The Case of Stephen Lawrence

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Stephen Lawrence’s parents were migrants from Jamaica. Neville Lawrence came to Britain in search of work in 1960, when he was eighteen. Doreen came at around the same time as the ten-year-old daughter of a large immigrant family. Neville worked as a plasterer and decorator; Doreen, after five or six years at school, as a clerk in the National Westminster Bank. They met at a concert in 1972 and married in the same year. Stephen, their first child, was born in 1974 and was followed by another son, Stuart, and a daughter, Georgina. By this time the Lawrences had settled in Plumstead, in an estate of council houses dominated by a tower block. This, the Nightingale Estate, named possibly after the nurse or possibly after the songbird, is the kind of place that exemplifies the limitations (and excesses) of British municipal planning in the 1960s, but the Lawrences rented a house on the edge of the estate in one of its pleasanter streets. They did well. They worked, they saved, they went to church. Eventually, they bought their house. By 1993, they had enjoyed their average share of British fortune and misfortune. The recession in the building trade in the early 1990s had put Neville Lawrence out of work for a year. Doreen Lawrence, on the other hand, had gone back to work after ten years at home looking after her children. She had progressed from serving school dinners to looking after children with special educational needs. Her colleagues recognized her gifts and her intelligence and encouraged her to get the qualifications that would allow her promotion. In 1992 she began her first year of a humanities course at what is now the University of Greenwich.

The Lawrences believed in good behaviour and they were, by modern standards, strict with their children. They wanted them to get on. The children grew up to be bright and well behaved; Stephen, since his death, has often been described as a ‘model teenager’. He had been a cub and a scout, he studied hard (homework came before television) and had ambitions to qualify as an architect. Besides school and the friendships formed there, his world was mostly an extension of his parents’ world, which was defined by three communities: the extended family, and especially Doreen’s relatives; the local Methodist church; and the family’s neighbours on the Nightingale Estate. The first was black, the second a mixture of black and white, the third mainly white. But that was to see things racially, and the Lawrences were neither defensive nor assertive about their race. They got on with their white fellow churchgoers and particularly well with their white next-door neighbours, who had children of similar ages. They could be (and were later to be) portrayed as an example of typical British family life, even though this respectable model was dwindling everywhere, among all classes and races: the Christian, undivorced, two-parent family who wanted the best for their children. Because of these virtues, they could be set against a notion of black life in Britain popular among white people: typified by lone teenage mothers, educational under-achievement, unemployment and criminality. And so, depending through which stereotypical prism they were viewed, they were an unremarkable family in one way and a remarkable one in another.

But perhaps their most remarkable quality was this: that they had sustained their belief in the fairness of British society against a political tide which among non-white communities ran generally in the opposite direction, and they had sustained it while living in the London borough of Greenwich.

The world knows Greenwich for its meridian, its mean time, its naval college and museum, its royal palace and its historic observatory. It grew up as a maritime outpost of London, supplying the Royal Navy with ships, guns, sailors, charts and victuals. Fine Georgian terraces climb up among its parkland. Beyond them, over the horizon that is available from the river, lies a Greenwich which the world knows less about, the residential hinterland: Plumstead, Eltham and Mottingham. These suburbs are neither bad nor mean, nor even lacking a history of their own. The medieval kings of England spent their summers in a palace in Eltham. Bob Hope was born in Eltham; W. G. Grace, the most celebrated cricketer of all time, lived in Eltham. Until late in the last century most of it was fields; early in this century it became a refuge for the self-improver, the upwardly mobile working-class who were quitting inner London for houses with gardens that offered easier access to the countryside of Kent, ‘the garden of England’. Stand at the spot where Stephen Lawrence waited for his bus, where Dickson Road joins Well Hall Road, and you can see the unmistakable stamp of the architects and planners of the 'Garden City’ movement and the brand of idealism which tried to bring rural England, Olde England, to the town. The houses have steep roofs and dainty windows–the English cottage was their inspiration–and stand well back behind trees, wide lawns and hedges. Dickson Road twists down westward into a jumble of gardened streets. It is supposed to feel like a village; and it does.

It is called the Progress Estate, and it was built during the First World War to house the thousands of munitions workers who had been recruited by the Woolwich Arsenal and who took the tram along Well Hall Road each morning to make shells and bombs. The trams went long ago, and then the arsenal closed along with many other riverside factories; the story of work in Eltham over the past thirty years is common to the western world. Employment, especially for young males, can be difficult to find. But the Progress Estate–perhaps unlike some of the people who live on it–has not been much damaged by this transformation. Architecture students come to admire it. And, partly because the local authority which once owned the houses obeyed the wishes of the inhabitants that the estate should house their kith and kin, it is still nearly one hundred per cent white.

The white boys who killed Lawrence ran down Dickson Road. Were they running home?