Why we love Woolwich

Woolwich is an amazing place. It’s where the Labour party was founded as a mass membership organization. The Woolwich Provident was one of Britain’s first building societies. The Royal Arsenal Coop one of our first cooperative societies. Woolwich had the second Polytechnic in the country, created with the aim of providing education for working adults.

Woolwich is my nearest big town centre, where I shop and go to meet friends. In the last few days, for many people, its name has come to mean the location of a terror attack. On Twitter and in much of the press, “Woolwich” signifies poverty and violence. It’s a picture of the place I don’t recognize, which we need to fight. The real life of this town is very different.

The attack on Wednesday wasn’t aimed at Woolwich. It wasn’t about this place, or even this man. It was an evil, abstract kind of violence, an act by rootless men who care no more for real Muslim men and women than the person they murdered.

Our response needs to celebrate exactly what the murderers denied: our relationships with each other, and to this place.

Woolwich is a town with a deep sense of history. It has strong, self-organised institutions. Once the arsenal factory. Now the Royal Artillery Barracks. Vibrant churches, mosques, temples, where people spill onto the street to talk after prayers. Small businesses where people stop and chat. It’s a place where immigrants have moved to create a life together with old residents, first Irish and Scottish, then Nigerian, Ghanaian, Somali, Indian, Nepali.

Woolwich is place of joiners and doers, where people get together and organize to improve their common life. It has the kind of town centre where people talk to strangers. It’s a town with a sense of energy and amazing local pride.

Woolwich has had its hard knocks. The riots. The IRA bombing. Like many northern industrial towns, it’s growth came from industries that a century of bad political leadership allowed to close down. The Royal Ordinance, the Siemens factory, the Woolwich Building Society are all empty buildings or the site of shiny new blocks of flats. Bolder politicians and more imaginative businesspeople could have made sure their high-skilled employees had work in successful enterprises.

But the story of Woolwich is of resilience in the face of hardship. The spirit that created the Arsenal Coop was there the day after the riots, as residents got their brooms out to clear up the streets. It’s there as the town gets back to business, and talks about how to respond to this vicious attack. It’s there in the call of community leaders, now, to better support the sense of hope and possibility Woolwich’s young people have.

As local Labour member Janet Turner told Vanessa Feltz yesterday morning, Woolwich is a place that rose, after the riots, like a phoenix from the ashes. With a rebuilt civic centre and new coffee shops, housing developments and a big Tescos, the place has a new buzz about it.

With the recession and decades of industrial decline accelerated by this Tory-led government, it’ll take hard work to make Woolwich a place where everyone leads good, comfortable lives. But with its history and vitality and strong sense of place, the people of Woolwich will come together to do just that.

The lesson for Labour is that our politics needs to start with the places we live. One Nation is something that needs to be built town by town, city by city. It needs to begin, first of all, with a sense of local pride, from our connections with the people and institutions around us.

Which is why we need to say, very loud, why we love Woolwich.