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Oxford's secret shady side
Feature
Oxford's reputation as a city is pretty much entangled with that of the university and so many view the place as an upper-middle class image of an old fashioned type of Englishness.
To some extent this is true, but like every area it has its bad bits and the beautifully named Blackbird Leys is one of those areas.
Blackbird Leys is one of the largest council estates in Europe and like many an estate, it has picked up a very unwelcome reputation since it saw rioting in the 80s and 90s but not on the scale of or Toxteth.
Earlier this year, police decided to clamp down on crime in this part of the city and so stumbled on a novel way of finding the criminals - in a move you could imagine Rowan Atkinson in the Thin Blue Line concocting, coppers went door knocking for information.
It worked surprisingly well as police managed to get the opinions of 300 people in both the Blackbird Leys and Greater leys estates and the Oxford Mail newspaper reports 39 leads on the whereabouts of yobs and drug dealers being discovered.
Interestingly, a Channel Five show aired last summer, The Singing Estate, featured residents of the estate as they looked to rid themselves of their shady pasts and become members of a choir. Some people will do anything for their 15 minutes of fame.
