Adrian Short

To some it must seem the very vision of Utopia: an elegant New England-style enclave with neatly clipped lawns, docile residents and a 9pm curfew for social housing tenants aged under 15.

This is The Hamptons — not the real ones on Long Island, New York but a housing development in the south London suburb of Worcester Park.

But as ever there is trouble in paradise, or at least the contemporary spectre we call the fear of crime and “anti-social behaviour”.

Like most new developments, The Hamptons features a mix of tenures, with owner-occupiers holding homes valued up to £800,000, down through tenants in privately-rented properties and social housing tenants.

The curfew at the Hamptons comes courtesy of Twickenham-based Thames Valley Housing which runs the social housing on the estate and is implemented through its tenancy agreements. Parents of children under 15 must ensure that they’re inside after 9pm or risk losing their homes for breaking the terms of their contracts.

As a modern, progressive and socially-conscious organisation, Thames Valley Housing is keen to ensure that its policy and practice avoids prejudice and discrimination:

Thames Valley Housing believes that no person should suffer disadvantage by reason of their race, colour, ethnic or national origin, or because of their religion, gender, sexual orientation, appearance, age, disability or marital status and opposes any discrimination which denies this.

Paradoxically, it sees no conflict between this policy and a requirement of tenancy on the estate that residents under 15 must be indoors after 9pm, in contravention of their legal rights and accepted social norms.

One might expect that such a curfew would meet a fair bit of resistance from the locals, but if the Sutton Guardian is to be believed, many of them quite like it. In fact, not only are the young social housing tenants observing the curfew, but some of the adult residents too. In the words of one local mother:

We all have to be in by 9pm, it’s adults as well. They don’t want people wandering around the estate at night. But it doesn’t really bother me as I’m in by that time anyway.

Another comments that her children aren’t allowed to sit on the grass in groups of more than four because “this could be seen as intimidating”.

Very few people would defend the kind of inconsiderate and malicious misbehaviour that blights many people’s lives, whether it’s vandalism, violence or persistent late-night noise. I’ll oppose those strongly where they happen. But in the rush to be seen to clamp down strongly on “anti-social behaviour” our society seems to have forgotten the nature of society and sociability and thrown the baby out with the bathwater. If this were sex, we’d be advocating chastity as the antidote to rape.

Society and that much abused concept, “community”, arises from people living together, working together, playing together and forming numerous reciprocal relationships at varying degrees of intensity. As we’re not all (yet) a homogeneous mass of automatons, this interaction causes friction. Often this is experienced positively, as new ideas, opportunities and ways of living arrive serendipitously in our lives. Sometimes it’s negative, as others innocently or maliciously transgress our personal and collective boundaries.

In seeking to resolve these conflicts as they inevitably occur, we are forced to answer the perennial question, How should we live? The answers apply to ourselves, of course, as well as those we may consider to have done wrong. Therefore, while addressing the (perceived) misbehaviour of others, we clarify our own responsibilities towards the community and strengthen our own commitment to meet them. The Golden Rule, that we should treat others as we would like to be treated by them, remains paramount.

Using a curfew as a prophylactic against potential disorder ensures that the possibility that the normal functioning of community may be disturbed is replaced by the inevitability that it will be. To prevent people occupying common space and socialising with each other, even passing by and exchanging glances, nods and smiles, reduces the space in which real social relationships are formed and nurtured. Using rules rather than customs imposes values on people rather than allows people’s own values to be expressed. The post-9pm teenager sitting with her friend becomes a deviant and a threat, regardless of the purpose and nature of her conduct.

I’ve long believed that the real cure for disorder on our streets isn’t to scour them clean of humanity, but to fill them up with people of all ages, classes and “lifestyles”, to encourage diverse activities and to promote the notion that we as citizens have equal responsibilities to be tolerable and to tolerate the reasonable behaviour of others. The notion is as old as cities themselves and defines the very essence of citizenship. The alternatives, seen far too often in contemporary Britain, are disconnection, alienation, segregation, mistrust and a paralysing fear that becomes more potent than the feared object itself. We need an anti-curfew that fills our streets with the vast mass of well-behaved and well-intentioned people, rather than just the marginalised few that have no private space to which to retreat. It’s not the presence of bad people that creates disorder but the absence of good ones.

If community is to become a reality rather than a cute marketing euphemism we’ll all need to get out more, not less. The one thing that worries me more than those imposing curfews are the Stepford Wives (and husbands, and children) that blindly follow them, naively hoping that heaven is a quiet house in an empty street where no-one knows your name.