On 30 September 2025, I broke up a beginning physical fight between two men in Amsterdam. A traffic situation at the Celebesstraat end of Borneostraat.
“Stop it. Both of you. Stop it.”
Saying this sufficed.
I’d never have attempted that if I hadn’t spent 15 years in Portsmouth in sweet England, however.
Appearances can be deceiving.
Let’s talk a little about that.
It was PC Froneberger III who recommended this book by Richard D. Lewis to me at a Berenschot workshop about cultural differences. That’s where we first met. PC and I both turned out to be members of the Amsterdam American Business Club. We became business partners.
I also ordered the book, at Waterstones in Amsterdam.
England
British insularity is mostly English insularity. Even within England, however, you can encounter it in vastly differing degrees. Infamous within the UK for its fierce insularity is Portsmouth. It is located in the county Hampshire in England.
Please be aware that there are other places called Portsmouth. Most are in the US. There is one in Virginia, for example, and one in New Hampshire. There is even a second Portsmouth in England. That’s not what this page is about.
From the Portsmouth this page is about, ferries run to France, Spain and the Channel Islands as well to the Isle of Wight. It is the first English municipality that many traveling foreigners encounter, for example on their way to London, arriving from France or Spain.
I remember an American who I encountered at the local Aldi. He was on his way to friends in London. He had stopped at the Aldi for some food, had driven from France where he had been on holiday if I remember correctly and then taken a ferry. I think he was going to London for a wedding. Or maybe not. I’ve also forgotten what he did for a living. I remember that he told me.
People in Portsmouth can come across as very unfriendly, but as a foreigner, you always also have to keep in mind that the British – read “the English” – describe their communication style and national character as “passive aggression” anyway.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/07/grey-rocking-brits-passive-aggression
It’s Nigel Farage’s style, Boris Johnson’s style, Theresa May’s style, Priti Patel’s style and I daresay also Angela Rayner’s style and Keir Starmer’s style and several other top politicians’ style. It’s not every English person’s style and it’s certainly not the style of the Welsh or the Scots.
How that came about? It’s got to be a consequence of the English class system, doesn’t it. It’s how you vent at someone perceived as more powerful and abusive when you are in a position of powerlessness. That way, the other person cannot accuse you of blatant disrespect. The ambiguity protects you.
People abroad may tend to think of the English as “prim and proper” as an American woodwind musician, band director and music graduate, as well as former USAF, once formulated it to me. We may imagine types like Morse and Lewis or Miss Marple, a little ornery at times but surely not entirely unreasonable.
Uh oh.
The glimpse of academia that you get to see in those series has nothing to do with academia in real life either. No wonder that so many of the English think that people who went to university are utterly useless. These cute little wooden chambers with three or four students instead of modern lecture theaters, with people who are always dressed in flowing black robes and talking in strange tongues, those are scenes that come straight out of Greek dramas. They bear no relation to reality.
Most of England is not like what you get to see in those sweet TV series, dear people abroad. There are lots of poor sods there, lots and lots and lots of them. Many are angry and powerless and dirt-poor and they sound nothing like the people in Morse and Fawlty Towers.
Portsmouth
Portsmouth is the ultimate example of that. It’s called Pompey locally, though “Pompey” also refers to its football club. That football club and Portsmouth as a whole has traditionally been associated with horrific hooliganism rooted in Portsmouth’s insularity. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6.57_Crew In the videos below, you can see what that used to look like. If you look at the Wikipedia page, you’ll see that I am not that far off when I talk of “Portsmouth’s ‘ndrangheta-style culture”.
Portsmouth is a densely populated place crammed onto a tiny island called Portsea Island. The place measures only 24.5 square kilometers. 9.5 square miles. 6,100 acres. That’s three long roads that run down from continental England and a bunch of side streets that connect them. Almost all of those streets and two of the three roads are fully lined with homes.
The island is wedged so tightly against the south coast of England that it’s easy to miss that you’re driving onto an island. You will drive over a bridge that takes you past Portsbridge Creek, the tidal channel that separates Portsea Island from mainland England.
You can have lived there for decades, but if you weren’t born there, you’ll always remain a stranger. I remember attending a Café Scientifique event shortly after I moved to Portsmouth and talking with a couple. They said that they weren’t local. To my astonishment, they then proceeded to tell me that they were from somewhere else and had been living in Portsmouth for 30 years.
