This is total codswallop. You _are_ making most of it up. You aren't a Londoner, that's pretty obvious, just an outsider who visited the place for a bit without knowing anything about it. Maybe you believed the shit some clueless middle-class provincials (briefly here between graduating and going back to the home counties to spawn), or some wanna-be 'gangsta' youth who wanted to sound 'street' told you?
There are dimwit kids, there are stabbings, obviously, like any big city, and there's a tiny element of truth in the 'postcode' thing (but it's still exaggerated, gangs don't exist in the nearly-formal, structured way they have done in some US cities) but, really 'vast areas' 'where the population is almost exclusively black'? 'ghettos'? You give yourself away there. You _have_ got to be some white middle-class provincial or foreigner who sees London as a place fully of scary dark-skinned folk and people with funny accents.
Don't speak as if you are an 'expert' on somewhere you clearly don't know at all.
i've landed in brighton the 3rd of january 2005. i've lived there until late 2006 and then moved to church street, in croydon, where i spent nearly 2 years. then between 2007 and december 2010 i've lived in brixton (Lorn court), East Ham (Napier rd) / Plaistow, and tower bridge. I worked for 2 years as a sweeper for Veolia, which brought me to work in croydon, in peckham, in southwark, lambeth, vauxhall, kennington, camberwell, stockwell, clapham, thornton heath, i even cleaned around teh west ham stadium.
I shopped at brixton market. i can name every shop around seven sisters and none of them have white, british owners. go to the whitgift shopping center in croydon and tell me what percentage of peple are white. White people in croydon - the ones who go party at Yates - all come from those four office buildings near the station, but everywhere else it's ALL indians, pakistani, africans, and so on.
i then wisely decided to bail out and went to scotland, which is paradise, compared to london, and right now i'm enjoying being in a cloud of rain and misery in Poole.
i've had a 16yo kid thraten to stab me because i wouldn't give him a cigarette. i've seen the postcode wars. I've seen the riots, the furniture shop that got burned down in croydon was at the corner of church street, the corner of the building i used to live in. i've seen two churches beat the crap out of each other because "my church is better than yours", in the middle of the street, in ffront of the O2 in brixton, right opposite the police station. i've had to take "cv training classes" at A4E in brixton road and seen people who could not write their own name.
i was in london. i wore rockawear and fubu and time is money. out of the people i knew in croydon,
six seven were british - two fishmonger guys from the church street fishmonger, two waitresses from Connors in church street, one of my landlords, and a guy i used to sweep with. EVERYONE else was of a non-british ethnicity.
My good friend terry, who lives in N7, is white. Proper, old skool british. Drinks PG Tips. N7 is a bastion of white residents, and even then every shop along the main roads is foreign, be it pakistani, indian, african, caribbean, iranian, or chinese. White residents in these areas still exist, but they are not the people you see in the street. Try going to brixton market, to croydon, to south peckham, to the elephant & castle shopping center, to westfield, and tell me what you see.