Soon I will be moving back to South London to work as an Assistant Curate in the Church of England. I have to admit that London was somewhere that we ended up through no choice or design of our own and, though my father was originally from Lambeth, I have often felt like a resident alien amidst the tumult of humanity. However, while on my sick bed this morning I watched this program on the BBC iPlayer:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01jt9bv/
If you can then I urge you to watch it, especially if you have a connection with London and its communities. It broke my heart to see what has been done to certain parts of South London in the name of progress, the fracturing of lives, families, communities and urban topography (yes I do care about geography, people and places are intimately linked). Hearing the stories of injustices suffered and inflicted, wounds that have never healed and scars that are likely to be with us for many years to come.
I thought it was a well made documentary, you hear from a number of different parties and, although the emphasis is placed on the community, there didn’t seem to have been an attempt to vilify the councillor involved. I was particularly impressed with the small coverage of a Christian pentecostal church where, through the art of good editing, there was an implied spiritual dimension to the consequences of the injustices acted on the community and, at the very end, a sense of hope restored for the future.
