Will Self: PsychoGeography

Scholars of genocide - which is a grisly discipline, although funding is relatively secure - write of the process of "othering", whereby a group within a society becomes stigmatised, initially as different, then as problematic, and finally as beneath contempt, as Untermenschen who should be annihilated by all right-thinking Volk. It may be overstating it to place us south Londoners within this context, but I think only a little.

You only have to consider the following - and evolving - psychodynamic. For a long time south London was beyond the metropolitan pale in this sense: there was very little of it, and what there was, was raffish and louche. The liberty of Southwark derived from the right of sanctuary attached to St Saviour's (later Southwark Cathedral). It was near here, at the Tabard Inn, that Chaucer's pilgrims rendezvoused for their stomp to Canterbury; while along the south bank such decadent pastimes as bear-baiting and theatre-going soon took root. The notorious "stews" or brothels of the Tudor era were located on Bankside, as was the Clink, the debtors' prison.

However, come the 19th-century railway age, and we find sarf London transforming itself within the popular imagination. "Popular" is the key word here: the rapid erection - a standing-into-being with all the flimsy alacrity of a pop-up book - of street after street of suburban semis and villas, meant that to live south of the river became synonymous with dull provincialism. Pooter may have resided on the Holloway Road, but his spiritual home was Herne Hill.

Come the turn of the 20th century, and we find Thomas Hardy, lurking in an upper back bedroom, of his rented house in Upper Tooting, and phobically staring out over sarf London, in mortal fear of "a monster whose body had four million heads and eight million eyes". And, of course, it goes without saying, that when Eliot observed that "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many / I had not thought death had undone, so many". The zombies he referred to are coming from the southern, commuter 'burbs.

Dull drones we may have been, but it's only in the last two decades of the last century that we began to be perceived as something altogether more threatening. Since the early 1950s, when the immigrants who arrived from the West Indies on the Windrush were thoughtfully entombed (sorry, I mean "temporarily housed") in an air-raid shelter 200 feet underneath Clapham North, the environs of Brixton began to be associated with the burgeoning black population.

By the time of the Brixton riots in 1981, London cabbies - not always known for their enlightened attitudes - would often say: "I won't head south of the river after dark, too much chance of getting a nosebleed." By which they meant either a punch-up or a rip off.

Curiously, their bigotry was perfectly complemented by those north-London bourgeois, who liked to imagine themselves as many miles apart from the East End as they were to the south side. To this day, it's quite common to hear some blinkered twerp at a Primrose Hill drinks party, proclaim: "Oh, I never go south of the River ..." as if the Thames were the edge of the map, and they feared falling into Aeolus' mouth.

As the lithe, young black rioter's foot made contact with the plate-glass window, he shattered one delusion about sarf London, and began re-fenestrating it with another. A quarter of a century later, to say you are from this neck of the woods, is to observe nervous northerners caress their own, apparently fearing that you're about to drop a noose over their heads and suspend them from the nearest period feature.

Since the wave of black-on-black gun crime, which began a decade or so ago, and has - fuelled by crack cocaine and a widening gap between rich and poor - mounted ever since, "south London" has become synonymous with "the Bronx", or "Soweto". It is an ascription that has achieved the dubious distinction of sounding menacing. You can imagine it being verbalised thus: "If you don't watch out, I'm going to come round your gaff and south-London you."

Bonkers, when you consider that within the immediate purlieus of Clapham Common (home to those famously ethereal sectaries), lies Nappy Valley, the epicentre of the valetudinarian baby boom, where you're as likely to be killed by a valetudinarian yummy mummy, who has lost control of her all-terrain baby buggy, as you are by a gat-toting bruvver.

In fact, far more so, because let's remember: this is internecine, this dreadful violence, and those of us who queue, pasty-faced, in Moens, the highest-class butcher imaginable, are far more at risk from our own bredren on the north side of the Thames, than we are from the Yardies in our own backyard. Yes, if this south-London prejudice gets much worse, we may find ourselves all - black, brown, yellow or white - ending up on the slab.

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