In 1981, on the same night as riots were breaking out in Brixton, the community leader Leonard Johnson, faced with a crowd of angry young people on one side and armed police on the other, stopped the same happening in Harlesden, north-west London. “Let’s build, not destroy,” he argued and for the next 40 years, that was his guiding philosophy.
My friend Leonard, who has died aged 67 of cancer, was a founding member and chair of the Harlesden People’s Community Council and was the driving force in the setting-up of Bridge Park, then the largest black community project in Europe.
