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Ladbroke Grove Mandem, Ladbroke Grove W10/W11
-GSG/Groveside Goons (Ladbroke Grove W10)
-Hoodstarz (Lancaster West W11)
-SFDM/Str8 From Da Manor (Edwardes Wood W11)
-TKO/Total Knockout (Kensal Town W10)
Make Paper Regardless, Acton/Shepherds Bush W3/W6/W12
-MDP/Murder Dem Pussies
-FDA/Fuck Da Authority
-CPG/Crime Pays Grands
West Kensington Mandem, W.Kensington Estate W14
-Avonmore Goons
Horror Road Mandem (W2-W9-W10 Alliance)
-C.R.I.M.E Set/Can’t Roll In My Ends
-GD/Grey Daiz (Warwick W2)
-Grimiest Movement (Marylands W9)
-SD/Street Diplomats (Ashmore W9)
Mozart Bloods, Mozart Estate W10
Lisson Green Mandem, Lisson Green Estate, ER W2/NW8
-ERB/Edgware Road Boys
-YGM/Younger Green Mandem
-OGM/Older Green Mandem
Ashmore/Maryland - W2
Becklow Gdns - W12
Bevington/Blagrove - W10
Crackton - W3/W5
Edwarde Woodz - W11
Kensal Town - W10
Ladbroke Grove - W10/W11
Latimer Road - W10
Lancaster West - W11
Mozart - W9
Shepherds Bush - W12
South Acton - W3
Sutton Estate - W10
Warwick Estate - W2
West Kensington - W14
White City - W12
WEST LONDON GANGS
West London gangs here cover the boroughs of Ealing, Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea and Westminster. Geographically the majority of these groups fall within west postcodes (W1-W14) although SW/NW postal areas are present within those boroughs.
Bush, WEST12, has a number of hotspot areas with the estates across the district such as Becklow Gardens, the White City and Lime Grove hosting gangs and not forgetting the ‘Jungle Blocks’ sitting between the two historic frontline strips of Goldhawk Road and Uxbridge Road. Some of the older named cliques that once plotted around those ends included the Biker Boyz, Borer Man Crew, No Face Crew and Urban Virus who fought with nearby Cold Hearted Cru and the Smokers Crew from next door Ladbroke Grove (WEST10 & WEST11). South Acton Mandem (on the South Acton estate) in nearby W3 (Ealing Borough) has long been synonymous with older cliques in the past and present day.
Bush mandem have usually had conflict with various surrounding areas, notably Ladbroke Grove but also north west cliques and the Junction Boys and So Solid era (now Stick Up Kids) areas of Battersea in south west London. Many of the new conflicts are not as generational as the Bush/Battersea/Grove heydays with newer cliques arising across west London taking some of the attention away from that W3-W12-W10 epicentre.
Some of the gangs from west known to have died out more recently include the LGM – Latimer Mozart Grove link up, after Mozart fell out with Grove, and OTT (Out To Terrorise) also died out in recent years or members joined into other Grove crews. During this same time a number of new gangs have grown up in west London such as the Harrow Road cliques around Mozart, Ashmore, Marylands that include the GD (Grey Days) and their youngers TMG (Touch Money Greys) and SD (Street Dreams) and YSD (Younger Street Dreams) and Lisson Green Mandem from the London Borough of Westminster.
Over the last few years the main gang or movement across these two boroughs has been MDP – most commonly referred to as Murder Dem Pussies and also known as “Murder Blues” owing to their association with the colour blue (crips). MDP command a large area of west London including Ealing, Acton, Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith and they were most infamously known for their involvement in the murder of schoolboy Kodjo Yenga in Hammersmith Grove in 2007.
Associated with MDP are a younger generation known by the abbreviation FDA – most commonly referred to as Fuck Da Authority, they occupy the same areas as the MDP although flag Brown colours rather than blue. The FDA were responsible for the murder of Yasin Abdirahman who they mistook to be a member of outer London rivals Gritset bloods gang from UB1/UB2/W7.
The older generational part of the MDP movement are MPR – Make Paper Regardless / Money Power Respect. MPR are less widespread geographically than MDP/FDA and are based more centrally around Shepherd’s Bush.
The final gang associated or linked with the whole MDP movement is IOC (Instruments Of Cruelty or Intelligence Over Cops). Recently one of their members was found guilty of playing an instrumental part in the murder of Craig Brown in December 2008, the same individual had been involved in the murder of Kodjo Yenga with other MDP members in 2007.
Finally, in W14 West Kensington, are the “West Kensington Mandem” who occupy the estates around North End Road. The youngers around here were known as the “Blackstarz” although more recently it is controlled by just simply AG/Avonmore Goons.
