TOWN AND OUT

In a single generation, says David Lovibond, drugs and drink have turned
Devizes into a place of incoherent rage

In better days the world left Wiltshire alone.

Blighted by neither coastline nor famous hills, the county was merely on
the way to somewhere else. In the heart of this fortunate backwater,
Devizes was the very archetype of an English market town. There is a
castle, a square big enough to have burned at least one Protestant martyr
in, and fine curving terraces of Georgian houses paid for by Wiltshires fat
cornlands.

It is many years since yeoman farming gave Devizes a gentlemanly and
prosperous air, but the faded little town was comfortable with its long
decline. One by one the 37 pubs closed down, the barracks went, the assizes
were lost, the squires, broken by taxes, sold up their town houses and
became extinct, market day was turned over to tea towels and fruit scones,
and Devizes found itself quaint a sleepy rural place innocent in its
assurance of safety.

Then came the drugs.

Easing in with the 1960s hippies and New Age naifs who crowded Wiltshires
numinous landscapes in search of invented gods, cannabis was the harbinger
of a traumatic cultural shift that has transformed the town from Barbara
Pym to NYPD Blue in a single generation. Not that drugs were the only catalyst.

In the dogdays between giros, cheap drink supplemented the dope, and by the
time I got to know Devizes 20 years ago the cider heads had already
established their lairs of vomit and scabby dogs by Viscount Sidmouths
fountain.

But it is only recently that suicidal drunkenness and the ubiquity of hard
drugs associated with inner cities have appeared in the town and made
street crime and even gang fights commonplace.

The Home Office lists Wiltshire as the second safest county in England,
despite an increase of 20 per cent in reported crime over the past eight
years. In Devizes, though, police figures show an astonishing 77 per cent
growth in crime over the same period.

Lawlessness on this scale means discarded hypodermics by the swings and
blinged-up youths in fast cars parked nose to tail in the square, windows
down and trading.

It means an old red bus camped behind the town asylum, open for business
and supplying the schizophrenics with the pills to keep them mad. It is
shop windows smashed on Saturday nights and the town centre a no-go area
every night.

It is mini-riots outside the takeaways at closing time, and swirling groups
of boozed-up teenagers in broad daylight shouting and threatening anyone
who comes near. It is beggars at the cash-dispensers, mugged tourists,
burnt-out cars, blizzards of litter, bikes ridden unchecked through
pedestrians and the stink of piss in the alleys.

It means CCTV cameras at every corner, and never meeting a strangers eye.
And for me it means that my local, the ancient and once wonderful pub where
General Wolfe recruited soldiers for his victorious campaigns in Canada, is
frequently infested by redundant cannon fodder; hopeless old-young men
gruesomely decorated with purple tattoos, uniformed in combats, woolly hats
and hoodies, braying like donkeys and looking for trouble.

It has become a place where extreme violence is only an unwise glance away;
a commotion of running feet, flailing fists and a victim staggering, his
head a red cap of blood.

There are the usual initiatives in response to the gathering chaos.

The police mounted Operation Ardent to remove class-A dealers from the
streets and, after months of planning, nine low-level players were convicted.

But there was no Mr Big, and the gaps left by the minnows simply created
opportunities for others.

New antisocial behaviour ordersare promised to chase the worst yahoos from
the off-licences, and every lamppost in the town centre is decorated with
little pictures of beer pots and imprecations against the evils of public
drinking.

But what most of us would like to see is a dear old bobby on the beat once
in a while.

The police are not dealing with the problem of drugs and drink in the town
very well,says Councillor Tony Duck, former chairman of the Constituency
Conservative Association. And Im not talking about policemen on a Saturday
night, but a failure of management.Councillor Duck left the party to set up
Devizes Guardians in response to the weakness of local Tory policies for
the town. He says that the sight of 12-year-old children drinking in the
streets has become unremarkable and describes town pubs as resembling
Dantes vision of Hell. He mentions poor parenting as a cause, but says that
the root problem is local authority Kennet District Councils housing
policy. Kennet recognised that the areas house prices were rising and
decided that 50 per cent of all new houses had to be affordable housing.
Eighty-seven per cent of new houses in Kennet are coming to Devizes, which
represents a disproportionate amount of social housing and a
disproportionate percentage of socially inadequate people.

The town has grown by more than a third in the past ten years, and the
council set up a Community Safety Partnership, which brings together the
police and all the usual action teams and pressure groups to muse on the
towns descent into anarchy.

Community development manager Alan Houghton is less than sanguine about the
Partnerships prospects.

The deferential attitude of the working class has gone. Everyone, through
television, has an idea of how they want to be treated, and if they dont
get what they want they get angry.

There is a real local need for social housing, but how many of the houses
we build are going to local people?

We have people coming in from outside who do not necessarily expect to get
a job, but park up in their flats and take advantage of all the benefits.

I see people walking round town now who I wouldnt expect to see in an
English market town and I wonder why they are here.

As Devizes slips into a Hogarthian nightmare, some sort of exposition might
be of more use than another capital-lettered, Guardian-advertised
initiative. Housing policy aside, employment is not an issue: jobs are
low-paid, but unemployment at 2 per cent is well below the national
average. There isnt much in the way of entertainment, but then apart from a
little weekend squaddie-bashing there never has been. As Alan Houghton
implied, the expectations of the ill-educated have been stimulated to the
point where ambition far exceeds ability; and there is something in that. I
think, though, there may be another reason.

Like everywhere else in England, Devizes has lost its homogeneity. The
pervasive blight of multiculturalism has, for the young especially, killed
off any feeling of a personal relationship with their surroundings.
Children at the local comp may have an excellent grasp of Englands
pernicious role in the slave trade and know how it felt to be an oppressed
Muslim in British India, but they wont have a clue that Alfred the Great
stopped the Viking hordes just down the road, or that the hill they see
from their classroom windows is a Civil War battleground. The youths
hanging round the fountain, or drifting listlessly from chip shop to pub to
street corner, have no sense of ownership of the history that made their
town. They have lost the instinct of belonging that their grandparents took
for granted; the connection between people and place has been broken.

In Devizes, my town, young people cannot respect what they are not allowed
to understand. They occupy the streets, filled with incoherent rage,
disaffected, culturally and politically disfranchised, and turn to their
barbarisms for bleak consolation because they can find no other way.