss Side area might have on the deliberations of the International Olympic Committee with respect to
the City's bid to be the site of the Olympic Games in the year 2000.
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IAN TAYLOR
local publicly funded police forces.31 Then, in a separate article, Mr Havers released
figures (which had originally been prepared for internal sub-divisional consumption)
suggesting that the crime rate in the Altrincham Sub-Division in the first six months of
1993 was significantly down on the similar period for 1992. According to these figures:
- Theft of vehicles was down 17 per cent; thefts from vehicles 6 per cent
- Burglaries of shops and offices down 33 per cent
- Criminal damage down 37 per cent
- Arson down 51 per cent
- Shoplifting down 33 per cent
- Muggings down 33 per cent
- Cycle thefts down 7 per cent
In the report on these figures in the Express and Advertiser, Mr Havers attributed these
good results to the particularly active collaboration between community and business
leaders in the Altrincham area. He admitted that the burglary rate was still up (by 34
per cent on 1992) but 'pledged to target this in the coming months'.32 The write-up of
Mr Havers's remarks by the local news-sheet journalist, Mr Simon Clark, generally
gave prominence to Mr Havers's remarks, but it is of interest that Mr Clark felt the
need, in an area under the firm control of the Conservative Party, to report that the
West Valley firm had attracted the support of prominent local Tory councillor Patrick
Myers, and also to report Mr Purcell's claim that West Valley was 'on target' in terms
of recruiting a start-up number of 500 subscribers. Mr Clark also saw fit to observe that
the figures released by Mr Havers did not, in fact, give any overall totals: in his words
'they don't give any idea how big the problem was in the first place'.
Global Problem, Local Suburb

