When Bob and Nina said they were moving to the Isle of Dogs, people thought they had gone mad. It was 1980 and they had recently married. Much of the island was still scrubland and empty warehouses. Flying above the year before, Michael Heseltine had peered from the window of his helicopter and declared: “Nothing’s happening — something must be done.”
Having accepted a council house where few others were willing to move, the newlyweds discovered a friendly working-class community living on estates built following the Second World War. When Margaret Thatcher kickstarted the peninsula’s redevelopment in 1988, Bob found work as a builder. Standing at the base of a 39-story tower on Wednesday afternoon, he points to the roads and drains which mark out his contribution to the global financial centre now stretching out around his home.
Then, the area began to decline. “It used to be lovely,” says Nina. “It’s been going downhill for 10 years. The police never come. If we owned our house, we’d move. There is no community here anymore.”
Instead, at night, they see young men inhaling nitrous oxide balloons behind the wheels of their cars. A local gang recently attacked the house next door to them, smashing in its windows and setting fire to a vehicle outside. The police took an hour to arrive. If they were quoted in the press, they tell me, they would face “reprisals”. Bob and Nina are not their real names.
On Wednesday, however, the police did come to the Isle of Dogs. They lined up on either side of the street outside the Britannia Hotel. The Home Office were requisitioning the building to house asylum seekers, and the previous day a group of protesters had gathered. Many believed the immigrants would be moved in from Epping, where the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl by a man at the Bell Hotel has sparked weeks of protest.
For Bob and Nina, this marked a final betrayal. Their son had been forced to move away from the Island, as locals still refer to it, by soaring property prices. If he were to request a council house as his parents once had, there would be 1,500 people ahead of him in the queue. For now, he lives in a one-bedroom flat in Bow with six-month-old twins and a five-year-old. “They’re unvetted,” says Bob, “…and they get houses straight away.”
While the Government’s use of three-star hotels to house asylum seekers has proved controversial for years, recent protests in Epping, whipped up by various actors, have galvanised a wider movement. In Diss, Norfolk, a demonstration was held outside the Park Hotel following news this week that it would no longer house families but single men. Further rallies are planned there, as well as at the Brook Hotel in Bowthorpe, near Norwich, and in Waterlooville, Hampshire, where asylum seekers will be housed in a vacant high street shop.
Peter Golds, a Conservative councillor who represents the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, fears the requisitioning of the Britannia Hotel will spark community tensions. He maintains the Island is diverse and happy — he lives there himself — but worries about the increasingly feverish anger of locals. He shows me messages on his phone from constituents which display a raw fury.
“It’s a government catastrophe,” Golds claims. “Would the French put them in a hotel with a sauna, chandeliers and a swimming pool? Would Meloni put them in central Rome? We’re mad.” On the nearby Barkentine Estate, he says, homes are desperately overcrowded; teens are sharing bunkbeds and “suddenly they’re seeing people getting off a boat and going into a hotel”.
“Would the French put them in a hotel with a sauna, chandeliers and a swimming pool?”
Others are angrier still. Alf, a young man in an England shirt with a patchy beard, butts in to tell us that small boat migrants should be shot on sight. You would end up with small children drowning in the Channel if you did that, pleads the councillor. He can see his happy community slipping away in front of him.
For Alf, only a government led by Nigel Farage can fix Britain now. He lives just a few streets away from the Britannia, and can remember when the area was alive with dozens of pubs and local businesses. A perfume salesman by training, he used to work in Harrods until he squeezed a female colleague’s bicep (at, he insists, her instigation) and was fired for sexual harassment. For the past 15 years he tells me he has been warning his friends about Muslims, who he insists are taught to rape and kill Christians and Jews. “I’m not Tommy Robinson,” he says. “I’m quite a shy person. I don’t like trouble, but when I see something not right I have to stand up.”
Like him, most of the protesters are locals. “The Isle of Dogs is a tight-knit community,” says Mary, as she hands out homemade signs that read, “Stop calling us far right. Protect our women and children.” Over the school summer holidays, kids will be out playing in the streets, says a man standing next to her. He believes they will not be safe if asylum seekers are moved into the hotel.
While many here are working class, others come from a very different world. One Polish man gestures to the flat he plans to buy in Wardian London, an ultra-luxury development next door to the hotel where 70% of the properties are priced at over £1.5 million. If asylum seekers are moved in, he says, he will have to reconsider.
There’s a Bangladeshi community too. They moved to the Island after the Second World War to work on its docks and fill its cheap housing. A group loiters nearby. Rocky, who grew up here, remembers the Eighties as a dangerous time. “This area used to be a no-go zone for us, we got chased out of here,” he says. When he was around seven, he wandered into the wrong neighbourhood and a group of white men in their 20s stabbed his football with a knife before holding its blade to his face.
Now, he says, different communities get along. He worries that the arrival of asylum seekers might change that. “It can cause a division and more racism.” The younger men in his group agree. “Thousands of them are arriving every day,” Rocky says of the small boat migrants. “They’re not educated, they don’t know the law. If you’re going to stick them here, it will cause an uproar. You’ll have single men harassing young girls. I can foresee migrants hanging around outside causing no good.” All of the British-born Muslims in his neighbourhood are opposed to the hotel being requisitioned, he claims. “We may be bilingual but we’re British in here,” he adds, pointing at his temple.
