Our work contributes through a cultural criminological perspective to a contextualised knowledge of street violence and its constructed meanings; uncertainty, familiarity and strangeness in spaces of urban disadvantage as perceived by Scottish white youths are examined. Youth criminal and antisocial behaviour associated with knifecarrying is widely reported and structures political and media discourses which classify street culture. In our article we argue that a particular symbolic construction of social space, as experienced and constructed by weapon-carrying young white men in Glasgow, informs the landscape of violence judged in terms of official statistics and fear of crime. Signal crime theory as a particular type of cultural criminology affords insights about why weapons are carried. Links with a hierarchical codification of consumer culture inform the findings and resonate with the penetration of capitalism in the lives of the marginalised street youth. Cultural Criminology Cultural criminology engages with the ontological fragility of late-modernity, structural inequality, uncertainty, and how these haunt the included and excluded, impacting their fear and vindictiveness (Ferrell and Hayward 2014). A politics of meaning-making