Ladbroke Grove covers the W10 area of London with the estates around “Ladbroke Grove” and including Sutton, Elthorne, Wornington, Kensal Town and Latimer Road – going somewhat into W11 with Lancaster West and the disjointed “Woods” that lie between Bush and Grove. Many older LBG mandem link with other crews in west including Bush and Mozart although the current street presence is mainly that of a younger generation.
There are two sides of Grove, the Latimer Road and Lancaster West parts and then the actual Ladbroke Grove and Kensal Town sides – further to this there is Edwards Wood estate. Throughout Ladbroke Grove a number of younger cliques are in existence that collectively make up a Ladbroke Grove crew. Those cliques were GSG (Grove Side Goons), TKO (Total Knockout) mainly from the east side of Grove who were in conflict with Grey Dayz and Street Dreams in nearby W2/W9/W10 – then you had SFDM (Str8 From Da Manor) and Hoodstarz from the west side of Grove whose conflict was more with MDP/FDA.
WESTMINSTER BOROUGH
Although the area’s around W9/W10/W2 in particular and also parts of Lisson Green / Edgware Road have had gangs issues for some time, including a “Yardie” dominated drug culture that stemmed particularly from the estate behind Gloucester Terrace, many of the named groups currently establishing themselves in the west side of the borough are relatively new.
The biggest of this new generation is the Horror Road (Harrow Road) Alliance that compromises the gangs around W10/W9/W2 covering the Warwick & Brindley Estates, Amberley Estate, Ashmore & Mozart, Queens Park Avenues and Marylands. Here you will find GD (Grey Dayz) and their younger generation TMG (Touch Money Greys) from the Warwick & Brindley Estate – they flag grey. North of here there are SD/YSD (Street Dreams and Younger Street Dreams) who are present around Ashmore, Mozart and QP areas flagging brown. North/West of here are Grimiest Movementz and C.R.I.M.E Set (Cant Roll in My Ends) or Crime Section – blue flagging.
Also around the Lisson Green Estate in NW8 you have the Lisson Green Mandem, who flag green, and are separated like many other gangs into olders (OGM/Older Green Manz) and youngers (YGM/Younger Green Manz). Adjoining this area along Edgware Road (NW8/W2) and the Church Street estates are ERB/Edgware Road Boys.
OUTER WEST BOROUGHS:
Some gangs have emerged in outer London suburbs on the west side of London which are closely associated (usually in terms of rivalry) with the gangs in the western London postal area. The most prominent of these is Gritset from Southall LB Ealing (UB1/UB2/W7) and Section 18 / BU (UB3/UB4) from Hayes town in LB Hillingdon
SEE BELOW FOR A MORE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE OF SHAPING GANG CULTURE AND STREET CULTURE IN WEST LONDON
Shepherds Bush/Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill - history
Kids are in charge of the streets, you have to ask permission to get along them even in a car – the teenage lot are mostly of the Ted variety.
As Britain emerged from post-war austerity, working class youths found themselves no longer categorised as older children or young adults but as a new economic class: the teenager. The first British manifestation, the Teddy Boys, evolved from the wartime blackmarket spiv as a hybrid of upper-class Edwardian and Wild West styles – featuring a quiff with greased back ducks arse hairstyle, drape coat, bootlace tie, drainpipe trousers and brothel-creeper or winkle picker shoes.
They were not criminal in the old sense and not out for gain though they were profoundly anti-social. ‘Up on Rotting Hill’ just after the war the original Edwardian trendsetter Wyndham Lewis said ‘We are famous for our Spivs’, as he was beamed on by “negroes, shadowed by Afrikanders, displaced in queues by displaced people".
Still in the 40s, Basil Dearden’s THE BLUE LAMP starred Dirk Bogarde as a west London rebel without a cause. After murdering PC George Dixon on Harrow Road his delinquent character is pursued in the climatic car chase through Notting Hill, along Ladbroke Grove and Lancaster Road to Latimer Road where he crashes before running across the railway tracks to the White City. The other great post-war car chase in the 1951 Ealing classic THE LAVENDER HILL MOB also concludes on Latimer Road.
After the war, as Portobello Road began its transformation from rowdy flea market to international tourist attraction, the once respectable North Kensington area acquired a reputation as a seedy twilight zone. In 1968 the area was closed off and forgotten. Grey, anonymous, all life and colour had vanished as quickly as the paint from the tenement walls and Notting Hill sank into a twilight of sensational crimes, violence, poverty, extortion and petty racketeering.
In 1953, as the area hit an all time low with the notorious 10 Rillington Place murders, an article entitled Rotting Hill in the Kensington Post refuted allegations that Notting Hill is Londons crime black spot number one ridden with teenage gangs.
