A 14-year-old boy outside Peckham Library looks around furtively, checking to see if he is being watched. "It's the gangs man," he says in reply to my question about whether he has to be careful on the streets. Is he scared of being spotted or just nervous talking to a journalist? He doesn't hang around to explain.
Herein lies the difficulty of trying to draw conclusions about growing up in Peckham a decade after the death of Damilola Taylor. The 10-year-old schoolboy tragically lost his life on 27 November after being stabbed in the thigh with a broken bottle by a group of teenagers. Whether the area has improved depends largely on the individuals you speak to.
Gangs and violence
Exploring the area with local people and police over two bright autumn days, Peckham seems bustling, friendly and well-cared for. It is certainly not the crime-steeped milieu of US drama The Wire that Chris Grayling, the then shadow home secretary, last year claimed many of Britain's inner cities had become.
But the problems with youth violence remain. On Monday 6 September, at about 9:30pm, a promising 18-year-old footballer called Rio McFarlane was shot dead a few streets from Peckham High Street. Local rumours suggest that he was not in a gang himself but had stopped to talk to friends who were gang members. When a rival gang arrived to carry out a revenge mission, he was hit by a bullet. The tragedy prompted England captain Rio Ferdinand - a friend of the victim's family - to speak out: "Rio didn't have any connection to gangs, yet was killed through gang violence. It's mad."
It is not hard to find young people who have experienced similar tragedies, although they did not all happen in Peckham. A 14-year-old girl on her way home from school with three friends, recalls a friend's sudden death: "A year or two ago my friend was dropping his little brother in Brixton. A gang stopped him and asked him where he's from. When he said Peckham, they stabbed him and killed him," she says.
The girls worry about people carrying weapons on the streets but do not believe that it is necessary to join a gang for guaranteed self-protection. And while they accept that female gang members are becoming more common, often because of encouragement from boys, they are adamant that gangs hold no attraction for them. "Boys say if you're going to be my ride then you're going to have to be in my gang. But you can resist," adds one.
Two 12-year-old boys who go to Harris Academy at Peckham say they are aware of gangs in the area but would never join them. They say that bullying before and after school, which was once common, now seems to be under control.
Surprisingly, the flagship Damilola Taylor Centre (DTC) is currently shut, with a sign saying "DTC is closed for refurbishment. No access." There is nothing to tell people when it might reopen.
Nineteen-year-old AJ, a Southwark Young Advisor (see box), has his own theory. "You've got young people going there to play football but you've still got other boys who are gang members going there and trying to influence the younger generation," he says.
After a couple of serious incidents close to the centre, the council decided to temporarily shut the facility to both protect staff and send a message to young gang members that their behaviour would not be tolerated, he believes.
A spokeswoman for the council strenuously denies the claim. She says the centre has been closed because the sports hall was being replaced between 6 September and 31 October, and was due to reopen last week.
Weapons of choice
Gary Trowsdale, managing director of the Damilola Taylor Trust, which was set up by Damilola's parents, says not enough has been done to address youth violence in the area. He blames the police for being too weak on the "bad apples", and the "youth industry" for trying to mentor those who are beyond rehabilitation rather than trying to help the majority of young people who may be struggling, but are keen to do the right thing. "I know the way this sector works and it disgusts me because it's an industry," he says.
Trowsdale is also critical of the Damilola Taylor Centre: "They don't work with us. That's pretty abysmal really isn't it? There's a lot of problems around that area - the young boy Rio McFarlane was shot just down the road from there. To be honest, if they don't work with us, they should lose the name. Why can't it be called the Peckham Youth Centre, for example?"
To shift its focus back to young people's achievements, the trust launched the Spirit of London Awards last year. The inaugural event was held on the anniversary of Damilola's death and will be repeated this month.
Wayne Chance, borough commander for Southwark Police, believes there has been a massive improvement in relations between the community and police in Peckham in recent years. He accepts that youth violence is still the main problem, with knives now being the weapon of choice after the introduction of stronger penalties for those found carrying a firearm were introduced. But Chance says that knife crime awareness programmes, amnesties, and the police's regular use of stop and search, has brought down the use of knives by 24 per cent between April and September this year.
Another development this year is that Ricky Preddie, who along with brother Danny was convicted of Damilola's manslaughter, has been released after serving only four years of an eight-year sentence.
At the time of his trial, there were arguments suggesting that the Preddies would serve their time and return as conquering heroes. But young people on the streets of Peckham today seem to regard them as loathsome thugs rather than the glamorous crime bosses the tabloid press made them out to be.
Young Advisor Emanuel Candengue, 22, says: "I live in Peckham and nobody respects Ricky Preddie. The media are giving him a profile but on the street young people don't actually care about him. If it was a situation where he killed another gang member then maybe yeah he's bad. But he killed an innocent boy."
Working with police
Sergeant Mike Bruget, of the Safer Neighbourhoods team, who has worked in Peckham for the past 13 years, says the tragedy of Damilola's death gave impetus to those who wanted change: "Ten years ago the whole Peckham ward was not a pleasant place to be living. That has changed. Definitely there is less crime but we've still got a core group of youths who are attracted to gang culture. They don't do many things to the general public but they do things to each other. So it raises the fear of crime," he says.
But a key difference now is that the community - having once been hostile to the police - now sees them as part of the solution. "It's quite strange because a few years ago the community resented seeing black youths stopped. Now, the majority of black members of the committee say more stop and search should be done. At the end of the day, the people being shot and killed are mainly black youths. But it's still important that stop and search is done in a respectful manner."
Despite some evident improvements, there will always be those who disagree that progress has been made. A white family living opposite the Damilola Taylor Centre believes "the area is getting better but the people are getting worse", contrasting the improved buildings with what they perceive to be feral youths running amok.
While shootings and gang rivalries still flare up from time to time, overall life seems better for the majority. Damilola, the boy who wanted to be a doctor when he grew up, would be 20 if he was alive today. His was a tragic end, slashed with a bottle and left to die in a concrete stairwell. But his life and death seems to have spurred Peckham's inhabitants and authorities to build a new, more hopeful area in which to live.
"I remember him. I was four when Damilola died," says one girl near Peckham Library. "It's good he's been remembered and his legacy has led to something useful."
YOUNG ADVISORS BRING ABOUT CHANGE
The Young Advisors initiative was developed within the Department of Communities and Local Government in 2005 to encourage young people to have an influence on decision-making and local services.
In Southwark, there are 17 Young Advisors aged between 16 and 21. In the flesh, they are articulate, passionate and keen to change young lives. They spend up to three months in a designated area getting to know their peers on the street, as well as separately advising community leaders, agencies and local organisations on how to engage young people.
Emanuel Candengue, 22, has advised the police on how to carry out stop and searches in a more sensitive way to bring the black community on board. "For three years I've been training police officers. Back in the day a young person wouldn't get a chance to do something like this," he says.
Having been stopped recently himself, Candengue knows that the training has worked. And he also talks to his peers to relay the police's side of the argument: "I go to young people and say that sometimes it might be your fault if you get stopped - your attitude might stink."
Essentially, the Young Advisors are trying to broaden young people's horizons and allow them to see opportunities rather than limitations. "I said to a kid recently 'meet me at London Bridge' and he didn't know where it was. It's only down the road but he'd never left his area," says Candengue.
