The airhorn blows. A cry goes up. The field, scattered across streets from Brixton Water Lane to Poets’ Corner, converges toward the sound. The hounds are in full cry. A triumphant ululating from the lead riders, thin tracksuits flapping as they pedal toward Mayall Road. The quarry has been sighted. On bikes, skateboards, scooters or just on foot, the field streams after the leaders.

Overhead on grey terraced rooftops, a scatter of parkour scouts scampers across the sloping tiles, whooping and gesturing. Below them, the quarry flashes in and out of the cover of back-garden bike storage, patio furniture and shrubbery. A few scouts are down from the rooftops now, vaulting fences between gardens. Close pursuit. A delivery van honks. Residents peer out of windows as the hunt streams up the Saturday morning street. 

Moments later it’s flushed out: a glimpse of red-brown, the hunt stampeding after it down the tarmac. Then it’s cornered in a newsagent doorway, the hounds swarming. The inevitable end. A Brixton schoolboy, eyes shining with the joy of exertion and bloodshed, is gifted the brush. He holds it aloft in one blood-smeared hand, russet against Herne Hill’s leaden sky.

When the ban was repealed, there were demonstrations throughout the English countryside. It was grossly unjust, the Telegraph howled, yet another sign of government bias toward the cities, that foxhunting was now legal in urban areas but not the countryside. The Johnson government replied serenely that foxes were a predominantly urban pest in 21^st-century Britain. Also, as county lines operations had spread city-style drug-dealing throughout rural England, it was only fair in return to encourage outdoor rural pursuits to flourish in the city.

Horrified Guardian editorials inveighed against the education in brutality that would now be coming to London’s already violent youth. But the columnists fell silent when the season started, and knife crime abruptly dropped. United against the mangy pests that raided bins, terrorised domestic cats and occasionally mauled a baby, a critical mass of Londoners embraced the hunt. 

Hunts formed along postcode lines, and initially when a hunt crossed multiple postcodes there were stabbings. But the gangs’ youthful energy, physical fitness and fondness for casual violence catapulted them to the heart of London’s great pest control project. Finding themselves suddenly lionised instead of stopped-and-searched, a newfound sense of civic participation put a spring and swagger in their step, and inter-gang rivalry waned.

There was a minor furore shortly after the Repeal Bill passed when, having voted against the Bill, Dr Rosena Allin-Khan MP (Labour) was photographed at the Boxing Day Tooting meet. Polly Toynbee accused her of ‘cheap populism’, while one snarky Spectator columnist noted how clean her Nikes remained even after a gruelling back-garden chase. 

The issue split the Labour Party down the middle. On one side stood those who saw the benefits in terms of public health, pest control, crime reduction, race relations, and young males having a healthy outlet for their aggression. On the other stood those appalled by the cruelty meted out to the fox. Innocent animals should not be hunted for fun, they protested. The repeal was emblematic of a culture that had turned its back on progress and was disintegrating into barbarism. 

Their opponents replied that the riotous pursuit and bloody death of the odd manky fox was a small price to pay for a reduction in youth knife crime, and that objectors were white middle-class snobs who want to keep London’s multicultural youth in a state of dependence and misery. Would they rather see machete-wielding gangs pursuing foxes or teenagers? The statistics showed it was a straight swap.

The antis retorted that this revolting weaponisation of tragic deaths among troubled urban youth was the first move in a base and bloodthirsty effort to take modern Britain back to the Dark Ages. The next step in the Tories’ grim plan would be tagging further vulnerable groups for torture and sacrifice. Ken Livingstone popped up from somewhere to remind us who else murdered vulnerable groups in order to create a sense of belonging forged in bloodshed. 

Jolyon Maugham became, unexpectedly, an anti-hunt sensation, when after months of silence he prioritised his Lib Dem sympathies over past association with urban pest control and wrote a heartfelt op-ed for The New European, explaining why he should have called the RSPCA on that hungover New Year’s Day. Floral kimonos became, briefly and surreally, a symbol for militant veganism.

But with Labour now a rump party of urban liberals, and city hunting wildly popular, the electoral calculus was inexorable. Pollsters nodded sagely when Allin-Khan’s popularity rocketed. The #KillerKhan tweetstorm never got off the starting blocks. 

As the wind picks up on Dulwich Road, hunt followers are still milling, elated. The crowd passes hip flasks, relives highlights. Young people mix across culture, ethnicity and caste. Paleo-and-Crossfit machos swap hunt stories with Asian wideboys. Shaven-headed teenagers in tracksuits laugh uproariously with a knot of tweed-wearing neo-trads, the men extravagantly moustachio’d. Locals sidle uncertainly past the panting hounds. 

The parkour crew are all here now. The hunt’s athletic elite. Stripped to the waist, defined even in dull autumn daylight, they draw admiring glances but talk mainly to each other. A chill rain begins to spatter. It’s still early; the fitness hardcore moves on toward Parkrun. Knots of people disperse in pursuit of brunch, showers or the visceral pleasures of a post-hunt shag. 

In an apartment window above the vintage furniture shop, someone spots a sign hand-stencilled on a sheet. FOR FOX SAKE BAN THE HUNT. Scattered jeers. No one performs compassion for status points these days: that generation is sliding into middle-aged irrelevance. Vandalising monuments is so last year. All of bleeding-edge young London is here, at its most energised and diverse, to thumb their noses at public displays of empathy. 

Veganism is tired. Bloodsport is a human instinct. Better to hunt foxes than each other. 

Originally published by The Fence