Dancing and Danger: it's party night on Angell Town

Angell Town on a Saturday night is party town and by early evening things were already in full swing. Down on Dora Way, Kamika Nathan’s daughter Zian was turning 10 and their tiny maisonette heaved with 70 people, aged eight to 80, the music revved up to full volume.

Zian and her friends danced in the front room and played “sit on the balloon and pop it with your bum”, while Kamika and her women friends served up tasty barbecued chicken and curried goat in the kitchen.

Out in the backyard, men stood chatting and drinking beer while boys tore up and down the narrow scrubby strip playing football.

It was a scene of fun-loving, cross-generational community life that depicted the estate at its best.

But a block away on Fiveways Road, a very different scene was unfolding.

Here, too, the barbecue sizzled and music blasted full tilt, but the atmosphere was edgier: the whiff of weed cut the air and a dozen young men in black hoodies occupied the street corner outside a house party.

This was my sixth day living on Angell Town. The London I knew had receded the moment I had walked through the narrow passage once known as “murder alley” onto the estate.

It was as if I had fallen down a rabbit hole into a parallel world with its own heroes, language, rules and lore, but I had never once felt that I might be unsafe. Until now.

As darkness fell and more hooded-up youth arrived — on foot, by motorbike, by car — there was a sense of gang members massing.

“Yo blud!” they greeted each other. “Yo bludclot!” came the reply. They spoke into their phones in street slang, telling their “mandem” where the action was.

“I’m deya A-Town blud, big-man-ting.” Loosely translated, this meant “I’m here in Angell Town brother, for real”.

Bludclot”? That was a Jamaican swearword, a contraction of “blood cloth”, so you were affectionately calling someone a “used sanitary towel”.

At their centre I recognised Shaquille, 21, known as rapper MDargg or M, who I had met when staying with my first host, Golda Mochia. He stood coolly scanning the street like a sentry.

Who are all these people? I asked. “There are some serious G-members [gang members] here tonight,” M said.

He raised his eyes towards a group congregating on the opposite corner. “Some of those guys are Myatts Field [estate], some Loughborough. A-Town cool with dem.” But if “mandem” come from Stockwell Park [the estate across Brixton Road], it could spark a riot, he said. Was I safe? “You safe cos you wid me,” he laughed.

But when I pointed towards the G-members on the corner, he admonished me sharply. “Never point!” he said. “You don’t be no pointing at nobody.”

Last time we met, M told me he was a former GAS gang member but that the gang had fragmented and he was now with a new faction called Rockblock 150.

The very next night his friend Ogarra Dixon, 24, known as Gora, had been shot dead. I had heard that M was one of three people who had driven Gora to hospital to try to save his life, and that he had already been interviewed by the police as a witness.

Was it true? He stared into the distance, then almost imperceptibly he nodded. “I came out the block to have a smoke and saw two of the mandem picking him up and I went to help. Gora was like my older brother.”

It was a while before he looked at me and spoke again. “I been so calm, I haven’t shed a tear. People say I need counselling, that I need to speak out what’s happened. I might look fine on the outside … inside there is just pain. But soon as I talk about it, I don’t know what to say. It’s gone on such a long time. I was shot in the head with a pellet gun when I was 14 and it’s been madness ever since. A couple of years ago, some friends and I were attacked at a house party just because we were from Angell Town. I tried to run away but I slipped on blood on the floor.