Here are some links for an impression of what Portsmouth can be like so that you can brace yourself. Things can get ugly. It’s not what the whole town is about, but it is definitely part of the town’s makeup.
“Britains Toughest Towns, Season 1 Episode 5”. ITV documentary about Portsmouth in the series “Britain’s Toughest Towns”. David Sumnall (director/writer), Donal MacIntyre (reporter/presenter). 19 October 2005. (Videos posted below.)
Cotterill, Tom (22 May 2020). “Fresh fury as more reckless gangs gather on Southsea Common ‘putting lives at risk'”. Portsmouth News.
Fishwick, Ben (15 June 2021). “Southsea Common ‘public order’ incident involving 30 people sees man, 18, injured”. Portsmouth News.
Fishwick, Ben (11 June 2020). “Gangs of up to 20 yobs fighting in Buckland street, riding…”Portsmouth News. 12 June 2020.
Lewis, Anna (24 June 2020). “‘They’re laughing at police’: Dispersal order in place at Southsea Common after gang of 200 teens fight, take drugs and intimidate residents”. HampshireLive.
Deeks, Steve (15 September 2020). “Gang with machete and knuckle duster seen fighting on…”Portsmouth News.
The images of Morse, Lewis and Ms Marple now have surely evaporated from your thoughts.
Meth
No, I am not being paranoid about drugs. I’ve seen people shoot up from my office window. I’ve watched people hide out from the police on our patio. From my kitchen window, I’ve also observed drugs transactions take place a few times. I had noticed odd behaviors so I waited and watched to see what would happen.
I have also stopped two people from dragging a driver out of his car along Kingston Road. His young family was in it too. It was rush hour, so he was stuck and couldn’t drive away. I was very unwell at the time, wouldn’t have been able to put up a fight or run away. Maybe that made me more effective because I didn’t care if I was going to get hurt.
There was nothing wrong with my voice, though. So I yelled at the culprits that they were being ridiculous, very loudly. That made one of them turn around and run toward me. That was a mother with her baby in a pram from which she constantly kept running away, too. The word “pram” is British English for baby carriage; a stroller is called a “pushchair”. A “pushbike” is a regular bicycle.
I had seen what happened. They were on the pavement and a car was turning into traffic, from a parking area behind a building. The view to the right is blocked by a building; the view to the left is clear. They were already yelling at him when he was still on the pavement. I said something to the driver in an attempt to make up for it, to support him a little.
They wouldn’t leave him alone and the crazy way in which they were acting probably meant that they were high on meth. They ran after the car again a little later, the guy ahead, she following with the pram. When the guy ran into traffic, I decided to intervene. That the woman then turned around distracted the guy too and it made him forget about the driver. The woman didn’t touch me. There was just a lot of yelling in my face, at a distance of about 10 centimeters. It’s a matter of standing your ground.
Like I said, I am pretty sure that they were high on meth. There is a lot of aggression and violence in Portsmouth, but these two were over the top, out of control. There’s almost always a lot of screaming, shouting and yelling going on there. That’s no surprise. There are always guerrilla wars going on. People don’t often have normal conversations with one another in the central part of town. They tend to be pretty abusive. Of course, it depends! There are plenty of normal, friendly people there too.
Yobs
In Portsmouth, young people sometimes climb onto roofs and go onto patios to harass residents. You have to really stand your ground to fight off these local youngsters. You cannot show any fear whatsoever, or anger. Because they love seeing you getting riled up and red hot with anger and powerlessness. The English call such youngsters yobs.
Mums
I also attracted a lot of anger after I took action when I saw a young kid and a baby left alone in a car in the sunshine, with the adults chatting inside a house behind a closed door. That was a different story and nobody got hurt. These folks were just scared and in Portsmouth, that tends to manifest as anger and aggression.
That particular woman, however, had already occasionally shouted at me and she later shouted at me again one day, no idea why. In fact, I think she had already been shouting at me when she was still living in a different part of town, again, for no particular reason.
There’ve also been two women who pushed me up against a wall once. I used to walk down their street often, St Paul’s Road, on my way to and from the train station and later also Asda. In Portsmouth, people are pathologically obsessed with strangers. I had a black trench cotton coat and apparently, they had nicknamed me the Penguin. (I’d never even noticed them.) Granted, I think I was in a foul mood myself at the time. You can’t live in Portsmouth for long without developing frequent foul moods.
