Does Croydon deserve the nickname “the Cronx”?

Anyone remember the “Chav craze” of the early to mid 2000s? Early on in this blog’s history I wrote a piece called “Cursing the Darkness” which looked at websites dedicated to slagging off the poorly dressed kids who hung around some town centres; a site called ChavTowns allowed people to describe the ‘chavs’ in their town, or any town they liked (that site, and its parent site ChavScum, have long since disappeared). Croydon, the town in south London where I grew up, had an entry which described its main shopping centre as a “pikey temple” (using a racial slur for travelling people and lumping the two different types of people together), full of McDonalds and Burger Kings (which was inaccurate although there is a McDonalds, as there is in most town centres). All the websites which sprung up at that time, with names like Glasgow Survival, Sheppey Scum and Chatham Girls, are now defunct but the craze nowadays is YouTube videos focussed on everything that’s wrong with a place now compared to its golden age 40 or 50 years ago. 50 years ago, Croydon was a thriving retail centre which had a fairly new shopping centre which was busy on a Saturday and had few or no empty units. Nowadays the mall in question is a sad sight, with dozens of empty units, only a handful of big names still trading there, and whole sections cordoned off because of unsafe structures or leaky roofs. But who do the YouTubers blame? Immigrants, of course.

Croydon has been a diverse place as long as I’ve been alive. It’s South London. Old-timers will insist it’s Surrey, but it’s been part of Greater London since 1965 and was Surrey in name only before then (it was a county borough, i.e. county and district in one as were many big towns and cities). The southern part of the borough were always affluent and white; the north had big Black and Asian communities with the shops and places of worship that go with that. While Croydon’s affluent south was and remains “true blue” Tory, the north is nowadays a safe Labour seat and the central seat is marginal. Sadly, times have not been kind to Croydon, especially central Croydon. The borough put all its eggs in the retail basket, allowing an extra shopping centre to open the other side of the main shopping street from the Whitgift Centre, the bustling mall shown in the 70s footage. As well as Allders, a homegrown department store on six floors which had been around since the 1860s and at one point was Britain’s third-biggest department store behind Harrods and Selfridge’s and was the centrepiece of a nationwide chain, it had a House of Fraser, a Debenhams and an M&S, and was expecting a John Lewis to follow once Westfield opened up one of its shopping centres there. Then online shopping happened, and department stores suffered because although they offered “retail therapy”, people who just wanted to buy stuff found it easier to order it online, where you didn’t have to hunt through concession sections but could simply search for the garment you wanted in the size and colour you wanted. Then the 2010 Tory government happened, stripping local authorities of funds; then Covid happened, which resulted in the hotels some councils had invested in becoming unviable. Westfield and John Lewis never showed up; Allders and Debenhams went out of business or moved online, and Croydon council went bankrupt.

The videos, however, hold up Croydon’s woes as a sign of how Britain has declined, or been taken over by immigrants, or how society has gone to the dogs since some mythical golden age rather than as a result of the decline of the High Street more generally. One video included footage of the Whitgift Centre in the 1970s and pointed out that women in Croydon still wore skirts in the 70s and weren’t feminists. Mostly, however, the focus is on the apparent preponderance of Black and Asian people in Croydon now compared to in the past. Footage of groups of young Black men just hanging around (especially at night), various people (never white) acting ‘crazy’ with the suggestion that they are immigrants, a guy praying in an island in the middle of an empty dead-end road at night. Basically, people minding their own business, but because they’re not white, that’s scary. Then there is footage of areas with a lot of ethnic shops and Black and Asian customers going about their business, and that too is presented as a sign that they’ve “taken over”.

Having grown up in Croydon, I know there’s a lot to like about it. The town centre with its ugly concrete mini-skyscrapers has been widely derided since the 1960s but it is probably one of London’s greenest boroughs, with enormous acreage of public parks, some of it only walking distance from the town centre and most of it within an easy walk from anywhere anyone lives and an easy bike or bus ride for pretty much anyone else. Back in 1999, when I arrived back from spending two months of the summer in Cairo, I came across a letter in the Croydon Advertiser, opining that “the whole rotten apple needs condemning”; I wrote back saying that anyone who thinks Croydon is bad should spend some time there, where it’s hot all year round and it has a fraction of Croydon’s (let alone London’s) park acreage (they printed it). Most of it is every bit as safe as any other town of its size; there is the odd violent incident, but this doesn’t make it an “urban jungle” or “stab city” — the incidents make headlines precisely because they are not common. I once told an American friend that there had been a record number of stabbings in London that year, and the number was a fraction of what happened in her city (and as the average person cannot get hold of a gun, shootings are rare).

As for comparing it to the Bronx, that is also ludicrous because the Bronx is one of New York City’s five boroughs (London has 31) and roughly a sixth of the land area of New York City with a population of nearly 1.5 million (compared to Croydon borough’s population of 385,000), and while it does have a rough reputation, that stems from some of its housing projects in the south while the borough as a whole is very diverse, with richer and poorer neighbourhoods and it includes a zoo and botanical garden (which includes a tract of ancient woodland) and several universities. So if you lumped Croydon in with Sutton, Kingston, Merton and Richmond (where London’s botanical garden is located), it might merit that comparison. To call Croydon “the Cronx” because of a few stabbings and what you consider too many brown faces is an ignorant, racist slur on both places.