Two Africans have documented life on a tough, tight-knit North-East estate over the past ten years, a time refugees came to make up 25 per cent of the estate. Chris Webber found out how, contrary to their expections, they were ultimately welcomed

ELVIS KATOTO, once of the Congo, clearly remembers the startled reaction of his London friends, many of them refugees, when he told them he was moving to the North-East.

“‘Don’t go’, they all said, every one of them,” says Elvis, “‘that place is full of racists’.”

Thankfully, Elvis, who came to the region on a placement working at BBC Tees and has since won a first-class honours degree from Teesside University in film-making, ignored the naysayers.

What’s more, he has, almost by mistake, taken that popular view of the “white working-class North-East racist” in a new documentary set on the Victoria Estate, in Stockton, and turned it on its head.

He has worked with the estate’s Stockton African Caribbean Association (SACA) to help make a unique documentary and exhibition called Victoria: Life Through a Lens about how the life and culture of the estate has radically changed since 2001.

The idea wasn’t just to talk about the impact of an influx of black, Afghanistan, Asian and other former foreigners in these few cramped streets and flats, walking distance from Stockton town centre. Instead, they talked to neighbours about how the estate had changed, good and bad, over ten years, and found out about their individual stories.

Elvis says he has never encountered any racism on the Victoria Estate, but, despite becoming a well-known face in the area, does not live there.

Vera Walker, 68, a well-known member of the community who has helped refugees, often arriving with nothing, settle in, perhaps gives a more accurate picture of what can be a tough environment. For a start, Vera’s memory of Victoria goes back much further than 2001.

“I’ve been here 50 years, more,” she says, “living conditions definitely did improve, whether the social aspect did is a different story. They did knock all the old houses down, but they broke whole communities up.”

She remembers a few difficult moments when many of the refugees came in 2001. “The council did up some homes and people thought they (the new residents) were getting something the people here already weren’t and there were break-ins. Of course it was all down a lack of a communication and when people realised the real story, that these people weren’t getting anything special, it all calmed down.

“Then there were times when some of the immigrant lads would meet in cars, talk to each other and relieve themselves outside in full view of everyone, that caused a bit of shock!

But it was a cultural thing, it doesn’t happen any more, they learned. There was never really any serious trouble.”

VERA soon became interested in the lives of these people who came from across the world to be her neighbours.

“I found it fascinating,” she says. “They had stories that made your eyes pop about what happens in their countries, but they were good,good people.”

Ronald Mutezo, of SACA, has been very closely involved in the Life Through a Lens project, and has lived there for eight years after escaping from Zimbabwe. He explains the project has cost a few thousand pounds, jointly funded by Stockton Council and housing association, Tristar. Even more than Vera, he talks up the positive side of life on the estate.

“The first day moving here was daunting,” he admits. “You do see yourself as this minority.

But time goes, you get talking, you make friends, it has been positive for me here. The only racism I ever encountered was from another black guy. Me and a colleague, chairman of SACA, Herbert Dirahu, wanted to work on this idea because we’re positive about our estate and our neighbours.”

Leaving race and culture aside, Ronald talks about the positive stories he and the team have stumbled across chatting to people up and down the few streets of Victoria. “There’s a blind lady, Denise Ross. We were talking to her about how she goes to the gym, but it turns out she was a javelin thrower when she was young and she represented Britain in the Olympic Games. There she is, blind, walking her dog, wanting to get to the gym every day.

“Then there there was young lady, in her 20s, she’s kind of symbolic. She’s white and she told us how she was scared about coming to a mixed area, scared of the refugees and all that. Now she’s with a black guy, all that nonsense gone, behind her.”

T HE last time the Victoria Estate was in the news in a big way was when a young girl was abducted and violently attacked.

The whole place was in uproar, all sections of the community involved, although the black community was by common account the first to react. The police appealed for calm. The negative story made national headlines.

A few days later some of the estate’s teenagers, often much maligned, cycled around the estate to raise money for the girl and her family, enough to have a weekend away. The money all came from the hard-pressed community.

Some of them put on a talent show for the estate’s kids for the same cause. The story, positive, was covered in The Northern Echo and Gazette, a few paragraphs each. Nowhere else.

“People only talk about the bad side,” says Ronald, “and we wanted to put that right, there’s so much good here, it’s not fair that people don’t see that.”

Life Through a Lens is being exhibited at Stockton library.