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Originally Posted by Falbe Publishing
Well, I went and followed the link. Very well written essay! I am fascinated by this term "chav". Are these perhaps soccer hooligan stock? Is this British code for "white trash"?
Thanks for sharing the link. It was most charming.
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I get the impression that chavs are a New Town phenomenon. In the post-war years of the 50's and leading into the 60's a number of New Towns started to spring up around London and the south-east here in the UK. North of London is Stevenage and south of London is Crawley, the latter sandwiched between London and Brighton on the south coast. There are others and some were planned as dormitory towns for London where the less well off or otherwise disadvantaged could get a home (many were council owned houses) which was cheap to rent and had some form of public transport serving the suburbs. This, at a time when car ownership was a luxury or a higher value outlay which many of those families could not afford. The New Towns were built on the designs of very impersonal architecture, cheap materials (a lot of concrete) and the houses all looked the same. In a sense it flattened the class conscious layers of society and everywhere looked the same. With that came the realisation that there was no identity and the New Towns became the laughing-stock of many cruel jokes and anyone who lived in a New Town had a tough burden to carry. True, the types of people who moved to them may have been honest, hard working folk but they were not the types you'd associate with university and many were probably basically educated.
This I think, is where the angst of New Town life crept in. The chav is not necessarily a soccer hooligan. They have their badge of office which in its so-called purist form is to dress in Burberry clothes, the most prominent is the Burberry-style baseball cap. This is quite ironic as Burberry is a brand associated with style and mostly bought by the well-at-heeled. Over time, they collected into street packs and to aid anonynimity the caps were replaced with hooded jackets. But the essential facts remain. Most chavs will leave school at the earliest age they can. Explusions are not unknown. Most have no useful education that lets them aspire to white-collar employment. Teen pregnancy is almost a way of life for a lot of them. They are associated with antisocial behaviour, often petty crime, gang fights, and even as young as ten-year olds are on the streets late into the evening and drinking. There is a sort of feral existence. There are some suburbs that we would never go to out of choice. My wife is a community nurse and she visits the homes that have this awful legacy dating back to the 50's and 60's and some of the tales she tells me are quite harrowing and often quite distressing. That legacy is passed onto the children. It has become almost a generational curse.
So chavs are a low-class group with few aspirations and few opportunities to progress and make things better for themselves. Are they white trash? They are a dumpster breed for certain. To be honest, the son of some people we know was a chave-come-yob and served time in prison or a young offenders institute, I'm not sure which. When he was released, he drifted in and out of drugs, halfway houses that sort of thing. He reached a point where he decided to change his life. He went to evening classes and over a few years he got his high school qualifications of GCSE and a couple of A-levels. He's about 24 now and he's enrolled at university to study geology. As a former chav he's one of the rare success stories.
Soccer hooligans are not a thing of the past but their influence is very much eroded. Everytime the local teams or international teams got to Europe to play soccer there is often a number of arrests. That's probably fuelled by too much alcohol and taunts from opposition fans. But soccer hooligans are rarely chavs.
You are right, it is a most
charming site.
