01.07.2024Safety – Material Manifestations of a Cultural Theme in Swansea (Jan Kohler)

Figure 1: The neighbourhood’s watchful eyes. Photo by author.

The moment we leave the university building, the rain has stopped. We spent the morning exchanging our perspectives on industrialisation with faculty and students of Swansea University. This afternoon we have time to do some exploratory field research in and around the city. With my colleague Andrea I cross the adjacent park, heading for the borough of Brynmill (see also Serafina Andrew’s contribution). Without any particular question or focus in mind, we want to go on a walk through the hilly topography of some of Swansea’s western residential areas which would finally lead us back to the city centre. In the style of the Situationists’ ‘dérive’[1] we want to ‘drift’ through the neighbourhoods with our senses alert, looking out for things which would catch our attention.

Beside the lush green park with its landscape architecture, there is a sign at the exit of the compound that first catches our attention: It refers to a campaign called ‘StreetSafe’ which urges citizens to report anonymously to the police in which areas they felt or feel unsafe. Examples listed on the sign are environmental issues such as street lighting or vandalism.

The moment we enter the borough of Brynmill, the sun pokes through the clouds, reflecting its rays in the asphalt of the streets and letting the houses appear in strong, bright colours. Architecturally it mainly consists of two to three storey terraced housing of the Victorian era[2] and I somehow perceive them as the epitome of a British neighbourhood. The long rows of houses gently follow the hilly landscape of the area, reminding me of the spine of a giant dinosaur. The typical house of the area is two to three storeys high, has a small front garden, a bay window, and a backyard that eventually leads into a back alley. Across the alley is another, identical row of houses, with the small street acting as a mirror axis. Looking down a street along the fronts of these terraced houses, it is hard to ignore the forest of signboards advertising the renting out of the properties: ‘To let’, ‘Student let’ or ‘We’ve just let it’.

The main target group for renting seems to be university students. As I find out later, Brynmill is a residential area with a high percentage of students due to its proximity to the campus. A website of a local agency providing student accommodation calls Brynmill “the most popular student area in Swansea”[3] and claims that the borough hosts more than 8000 students compared to a total of approximately 9300 residents[4]. Besides the large student population, Brynmill can be considered as a middle-class area[5].

The amount of rubbish scattered on the pavement as well as in some front yards and gardens catches my attention. In one front yard, I spot a pile of black garbage bags. In a bigger garden of a flat building, a man, maybe the janitor, is mowing a lawn that is littered with plastic bags, bottles, and other things that were thrown away. I ask myself: How does the garbage collection system work in Swansea? Is there a waste fee some people cannot afford? Are the garbage collectors on strike? On the website of Swansea’s council, I later find out that the kerbside collection takes place every week and that the streets are being cleaned afterwards.[6] To the second and third question, I could not find any answers browsing the web. So-called ‘fly tipping’ (illegal disposal of waste on public ground) indeed seems to be perceived as a problem in Swansea. There is a local media debate around the issue; the fight against it is part of the city council’s agenda. A Swansea council spokesman states: “The annual cost of dealing with fly tipping and littering in Swansea is regularly more than £2 million”.[7]

Another striking detail is the ubiquitous presence of CCTV, respectively of signs pointing out that there are cameras in operation on private properties.

It is this observation that retrospectively intrigued me the most. I was aware that United Kingdom has a high density of CCTV. But reading more, I became increasingly puzzled about the sheer amount of video surveillance cameras and the societal discourse around the topic of safety and security. That is why I decided to put this issue in the centre point of this account.

The cultural anthropologist Katharina Eisch-Angus, who has done extensive qualitative research about the issue of safety and security in suburban middle-class neighbourhoods in the United Kingdom, has found what she calls a “complex of ‘safety/security’”[8], which serves residents as an important reference point when talking about their everyday life and experience, and ensures an interpersonal and collective understanding of the matter so that it corresponds to the larger societal discourse.

