Finsbury Park is a neighbourhood often characterised as ‘superdiverse’ or noted for its ‘working-class flavour’. Right in the centre of Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington North constituency, the smallest in the country by area, it is dense with successive migrant communities – most notably Irish, Afro-Caribbean, Greek and Turkish Cypriot, Turkish, Kurdish, and more recently Somali and Algerian. Now a hub of the North African community, the area has been experiencing rapid gentrification thanks in part to its position as a transport hub, the patchwork shops and restaurants of Seven Sisters Road and the surrounding estates now standing in the shadows of City North, a ‘landmark cosmopolitan development’ next to Finsbury Park tube station.
For many of those receiving the food – either picking up or being delivered to – as well as the volunteers from the mutual aid group, this was their first interaction with Muslim Welfare House and the community it typically serves.
People are so good and true. They deserve leaders worthy of that, who will uplift examples like this instead of telling them who to be angry at and who to blame.
A.
If we want, not deserve, better, we have to elect them.