Portsmouth and its extreme insularity
There’s also a great deal of boredom in Portsmouth. Many people there have too much time on their hands and their lives feel empty.
Portsmouth seemed friendly and lively when I decided to move from Southampton to Southsea. It’s not friendly at all. Just about everybody here acts as if they hate just about everybody else here but, together, they seem to hate strangers even more.
No, the people of Portsmouth are not very sociable, even though they may see themselves as such because they may not get a lot of exposure to what life is like away from Portsmouth.
I am not blind, though. Not everyone here is grouchy and hostile.
That said, you can see foreigners and other strangers change here too, from friendly and confident people into distrustful, aggressive, thoroughly unpleasant and even hateful as well as miserable people.
You always have to expect anger and hostility here and be ready for it so that you are not taken by surprise, which will make you come across as weak.
How to respond to Pompey nonsense
Do not laugh along with what folks here do to you. That signals that you are okay with what happened. Are you?
Do not pretend nothing’s happening either, depending on the situation, of course. People for example may yell a lot of nonsense at you. Well, if you had your earbuds in, you might not even have heard it and even if you hear it, you still usually won’t have the foggiest idea what it is about.
TIP: If you do stand up to local folks, pretend that you don’t remember them when you run into these folks again. Treat them like you would treat anyone else if they leave you in peace this time.
They may initially try to trigger you by snapping something at you the next time they see you, possibly to find out if you’ve reported them somewhere or merely to see if you recognize them, or (more likely) just to needle you. Ignore that. Give them a chance. Give them the chance to decide to start behaving differently. If you keep remembering them, you keep pushing them back into their old behaviors. Give them the chance to behave like random people who you haven’t met before.
That woman who I stopped from going after a driver in busy traffic (that is, particularly her partner), who had stood yelling into my face, I ran into her again a day later or so. She wasn’t high then, but she still shouted something at me. (If she had not done that, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed her.) I pretended not to hear or see her.
One day in 2022, I suddenly found myself surrounded by four young male security guards who thought it would be fun to mess with an old cow who seemed to be living in poverty. They ambushed me in the The Bridge shopping center, just as I was about to leave, followed me all the way through Asda and outside. They were bullshitting about me not being allowed to take photos, which I knew because I am not the dumb old cow that they mistook me for. However, to other people (random shoppers), it may have looked like I presented some kind of danger and was being escorted out.
I was taking some photos of shop fronts and maintenance issues after I received a leaflet from a local Lib Dem candidate who stated that most shops there were unoccupied (which turned out not to be true), and that Portsmouth City Council should purchase the shopping center.
Anyway, dumb old cows only exist in these young folks’ imagination. I went back a day or so later and gave them a resume (which among other things mentioned presentation skills workshops for NATO). After that, they left me in peace. This is horrible, that people stop targeting you after they see your resume and see that you went to university. Is it that awful English class crap or because they think you’re learning-disabled as you’re single (hence “dimwitted”), why they target you? Or is it mostly also merely the usual misogyny and gerontophobia? Everyone deserves normal human respect, regardless of background or circumstances.
Intimidation is the big game on Portsea Island. Always be ready to fight back, to stand up to attacks of any kind. Always watch your back, too. Portsmouth is often like a guerrilla war zone, in my experience.
There really should be warning signs at the entrance roads to Portsea Island. I’m only half-joking when say that. It’s so extremely insular.
While many people in Portsmouth are more or less in a perpetual state of war, this depends a little on where exactly on Portsea Island you are located. I’ve read that you can see it as consisting of separate villages. Some of these “villages” are more into this “we are under siege from strangers” and “we must beat the enemy” nonsense than others.
There’s something called being “Pompey born and bred”; Pompey is the nickname for the island. These tend to be people who seem to see everyone else as the enemy, and that includes everyone who they’ve never even set eyes on.
If you’ve been here long enough, people will start volunteering statements like “X went to primary school with Y. X would never do anything to betray Y.” That represents a pathological state of mind and it seems fairly typical for Portsmouth.
There is a great deal of intimidation and retaliation going on in this town. Locals will always deny knowing anyone else in this town and nobody ever knows anything about anything that might be going on. Like the mafia, they use a lot of code – words and signals – to convey messages to one another. It keeps people from getting caught.
