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Food and Frontlines: An Audiotour

9 / 12 Sandringham Road in the 1970s and 1980s

Sandringham Road was the Frontline. It was a place of ‘vice’ and of ‘energetic vibes’, a place of resistance to the police and of police machinations. Winstan Whitter, Michael McMillan, Bernadette Halpin, Eveline Marius and Pauline Brown reveal the many sides of the Frontline.  

Michael McMillan sums it up: ‘Frontline was that radical political edge that talks between the black and white world. That’s where you feel safer from the police and the moral majority, but it’s also a place of real cultural activity. Through gentrification, these places have disappeared, but it’s where you’d find the first black businesses – the food shops, the hairdressers, the record shops. This is where the Frontline was.'

‘Down in the Ghetto’, 1982 by Eveline Marius:

'Down in the ghetto where the cowboy comes from,
Contentment is something so hard to find,
Every day you wake up and say:
What you gonna do with yourself today,
But deep in your mind you know that you are only wasting your time:
Going down to the same old Frontline,
Down in the ghetto where the cowboy comes from,
A heavy burden always clouds the mind,
Every day you wondering, wondering,
What you gonna do:
Every day you sing the same old song too.'

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Sandringham Road, 1983 © Alan Denney
Sandringham Road, 2016 © Patrick Henry