It is what it is - in defence of Northolt

I'm not sure if this happens when you type your town's name into Google, but 'stabbing' is often the suggested second word after mine.

I can't say I've ever felt poor or particularly deprived - shoutout to my parents for not having more kids! Funnily enough I didn't even realise I was working-class until my 15 minutes of educational social mobility in a "nice school" in Hammersmith, from 16 to 18. So I spent my going out years in posh parts of West London, then Kennington and every bar in Waterloo with my foundation friends. Even before that, since there's very little to go and do in Northolt and my high school friends lived in neighbouring Perivale, I only very vaguely participated in the places surrounding my house. The park was nice, the new library was nice, that was all. I haven't even been to the 'new' leisure centre in the 10 years since it was built. It took until lockdown summer for me to go walking in and exploring my local area. There was the park with the "Pretty Church" I keep going on about, which I only discovered after 12 years (first I lived in Poland, then Harlesden, Perivale, Greenford and finally Northolt).

I guess I was a little naive and just a tad ignorant of the realities of my town; it only truly hit me that I'm from a "low income area" with "medium levels of crime" (CrystalRoof 2021) while researching for the Untold Tales project. It wasn't exactly heart-warming to find out that both wards of Northolt make it into the top ten most dangerous wards of Ealing. I suppose it's all relative, considering Ealing out of the 33 boroughs of London is in place 15, but maybe just maybe, it's not as benign of an area as I always thought.

Honestly, going through my usual phases of research, from glimmer of interest to fully engrossed, obsessed and won't-shut-up-about-it ended up being problematic this time around; things were hitting a little too close to home (no pun intended). Seeing all the mean things people had to say about Northolt, struggling to find any positive articles while plenty reported an array of criminal activity, made me quite uncomfortable. Although I was aware that my shithole is a shithole when I started the project and was very prepared to dress it up in my usual cynical, self-deprecation based humour, I thought its worst crime would be the fact that it's boring. It got to a point where I had to stop doing the project because I got too overwhelmed, anxious about a future where after third year, I'm 'stuck' there again. Then there was the shame of presenting this place to my double-barreled coursemates and obviously middle class tutors.

The truth is, there is no such thing as the truth. There are facts and statistics, but then there are experiences and interpretations, and I guess Untold Tales (not to be cheesy). This website is a sort of archive for all the things I found out about Northolt in the three weeks, good, bad, boring, because there is so little positive or even neutral information about it out there on the internet.

Recently I went back to collect my brand new, first ever British passport from my parents' house YAAAY! - sorry that's not the point. I went back to Northolt with a head full of worrying statistics and a Google maps mental image of 'rough areas' previously off my radar. I expected it to be tainted by the negativity I had been immersing myself in for the last weeks, but guess what? Northolt felt normal. It felt like home; and it was green, a tiny bit bleak but in a mundane comforting way. Everyone was commuting to their closer-to-London jobs; people jogged in the park. Nobody got stabbed, not that I'm aware of anyway.

References:

CrystalRoof (2021).Crime Rates in Church Road, Northolt, UB5 5BE Available at: https://crystalroof.co.uk/report/postcode/UB55BE/crime (Accessed: 7 October 2021).