From Postcode Wars to Peacemaker

I found this article really interesting and it gave an insight into what goes on in the streets and the whole postcode war  and some of the reasons behind it. It was quite an emotional read because it was an actual account from a person who lived that kind of life and it wasn't just someone making up there own opinion of what they believed to be going on. I feel the need to read his actual book - Prisoner to the Streets, which will give even more insight.

 From Postcode Wars to Peacemaker

By Ben Bryant

Robyn Travis, former member of the Holly Street Boys postcode gang. Photo by Agenda at www.visualmarvelry.com.

The term “postcode wars” sounds like a lot of hype, but it’s a way of summing up a kind of inter-estate rivalry that started in Hackney in the early 2000s. The culture wasn’t entirely new. Inter-borough conflicts – Hackney-Tottenham, for example, or Brixton-Peckham – had existed since the early 1990s. The postcode wars saw these scaled down to a single postcode or estate. The idea was simple: if you strayed outside your area, and you were a part of that culture (or perhaps you were just unlucky), then you might be chased, mugged and/or beaten.

That "rep your ends" mindset spread across London, fomenting new conflicts, tracing invisible frontiers across London, forcing schoolkids into hugely inconvenient public transport detours and terrifying the media. It’s thought to have started with one rivalry between a pair of gangs from Hackney, E8, from two estates less than half a mile apart: the Holly Street Boys and the London Fields Boys. Many of the teenagers involved had gone to school together, played football together and grown up together. Fighting was just something they did, like it was and still is for a lot of teenage boys.

Robyn Travis, 27, lived most of his childhood in Tottenham before moving to the (now demolished) Holly Street Estate in Hackney in the mid-90s. He spent over a decade in gangs, during which time he was shot at, stabbed in the head, legs, back and stomach and spent six months in a prison in Jamaica for attempted drug trafficking.

Now, he’s committed to helping end gang violence, but his new memoir – titled Freedom From The Womb, Prisoner To The Streets – is all about his time in the postcode wars, and his presence at their genesis back in 1999, when the Holly Street Boys began their rivalry with the London Fields Boys.

Full interview at link below

Article from http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/interview-londons-original-postcode-warrior-robyn-travis-e8-hackney