Every reporter knows the feeling. I’m watching television at around 11.30 p.m. on Saturday night when my phone begins buzzing. It’s the distinctive number of the New York Times newsroom: 111 111 1111. Answering means being pitched into chaos. ‘We’re hearing of some unrest in Tottenham,’ says the voice. ‘Can you get there?’ I sigh, jump in a taxi and ask to go as close to the local police station as possible. I know I have arrived when I see a burning car with 20-foot flames jumping out. It crackles and hisses. There’s no fire brigade, no cordon around the car. What, I wonder, is going on? I ask a bystander, a man with gold teeth. He explains that ‘these people want justice’. He gestures to 50 or so young men with their hoods up and bandanas covering their faces, squaring up to riot police in the distance. One of those young men, breathless from throwing fireworks, bricks and bottles at the officers, tells me he is protesting because a black man, Mark Duggan, had been shot by police earlier in the week. I ask him why he cares. ‘Because fuck the police,’ he replies. He sprints off towards a nearby house, where kids are kicking down a front garden wall to acquire more bricks.
•••
By this time, the police have closed off a stretch of Tottenham High Street. Reporters gather on the south side. I suspect the action is happening in the north, and I try to make my way there through a warren of back streets, narrow alleys and dead ends. There are dozens of fires now, thick smoke fills the area and it is impossible to see more than 20 feet ahead. Glass explodes out of a very large four-storey building, as the fire guts it. A man shouts, ‘Will everyone get out of here before this building blows!’ Residents start to evacuate, racing towards their cars. The looting has started. By the end of the night, there are fires almost everywhere. No shop escapes without at least one shattered window. Dozens of vehicles are torched by gleeful rioters.
•••
The rotors of police helicopters, hovering low overhead, don’t overcome the sounds of smashing and the alarms of the shops. The smoke is a useful cover for the rioters and looters, who would emerge in clumps of four or five, sometimes on BMX bikes or mopeds. ‘Let’s load up!’ someone shouts. A group sprints past with armfuls of groceries, or whatever it is they have found. One hapless looter appears to be carrying bags of ice. People seem to be grabbing whatever they can. Down the road in Wood Green, I see looters hit a GNC vitamin supplements emporium, and walk out of the Body Shop with armfuls of bath salts and shampoos. Even a Vision Express was stripped bare. The black market for reading glasses is likely to be hot over the next few weeks.
•••
Some of these young people, I came to realise, love the idea that society fears them. Twice that night, in the back streets of Tottenham, they ran at me — I was clearly identifiable as an outsider in an ill-chosen trench coat — with bottles and sticks, only to stop short, shout ‘Boo!’ and collapse laughing. They also started ‘confiscating’ phones from reporters who seemed too keenly interested in taking pictures of the carnage under way. I am now a master of in-pocket tweeting.
•••
By 3 a.m. the rioters had organised. They had built obstacles, pulling wheelie bins into several lines on Tottenham High Road and piling metal construction fences and rubbish on top. They then set them alight, creating a firewall against police who had gathered with horses and with barking attack dogs on straining leashes. The rioters were armed with baseball bats and pieces of wood and metal from building sites. As weapons became scarce, one young man improvised by wielding an aluminum crutch. And when they ran out of missiles, the rioters threw onions and coconuts. The police showed either admirable restraint or scandalous softness, depending on your politics. On a few occasions they clashed with rioters, and the sounds of weapons hitting Perspex shields echoed down the street. But for the most part they were content to push the rioters back 20 yards at a time. I watched as some rioters stepped away from the clashes, kicked down the door of at least one home and slipped inside.
•••
It seemed to me then to be an evening of isolated lawlessness. A Mad Max theme night. A rare suspension of the rules of modern society and a move, for a few hours, towards anarchy. I told people that it wouldn’t, couldn’t, happen again: London is not that type of city. But I found myself in the midst of the same scenes again on Sunday night, in Enfield and Edmonton. And again, on Monday, on the Pembury Road housing estate in Hackney. Two priests, one in full robes, had to be brought in to ask if police could take an injured, elderly lady to safety. I saw one young man kick a bin into the street to block traffic. I asked him why. He shrugged.
•••
Ravi Somaiya is a journalist, working mainly for the New York Times’s London bureau.
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