LIVING IN LONDON People’s action centre

Press, 19 September 1977, Page 14

LIVING IN LONDON People’s action centre

BY SALLY ADAMS l I The People’s Aid and Action Centre in Battersea, I South London, is a drop-in{ surgery for the neighbourhood, a densely populated area close to Clapham Junction. The centre offers a fruit and vegetable co-oper-ative and a Left-wing bookshop, alongside psychiatric counselling, a creche and a place where local activists can meet. The accent is emphatically working class. It is not a centre for the middle class, who are perceptibly “gentrifying” parts of Battersea, which is just over the Thames from posh Chelsea. Food in the shop, sold at just above cost, is for old age pensioners and those on social security, except in summer, when trade is rather slack and any buyer is better than none. It is sad to see the shop empty, especially when their bananas at 14p a lb are lOp a lb cheaper than those in the busy fruit shop directly opposite. Counselling Paul Hoggett, the resident community psychologist who runs the counselling service, says the People’s Aid and Action Centre is trying to provide the sort of therapy which is normally only available to the very wealthy. The people it is aiming to help are the working class who, Paul Hoggett says, often see their problems as rather physical than emotional. They go to the doctor and say “I’m having trouble with my nerves, doctor” and are prescribed valium. Or else they see the problem in spiritual terms and consult a priest or clergyman. “Working-class culture,” he says, “deals in commonplaces and platitudes and most working class people are kept in a state of ignorance. They are not fluent because they have never been given words or concepts to understand their world.” Most of the people Paul Hoggett is counselling on a regular basis are suffering from what he says could be listed as depression. He talks to them and tries to help them understand their feelings. “We feel it’s necessary all the time to work on everyday problems of the outside world.” So the centre helps people with their housing traumas, Social Security claims and! fuel-bill difficulties. That is where left-wing political theory obtrudes. In “Action in Wandsworth,” a booklet describing facilities available in the borough, the centre’s credo is described as “social-action-psychthe-rapy . . . This method of working and serving local people springs from the belief that positive change in a people’s psychic emotional self must go alongside positive change in their social and material situation. Not that one comes before the other, but both are inseparably linked.” This is enough to inflame many right wing voters, yet the action centre’s psychologists are sometimes criticised by the Left for “psychologis-i ing” instead of giving people , a direct call to collective! action. FEW CLIENTS Paul Hoggett is anxious to reach more people. At the

moment the P.A.A.C. has not got much money for publicity, so he sits in his office waiting for people to walk in off the street. Some do — but not enough. It is a tiny trickle, not a mighty flood. So the centre is hoping for a £lO,OOO grant for a mental health education officer and a secretary/administrator who could go out and spread the word. “It’s depressing waiting here to see them, lurking behind the facade. We would like to be able to go out and talk to them.” ' At the moment they get referrals from the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, law centres and Women’s Aid (battered wives) but not from the Social Security — hardly surprising, since the Claimants Union runs advice sessions out of the centre. It is a comfortable, scruffy place and has the food cooperative at the front. This is run, in summer, by two volunteers: old-age pensioners named Frank and John, who get the food from near-by Covent Garden, via another food co-operative. At the back there is the creche and rooms which provide meeting space for local activists. “Anti- 1 Fascists, please stack your chairs,” said a rather plaintive notice pinned on a table in the corridor the day I was there. Because the centre is used by so many of them. Left wingers are often getting their windows broken — by the National Front they claim. It is only equitable to add that the N.F. counterclaim that its windows are broken by the far Left. The Labour-dominated Wandsworth Council has been very sympathetic to the centre and helps support it financialy. However, Paul Hoggett says that the council is not behaving, well as landlords so the P.A.A.C. is withholding rent payment until some repairs are done. The centre’s long-term future is uncertain. This brave, so-far-unmeasured experiment in community mental health care may disappear. “If the Tories get in,” says Paul Hoggett, “we’ll probably be run' down or closed down.’ ’