Cheryl Clarke is still seething that Stephen Lawrence was granted special treatment, as she sees it. Gesticulating towards the bustling street where the black teenager was murdered 25 years ago today, Clarke says: “A Paki – an Indian boy – was stabbed down there just days after Stephen and he never got a plaque. Why is he the only one? What about all the others who’ve died around here and who never got a plaque?”

The Stephen Lawrence memorial stone, flanked on Friday by fresh bouquets and single flowers, is set into the pavement on Well Hall Road in Eltham, south-east London. After nightfall on 22 April 1993 a gang of five or six white men strutted across the road towards Lawrence shouting: “What – what, nigger?” and plunged a knife into the chest of the 18-year-old aspiring architect.

For some who live in the neighbouring estate, the death rankles primarily because it compelled British society to change its attitudes to race.

“They call us white honkys, but if anything happens or you say anything you get called a racist,” says Clarke, clutching a can of energy drink. “Someone threw white paint on the plaque and a white person got blamed – but it was a black who did it.” The 48-year-old is standing outside her sister’s home on Scarsbrook Road within Eltham’s Brooks estate, the orderly grid of postwar terracing and semi-detached housing where four of the five men accused of killing Lawrence lived close to each other.

In 2011 the Old Bailey heard how Lawrence unwittingly provoked the suspects by simply being a black man on their “manor”. Back then their “manor” was homogeneous, dominated by members of the white working class, bordered by the unrelenting traffic of Well Hall Road where it becomes part of the South Circular road on the stretch where Lawrence was murdered.

The estate’s demographic, much like the city stretched out to its north, has changed profoundly since Lawrence’s killers were spotted running into its streets after 10.30pm on a night that has framed the debate on UK race relations since.

Now black and Asian households outnumber the area’s white population, according to residents. One black teenager, asked if he was afraid of walking through the estate at night, says: “Nope, it’s more like the other way round – you’d be scared if you are white.”

John Lowman, a retired newsagent, says the estate’s racial profile has changed steadily over the past two and a half decades. “It wasn’t like when they were moving blacks from Walthamstow to Dagenham in the 70s – then it was: ‘Blimey, you’ve got a lot of blacks around here’,” the 70-year-old says. “Here it was gradual. People steadily moved in from different cultures. The area is completely changed compared with how it was 25 years ago.”

Several doors along from Clarke is Victor, a 52-year-old British Nigerian who pauses from laying a patio in the sunshine to explain that he has never experienced racism in his 10 years on the estate. “It’s nice around here,” he says. “I feel totally safe.”

Others feel the same. Trainee filmmaker Nathaniel Callender has been living on the eastern periphery of the estate for 12 months and also never experienced or witnessed any bigotry.

“It’s lovely. People are very friendly,” he says. “If we treat others like equals, if we are open to different cultures, that will inspire people. We are all human,” adds the 23-year-old, standing close to the entrance of Dickson Road, the street down which the Lawrence suspects were seen heading in the moments after the attack.

Nearby stands the St Thomas More Catholic primary school. One of its teachers is sitting outside eating lunch. “I wear a headscarf and haven’t encountered much racism around here, although there are pockets,” says Monica (not her real name).

However the 40-year-old identifies one variable that she feels has recently toxified sentiment on the estate. “Brexit has had a very negative impact,” she says. “It’s given people the right to say things like: ‘Go back to your own country.’”

Speaking above the din of the playground, full of faces that reflect the increasing multiculturalism of the estate, Monica is concerned that attitudes are slipping back to the era when Lawrence was attacked on the pavement 300 metres away.

“From my experience it’s like we’re going back to the 1980s when, growing up in Bracknell [Berkshire], we had our door kicked in, eggs thrown at us. These days it’s of a different type, more inadvertent. But social media means more people are involved,” she says.

Charlie Davis, the councillor for Eltham North, who was born the year after the murder, believes the area has an outlook and makeup in keeping with much of the capital. “It’s like any area in London, very diverse, although probably more green than inner London,” he says.

Statistically the diversity of the Brook estate is reflected in census figures for its ward, Eltham West, which incorporates 3,859 homes holding 10,399 people. Of these 6,839 are classified as white British and 3,560 as black and minority ethnic – 34.2% compared with around 40% for London as a whole.

The unemployment rate – poverty is frequently classified as a driver of discrimination – is slightly higher than the national average, with a third of its working-age population – 2,514 – economically inactive, higher than the current UK rate of 21.2%.

Measuring the actual level of hate crime at local level is harder, as the Metropolitan Police only provides data at borough level. For Greenwich, which incorporates the Brook estate, 1,089 religious and race hate crime offences were reported in the two years to February 2018, significantly higher than the 741 offences recorded in Barking and Dagenham to its north, but significantly less than the 1,626 in neighbouring Tower Hamlets.

Other types of crime are a concern on Brook estate. Eltham police station has closed and Clarke, still holding her energy drink, says too few officers patrol the estate.

“In terms of crime it’s more blacks than whites – drugs, mainly,” she says. As she speaks, an elderly black resident walks past down Scarsbrook Road. “You see how it’s changing?” adds Clarke. “That’s two of them who’ve passed since we been chatting.”

The man offers a greeting. Clarke turns and shouts: “Good day to you.”