In the mid 50s as youth culture defined. The local teenage rampage was commonplace in the old Prince of Wales Cinema on Harrow Road. In the wake of the rock and roll era Elvis become the role model of the Teds. As the Teds progressed from slashing cinema seats to harassing Cypriot and West Indian immigrants the look (which originated from Elephant and Castle) caught on in Notting Hill, particularly on Southern Street in Kensal.
“If you were a Teddy Boy what you aspired to was a 40 guinea suit”. Musically up until the late 50’s skiffle and jazz still held sway, people who used pubs were of an older generation, rock n roll hadnt kicked in the pubs and the younger Teddy Boys were still going to coffee bars or to the West End. Meanwhile, Notting Dale was rocking anyway. Regardless of music trends, the old slum area to the west of Ladbroke Grove was in a permanent riot waiting to happen state.
Notting Dale came into existence in the early 19th century as a shanty town inhabited by brickmakers and pigkeepers, officially known as the Kensington Potteries. A hundred years earlier Charles Dickens had referred to it as a plague spot and the not so far away northern slum of Kensal Town slum had been the venue of an anti Irish race riot in the 1860s. Notting dale in particular was known as a police no-mans land where anything can happen and usually does, “it seemed on every street corner brawls and quarrels were taking place”. Here groups of white youngsters would lounge against walls gibing West Indians and Cypriots.
At the time of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, a local boxing instructor teamed up with Jamaican boxer Lloyd Barnett to prevent a race riot developing from a dispute at a dance in the Kensington Public baths’ Argyll Hall on Lancaster Road. As a Teddy Boy white faction and a group of hot headed West Indians argued over who collected their coats first
The advent of the teenager coincided not very happily with the arrival of the first major wave of West Indian immigrants in Britain, to ease post war labour shortage. For many West Indians was disenchantment with ‘the mother country’ as they encountered racial discrimination in housing, employment and social life.
By 1958 its estimated that 7,000 West Indian immigrants settled in Notting Hill and the Colville areas was nicknamed “Brown Town” – as opposed to White City, the other side of the racial frontline was Notting Dale. There was an atmosphere of sexual jealousy and general ill-feeling towards West Indians, caused by a disproportionate number of black pimps with white prostitutes. For some “the Grove" was a testing ground in which people lived wild and free, uninhibited by laws and respectability. This was how it was at the end of the 50s. It was only Notting Hill/Grove that there was public life. Clubs, restaurants, cafes, music, street corner talk. This was the work of the immigrants.
With most local pubs unwelcoming, the hustlers/rude boys had their own scene, consisting of various types of clubs. There were after hours drinking clubs, basement/cellar clubs for daytime gambling, and blues clubs. Blues dance music went from jazz, calypso and Jamaican RnB through ska and rocksteady to 70s dub reggae.
West Indians would eventually establish a presence in Notting Hill pubs, most notably the Colville Hotel affectionately known as the pisshouse, and the Apollo on All Saints Road, followed by the Warwick Castle and Golden Cross on Portobello Road and the Kensington Park Hotel on Ladbroke Grove. Like the Irish shebeens and the most violent mushroom clubs of the indigenous English villains, blues clubs could crop up anywhere but tended to be in the areas around Powis Sq and St Stephens Gardens – this defines the original West Indian Grove areas as more Westbourne than Ladbroke.
Back in 1953, the Notting Hill crime of the century was solved when West Indian tenants of 10 Rillington Place encouraged John Christie to move out, and discovered the bodies of 3 prostitutes in a cupboard. In July, as the temperature rose, reports of isolated racial attacks around the area increased in seriousness, from general harassment to serious assault. In August, a local petition was organised and there were calls in the press for something to be done about the increasing violence.
Just before the riot in Notting Hill there was race rioting occurring in Nottingham. The night of the first Nottingham incident a gang of teenagers were driving around Shepherds Bush and Notting Hill attacking any black people they came across. After that racial tension increased.
The incident that started the Notting Hill riots was an innocent domestic dispute between a Jamaican man and his Swedish wife outside Latimer Road station. The argument attracted a crowd and the Jamaican was heckled by a group of white males who then attracted a group of West Indian men, there was a scuffle and that was the end of the beginning. The following night a local mob attacked a house on Bard Road and a blues party on Blechynden Street, setting off the late August riot weekend.
The Blechynden Street blues incident, consisted of Count Suckle playing the calypso record ‘Oriental Ball’, mixed with the bee swarm sound of the Latimer Road mob approaching, shouts of ‘Keep Britain white’, breaking glass and police sirens. On this occasion, the police escorted the West Indian partygoers out of Notting Dale to another club east along Lancaster Road, dissipating and containing the situation. However, this gave the mob the impression that they could ‘ethnically cleanse’ the area.