As Eisch-Angus points out, a state of safety and security could not exist without a corresponding flip side of risk and danger. And ‘security’ can only be expressed by evoking its opposite, ‘insecurity’, a fact that became manifest in many of Eisch-Angus’s interviews, where interlocutors contrasted the ‘normality’ of everyday life and routines in their community with stories about sudden disruptive events – such as smashed windows, stolen cars, burglaries, or antisocial behaviour.[9] As a cultural anthropologist, she considers this dialectic between security and its flipside as a “communicative and narrative necessity”[10]. The concepts of ‘safety/security’ and of ‘community’ are thus produced and reproduced in ritual acts of conversation, she argues: “[E]veryday communication serves to maintain awareness of fears and danger and, at the same time, to affirm the safe realm of the community.”[11]

The term “community”, on the other hand, gained popularity in the English-speaking world after Second World War and is widely used to describe the local, communal life – perhaps especially so in Wales. Although somehow vague, its frequent and widespread everyday use together with the narratives associated with it make ‘community’ a concept of high social significance.[12]

For Eisch-Angus, the notion of community is closely linked to the safety/security-complex. Many of her respondents stressed the importance of a neighbourly ‘keeping an eye on things’ to prevent crimes like thefts and burglaries in their street. This watchfulness was associated with a good ‘community spirit’ and personalised in the positive. [13]

As a material manifestation of this neighbourly vigilance, I happened to come across a Neighbourhood Watch-Sticker on a bay window. Neighbourhood Watch schemes first emerged in the 1980s. They were promoted by prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s administration – with the intention of involving more citizens in local crime control. The state was to withdraw from many of its previous areas of public service, and shift responsibilities to the individual and community level, i. e. to volunteering citizens in their communities.[14] The basic idea of the Neighbourhood Watch – in a broader context of neoliberalisation – was to bring neighbours together to act as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the police, to look out for suspicious behaviour in their vicinity and to report it to the authorities, but also to protect their properties and those of the other residents.[15] This was usually linked to a specific style of police work called ‘Community Policing’, which was promoted as a way of fostering and improving the relationship and communication between citizens and the police force, and which should offer residents the opportunity to express their concerns and wishes.[16] Such schemes are virtually absent in Switzerland, my intuitive point of reference -– or citizens there organise themselves around the issue of safety and security in a much more informal way. Generally, I am tempted to say that the topics of safety and security are far less prominently discussed in Switzerland than in the United Kingdom.

The way people talk about safety and security in the everyday corresponds with larger political and media discourses about the topic. As a random, yet maybe exemplary jigsaw piece of the media discourse about CCTV in Great Britain, I watched a documentary titled ‘Caught on CCTV: Neighbourhood Watching in UK’[17] after I returned from Wales. The statements of the residents who were featured there mirror and complement the material testimonies of the safety/security-complex I came across on my walk and the arguments I found in the literature. Despite undertones that were occasionally ironic, and comical-sounding background music, the documentary not only takes an affirmative stance on the use of camera surveillance in and around private homes, it even actively promotes it. Often using the collective ‘we’, the narrator takes sides with the portrayed residents and makes the private use of CCTV appear as something that is simply within the realm of ‘common sense’. In doing so, the documentary uncritically reproduces statements of residents which at times reveal an almost obsessive take on the safety/security issue – when, for example, a lady considers CCTV to be a “god-send”. In another scene, introduced by the narrator with the remark that for some people, surveillance cameras are “a way of life”, the spectator is introduced to a couple whose car repeatedly got a flat tyre and who tried to catch the perpetrator using CCTV. The statements of the wife and husband illustrate how time-consuming their quest turned out to be. While she recounts that they were “doing shifts on monitoring the cameras”, her husband expresses his gratitude by saying: “She would bring me cups of tea and I just watched this thing for ages, waiting for something to happen.” Later, we get to know a couple who had to deal with a ‘deviant’ and choleric neighbour. We are told that their lives “have become consumed by monitoring CCTV cameras and collecting evidence”. All these examples could be interpreted as evidence for the use of the cameras being much more than a simple, practical tool – it seems almost obsessive to me.

