LONDON LETTER
435
areas where the seamier kind of property dealer has been operating
at huge profits.
Chief among these are London W. 11 and W. 12, now known as
Rachmansland, in dishonor of the memory of the lover of Mandy
Rice-Davies, now deceased, whose satrapy this sinister area was. I have
described this district in two novels
(Absolute Beginners
and
Mr. Love
&
Justice)
and my report, of five years ago now, was greeted at the
time with incredulity. This zone largely consists of vast bourgeois terraces,
put up by Victorian speculative builders, which the bourgeoisie never
cared for, so that they soon fell into decline and were sublet in flats
and single rooms.
Tenants of long standing are protected by law from evictions, but
such is the pressure on housing in the capital-and so convenient is
this area to whores and gangsters (not to mention harassed colored
imrnigrants)-that every device was used by Rachman and his as–
sociates to buyout, or frighten out, sitting tenants, so that the rooms
could then be let far more advantageously. This happened on a colossal
scale, and may have been one of the factors leading to the race riots of
1958. For not only were many of the older cheap-rate tenants replaced
by immigrants paying three or four times as much for the same
premises, but one of Rachman's stratagems was to install ebullient
Caribbeans in a poor white house so as to scare out the more timid
of the older tenantry.
In surprising-and heartening- reaction to these tactics, a number
of grass-root tenants' associations came into being to fight together for
the victims' rights. At the time of penning this, one Mrs. Cobb, a
barman's wife, who is apparently in arrears with her rent, is resisting
a siege by the landlord's bailiffs from behind barbed wire, through
which food is passed to her daily by sympathetic neighbors. But I
predict that such occurrences will become more infrequent, for the
latest tactic of the landlords is to reconvert their premises in this area
yet another time, and turn them back into what they were intended
to
be in the first place-substantial houses and flats for the middle classes.
For the lettings to semi-criminal tenants have, since the recent fuss,
become too perilous, and the demand for suitable bourgeois properties
is still high.
"Direct action" of the kind adopted by the tenants' aSSOCIatlOns
may not be unconnected with the recent marked upsurge of anarchism
among the young-in their tactics, that is, if not always in their
conscious philosophy. This should not really surprise us, for it is often