After the pubs chucked out, gangs of drunk locals loitered about in the heat of the night looking for trouble. On day 3 of the riots, Monday September 1, in the calm before the storm gangs of white youths hung around streets corners and the police presence remained minimal. Notting Hill during the riots has been described as ‘a looking-glass world’, in which everyday objects like dustbin lids, car tyres and milk bottles were transformed into shields, barricades and ammunition. As the delayed-action Nazi missile went off in Colville, white rioters prowled the streets chanting ‘Keep Britain white’ and ‘Lynch the blacks’; policemen who tried to intervene were attacked on Portobello Road and cars were set alight on Powis Terrace.
When the rioting spread out of the Dale into ‘the Town’ (or ‘Brown Town’, as it was known to the rioters), the participants were no longer just locals. By then traditionally rival gangs from Shepherd’s Bush, Hammersmith and Paddington were arriving in vans to reinforce the local mob. With a few wild ones throwing bottles, everyone tends to get involved. And white people don’t run to the blacks for protection, nor the blacks to whites. They separate into their own groups. And then you have it, created out of nothing – a race riot. Or at least the atmosphere of a race riot. After the riots the Teds were further demonised in the press as the root of all evil, and the government announced short-sharp-shock measures to ‘de-Teddify the Teddy boys’. Of the 100 men arrested over the riot weekend 75% were white, and 60% under 20.
By 1958 Teddy boy had become the generic term for juvenile delinquent, and was applied to all teenage hooligans regardless of fashion. They’ve since been, if not vindicated, put into perspective as merely the hoody equivalent hooligans of the day. In all first hand accounts the Teds were encouraged by the fascists to fit themselves up as the empire throwback scapegoats. Michael X was largely dismissive of the threat the Teds posed to the West Indian community, and the riots in general: ‘The thing about the so-called Notting Hill race riots is that they were not real race riots at all. People are always fighting in an area like the ghetto; clubs are always being invaded... the general opinion was that a few Teddy boys had simply been making a nuisance of themselves…’
Soon after, Michael recalled it was business as usual in the clubs: ‘Amongst the legion of hustlers no colour is recognised… the white criminals would filter back into the black clubs saying ‘It wasn’t us man. All these people came from outside’… But deep down, we felt that everyone had been involved. It was just that the whites in the ghetto knew better how to evade the police.’
Drama was never far from Notting Hill around the time. The year following the riots a 23-year-old car dealer was shot dead from a passing car in Latimer Road. It is not known whether it was gang related but there was talk of a gang going to 'sort out' a local head and his cousin. Another similar incident shortly after occurred nearby in Kensington Gardens Square.
In 1966 three plain clothes officers were shot dead as they questioned two men in Braybrook Street, between East Acton and the White City. The driver was shot while in the driving seat, the second police officer was found yards away from the car and the third underneath the police car, he had been run-over as well as shot. Then Met Police Commissioner Sir Joseph Simpson pleaded for help from the criminal underworld. Among criminals in those days this sort of incident was unnacceptable.
As with the trouble that had first began in 1958 and carried through the 70s particularly throughout the carnivals the 80s troubles never ceased. A turning point in "gang activity" in West London, although the word gang was still taboo, forced special operations on the underground system in Hammersmith & Fulham.
Steaming gangs as they were known, supposedly an American import, were highly active on London's public transport network. The 1988 Notting Hill carnival saw police swamp the underground in response to at least 12 known "Steaming Gangs" that were common in south and west London. At the time they were working the bus routes and tube commonly after music festivals and concerts prior to the carnival.
The journey between White City and Shepherds Bush may only take a few minutes but with 200 youths running rampage through late night trains intent on robbing it meant nothing. "The gangs would go from carriage to carriage taking valuables and threatening passengers with knives". When the trains would arrive at Bush waiting passengers would also fall victim of robbery.
Amazingly today robberies are far more common in Hammersmith & Fulham than they were 20 years ago.
Whilst gun crime was still a rarity in London, in comparison to today, Shepherds Bush had seen its share of gun crime. And whilst the media seldom used gangs and drugs as media sensationalism drug wars were not lacking. London streets by the start of the 1990s were being labelled the front line of an evil crack war waged by the armed and desperate gangs who were shottin at the time.
Ladbroke Grove and Shepherds Bush along with Clapham and Brixton were identified in particular during this time. Scotland Yard were under increasing pressure to take decisive action against the drug barons fighting these bloody turf wars. Perhaps a turning point and beginning for todays situation can be found in Shepherds Bush in the early 1990s.
A feud over drug gangs in West London saw 3 people murdered in 24 hours culminating in the death of Junior Uriribo during the rush hour, gunned down as commuters looked on outside Shepherds Bush tube station. Even before the blood had tried on the pavement the assailants were picked up in Ladbroke Grove....