In the meantime, we have left Brynmill behind us and entered the borough of Uplands. As soon as we reach the comparatively lively centre of this part of Swansea, we take shelter from a sudden downpour in a café. The upper area, where we have a seat, is empty, except for a woman in her forties. Soon after we start a conversation about life in Swansea. We get to know that she used to live in Brynmill while being a student at the local university. Years later, she bought one of the terraced houses in the neighbourhood. But she has since moved to Mumbles (see also Jule Wiegmann’s contribution), a close seaside town she describes as “wealthier” and “quieter”. There is a clear spatial-symbolic hierarchy between Brynmill and Mumbles, for her, but she also tells us which places are even worse: Neath and Port Talbot, which she terms “shitholes”. Now she is renting out her property in Brynmill room by room to students, like many other homeowners do, and seems to enjoy life in the more prestigious coast town.

Before we leave the café, another fellow student, who also walked through Brynmill, joins us. On her walk she approached an elderly man and was able to do a spontaneous interview with him. As she recounts, her interlocutor complained about the students living in the area and made them responsible for nuisances like littering and nightly noise. To him, the student population serves as a scapegoat.

After the rain, we decide to continue the walk together heading uphill. The higher we get, the wealthier the houses look. At some point we even see villa-like properties with generous gardens. But as we move on and enter the borough of Mount Pleasant, the scenery abruptly changes: Again, we are surrounded by terraced buildings. At one street corner there is a graffiti on a power box saying 'Let's keep the Mount Pleasant', which obviously did not prevent some people from depositing their trash right next to it. If it was not for the garbage, the view down the road on the sea is stunning and for a blink of an eye I imagine myself strolling around in a touristic seaside town.

[1] Rolshoven, Johanna: Kontextualisierung II. Theoretische Grundbegriffe einer engagierten Stadtforschung. In: Johanna Rolshoven: Stadtforschung als Gesellschaftsforschung. Eine Einführung in die Kulturanalyse der Stadt. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2021, 181.

[2] Swansea Council: Uplands Ward Profile, July 2023. URL: file:///Users/jahn/Downloads/Uplands_Ward_Profile_Jul23r-1.pdf. In: Swansea Council, 2023 (Accessed on: 27/06/24).

[3] Digs Swansea: Brynmill. The Most Popular Student Area in Swansea. URL: https://www.digsswansea.biz/reasons-to-live-in-brynmill-as-a-student. In: Digs Swansea, 2021 (Accessed on: 27/06/24).

[4] Swansea Council: Mid-2022 Population Estimates for Middle layer Super Output Areas (MSOAs) in Swansea. URL: file:///Users/jahn/Downloads/Population_Swansea_MSOAs_2022.pdf. In: Swansea Council, 2024, (Accessed on: 27/06/24).

[5] Wikipedia: Brynmill. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brynmill. Wikipedia 2024 (Visited: 27/06/24).

[6] Swansea Council: Report litter in the street. URL: https://www.swansea.gov.uk/article/5145/Report-litter-in-the-street. In: Swansea Council, 2024b (Accessed on: 27/06/24).

[7] Roberts, Demi: Residents living among rubbish in one of Swansea's worst hit flytipping dumping grounds. URL: https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/waun-wen-fly-tipping-streets-22723411. In: Wales Online, 14 January 2022 (Accessed on: 27/06/24).

[8-13] Eisch-Angus, Katharina: «You Can’t Argue with Security». The Communication and Practice of Everyday Safeguarding in the Society of Security. In: BEHEMOTH. A Journal on Civilisation, 4/2, 2011.

[14][15]Brunton-Smith, Ian und Karen Bullock: Patterns and drivers of co-production in neighbourhood watch in England and Wales. From Neo-Liberalism to New Localism. In: British Journal of Criminology, 59, 2019, 86.

[16] Bullock, Karen: Citizens, Community and Crime Control. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014, 101.

[17]  Caught On CCTV. Neighbourhood Watching In UK. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9EAoj70F90. Real Stories, UK 2018.

Jan Kohler