Sadly, some of these folks may even believe that they are helping each other, when they are effectively sabotaging each other and keeping each other under everyone else’s thumbs. Among the local poor, it’s considered fairly typical to move to Portsmouth and end up in inescapable poverty.
I sometimes phrase it as follows. Nobody lives in Portsmouth. Everyone here is dying. They’re either waiting patiently for death or they’re dying to get out of here. For me me, Portsmouth acquired a very strong “death trap” feel.
When I was volunteering in the Covid vaccination effort, I heard a man who I didn’t know express surprise that I was chatting with people. Well, whaddayouknow, I am a perfectly fine person. Surprise, surprise. It was Portsmouth that instantly declared war on me when I moved there. It had nothing to do with me because nobody there even knew me.
Why would I want to socialize with strangers who do things like make fun of my blood test results and try to make me believe I have cancer, greet me and then empty a bucket of liquid over me from a window above me when I walk or shout all sorts of bizarre stuff at me (with or without grabbing their penis at the same time)? Or paint a slogan on the white wall with an arrow to my name and do all kinds of other bizarre shit?
Perhaps you can picture Portsea Island’s insularity as follows… Don’t get angry right away. Think about it.
Below, you see photos of some local neo-Nazi graffiti that I took in early December 2022. While this likely depicts the island of Great Britain wanting to deter migrants like me, you can also see it as Portsea Island wanting to deter strangers.
Of the graffiti below, Portsmouth City Council promised to remove it asap after I e-mailed them about it.
There is also a great deal of envy here. Or is it also part of the extreme insularity? The envy is mostly against older women and against people who aren’t white English who run businesses and/or are self-employed, for example as a costume maker for theater. They seem to be perceived as having taken something from the locals.
Xenophobia, part of insularity
Paul Cheape, a white male business owner in Portsmouth, was targeted in 2018 in what the Sunday Times called a “xenophobic campaign”. He is Scottish. He’d lived in Sweden. Has a young family. Kids.
The hate campaign against him had clear echoes of Pizzagate (4chan/8chan extremism). You all know what happened in Pizzagate. If not, look into it.
This is what he was like before he became attacked:
After he became attacked, he became depressed, didn’t want to venture out of his home any longer, developed physical health problems and had suicidal thoughts.
He’s gone from Portsmouth now.
The guy behind that vicious campaign against that Scottish business owner was living very close to where I was living at the time, after I moved within Portsmouth. Stirling Street. Just cross the street and take a left where going to the right would take you into Queens Road.
This area around New Road and Kingston Road is where a lot of crap within Portsmouth is organized from.
Among other things, these anonymous folks coordinate holding back or throwing away postal mail for certain people and blocking outgoing postal mail from certain people, cutting off their internet access or landline (in the days when most people still had landlines), or not cutting it off, or repeatedly stopping people from transferring to a different provider because they would no longer be able to mess with them, interfering with certain people’s bank accounts, utility accounts (including lowering or increasing their rates, btw) and anything else you can think of, such as coordinating responses to certain Freecycle posts, spreading people’s medical test results and making fun of them, delaying certain deliveries or speeding them up or interfering with them (opening packages to do stuff), making spoofed calls and a million other things, including lock-picking and probably also rubbish-dumping. They may stop by, open up an indoor wall, dump a dead rat into the cavity, or maybe even live mice (which are then supposed to get into your place), and close up the wall again. They create and spread deep-fake pornography, too. They may pay a neighbor who’s often up nights to honk on a didgeridoo in the night. They also mess with people on the public access library computer system. They sometimes arrange job interviews just for the opportunity to make fun of people and waste their time. They may arrange to overlook your rubbish bins. They can of course do the opposite too. They can even run around like crazy between 1 and 3 at night, just to be able to get at you without being noticed by others. They can target you by making use of the CCTV system. They may say hello to you and then deliberately empty a bucket with liquid over you when you walk by. They even have a mafia-style system of codes and symbols to convey messages to one another.
In 2016, I was handed a package with wet and muddied letters addressed to me over about 6 months, for example.
Shall I go on?
Better not.
Do I have ideas for how to tackle this problem? Yes.
I bet that I know Portsmouth better than any of its politicians. I got to live in its underbelly, which they usually see as a mere quick photo op. That is, if they see it at all. Portsmouth’s underbelly doesn’t have a lot of voters in it.