We hinted, earlier, that the Utopian idea of the English suburb is in some trouble in the
1990s, and our concern in this paper has been to try and fill out that observation. It is
not our intention, however, to leave the impression that the only real source of trouble
is the extent of actual criminal activity now intruding into private houses (burglary),
possessions (car-related theft) or private lives (the fear of assault), though in the first
two instances there are real grounds for concern, and, in the last respect, there seems to
be continuing concern over safety and civility on the street and in public places
generally.
We do not want to argue that Hale is typical of all suburban areas in England in
1993: we are conscious of the particular social mix of the area, hegemonized by
successful male members of the commercial middle class of Greater Manchester
('Thatcher's children' in their mid to late thirties) and their 'economically inactive'
wives and partners. But we do think there may be a general tendency across all such
English suburbs, which is particularly advanced in Hale. Putting the point directly,
Hale no longer seems to be an area, if ever it was, in which people readily engage with
each other in a friendly, neighbourly, helpful, and open fashion, especially in public
places (like the shops, the streets, the parking lots): it is a place in which a frozen stare is
31
Simon Clark, 'Private Policing "Will be Costly"', Sale and Altrincham Express and Advertiser, 5 August 1993.
" Simon Clark, 'Crime Rate Drops', Salt and Altrincham Express and Advertiser, 5 August 1993.
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far more predictable in public interaction than a smile. It is also a place in which the
idea of paying for public amenities by the local state evokes a significant resistance: the
attempt by Trafford Borough, in the winter of 1992-3, to impose a small charge for the
parking of cars at the rear of the Safeway supermarket resulted in a campaign of protest
in the local community press, and also a campaign of non-co-operation by customers to
the supermarket. The parking of cars by these suburban refuseniks in the residential
streets around the supermarket soon forced a climb-down by the local council. The
Daimlers and the BMWs have now resumed their free use of the council-provided car
park. Our point is that the idea of a public life as such in this suburb is under threat
from the general withdrawal of its adult inhabitants from involvement with public
activity and public provision on very many different fronts. Large numbers of the local
residents send their children to private schools, and otherwise engage in an altogether
privatized domestic existence inside the home. Their use of public provision is
increasingly confined to a reliance on the local authority refuse collection (which is
privately sub-contracted) and the police (and, as has been seen, there is now a small
private alternative to that, which may eventually grow in significance). Many of the
other provisions which, in other areas, would be provided by the state, like the health
service or education, are for many a matter of private subscription and payment. This
generalized withdrawal of residents of the suburb from direct public involvement and
indirect support for public services has a fundamental effect on the level of physical
provision, and also the architectural and aesthetic appearance of the locality: entry
into the public parks, public baths, public bus stations and, of course, the public toilets
provides unmistakable visual evidence of general decline, or demise, of what used to be
called municipal, civic provision. But these public buildings and spaces are among the
few places of resort available in the whole area for a youthful population attempting to
create its own space, away from adult supervision and intrusion. These public places
have almost without exception become places of fear and anxiety for other local
residents who spend most of their waking hours in private activities and in private
spaces, and some of whom seem to be engaged in a variety of stratagems to avoid public
space altogether. Public places can quickly degenerate into places where suspicious or
hostile encounters are expected. This routine incivility of daytime interaction can then
be matched by outbreaks of outright conflict and disorder in the evenings—especially,
given the continuing search of young people in the suburbs for escape from monotony
and routine, in the public places (the streets) which, in the absence of any alternative,
they have colonized.
Nothing is new about the colonization of public spaces by the young as places in
which to escape the supervision of adults and create a youth space (cf. for example,
Common 1938, Corrigan 1978). What if new are the specific historical circumstances
in which this long-time urban process is occurring—a context which is characterized
above all by escalating social inequality, the growth of competitive individualism in
society at large, fears over joblessness, transformations in gender and ethnic relations,
the growth of the international drug trade, the cultural play of 'post-modern' media,
and the generalized withdrawal of the state, at national and local level, from tasks of
social provision. All of these processes have their specific and local effects in particular
suburbs as much as they do—in different ways—in the more publicly problematic
inner-city or problem estate. The bollards which have been introduced on to the main
street of Hale—in front of the videostore and across from the Rohan mountain clothing
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IAN TAYLOR
store (a shop which sells many serious fashion items) testify to a spate of 'ram-raids'
through the videostore window in the summer of 1992 (though Rohan's itself has never
been raided). A frequent reference in local gossip is to the attack on the postman on
Westgate in early 1993. The local crime prevention volunteer mentioned earlier insists
that Stamford Park is a place made dangerous by regular visitations from drug-runners
from the Midlands, and needles are occasionally found in the street on the corner of
Victoria Road. The continuing mix of fact and fantasy lives on unchallenged by any
intimate real knowledge that might have been possible in a more publically engaged
and involved local neighbourhood in an earlier post-war moment.
We do not have the kind of dislocation in the English suburb that is routinely
experienced on council estates on weekend and weekday evenings. But the experience
of burglary and car-theft is now relatively widespread, and the level of fear of other
forms of crime or incivility unmistakable. Our argument here is that the fear and
anxiety about crime and incivility is now much closer to home for the privatized
populations of our Victorian middle-class suburbs than it was only five years ago, and
certainly much more pronounced than it is in the serene suburban estates of North
America. It is not at all clear how this fearful sense of implosion of the suburb—by
crime, by the feared Other (in this instance, the 'dangerous classes' of inner city
Manchester) can be resolved in present economic conditions: what seems clear is that
the residents of suburbs like Hale will turn, first, to privatized solutions. The suburban
idyll will be transformed, steadily but ineluctably, into a fortress retreat.
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Private Homes and Public Others: An Analysis of Talk About Crime in Suburban South Manchester in The Mid-1990s

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Private Homes and Public Others: An Analysis of Talk About Crime in Suburban South Manchester in The Mid-1990s

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BRIT.J. CRIMINOL. VOL.35 NO.

PRIVATE HOMES AND PUBLIC OTHERS

* Professor of Sociology, University of Salford, Greater Manchester.

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Victoria Road at Night

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LOUTS RULE OK!

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Noise and Rumour

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Buying Peace of Mind in the Suburb

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Crime and the English Suburb in the Post-War Period

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(as emphasized throughout this paper)—is a critical issue of cultural as well as

Local Crime and Local Struggles

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Global Problem, Local Suburb

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