Hostile Environment by Maya Goodfellow

Author:Maya Goodfellow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

4

Legitimate Concerns

how long must we make a case for migration? recount the times it has carried this country on its neck so this nation could bask in the glory of its so called greatness? how loud should we chant our stories of beauty of struggle of grit? write all the ways we are lovely and useful across our faces before we become a hymn sheet singing of desperation?

Selina Nwulu, The Audacity of Our Skin

When a Love Productions television crew arrived on Derby Road, Southampton, in spring 2014, it’s unlikely they knew their documentary shoot would soon become the focus of a national media storm. As they initially started work for what was a Channel 4 project, more and more locals cottoned on to what the programme was about, and a sense of unease began to rise. Camera-people, producers and residents of the street who had agreed to take part in filming were met with impassioned protest and some isolated threats of violence.

A tumultuous meeting between community members and the production team, which had been organised to dispel growing tensions, ended with no resolution. Some of Derby Road’s residents ended up making a trip to London so they could protest outside Channel 4’s headquarters. Within months, the crew were forced to abandon filming.

The TV company had been set to make a six-part series that would be an ‘honest look at how immigration has changed one street’.1 But producers were left with only enough footage to make a one-hour documentary, Immigration Street, which, following on from the highly controversial Benefits Street, was ample reason to explain why residents didn’t want the documentary to be made in the first place.

People from all over the world have come to call Derby Road their home. In the 1950s and ’60s, new arrivals from India, the Caribbean and parts of the African continent moved onto this one street, and in the past two decades they were joined by people from Lithuania and Romania. It is an ideal place to explore the UK’s rich history of immigration. But local councillor Satvir Kaur, who was heavily involved in the protest, explains that the majority of residents were especially opposed to filming because it was a time when ‘the debate of immigration was being sensationalised on their doorstep’. Rafique, a shopkeeper on the street who featured significantly in the final cut, cautioned during the one-hour programme, ‘The media, the way they portray immigrants coming over, they only talk about the negative side.’2

Accustomed to seeing migrants being depicted as untrustworthy, inhuman and unwanted, Derby Road residents didn’t trust that their lives would be documented without a side-dish of disparagement. You could catch glimpses of these anxieties in the final cut; fear of how they might be misrepresented seemed to be a driving factor of their protest. These are people too often talked about, not talked to. And even when they are, too rarely are their worries treated as important. Usually it’s worries about immigration that are placed at the centre of discussion.

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