London ‘riots’

Race and socio-economics at the heart of unrest in the United Kingdom

In September 2011 I, along with a number of other early career sociologists, was involved in producing a series of short articles for The Guardian, which reflected on the urban unrest or ‘riots’ which had beset many UK cities in the summer of that year. The four days of disturbances had been triggered by the shooting of twenty-five year old Mark Duggan, a black man, by the police in Tottenham, north London. The articles were an effort to counterbalance the dominant news coverage in the immediate aftermath which focused on generalised issues of law and order, criminality, feral youth and punishment. Instead, our series of articles was an attempt to analyse the local particularities of these disturbances through speaking to young people in areas that had experienced unrest, garnering their thoughts on the events and possible causes in the areas in which they lived and studied. Our objective was to give some space, amidst all the reactionary sensationalist commentaries abounding at the time, to alternative viewpoints of young people directly involved and affected. My piece, for example, was based on interviews with young people in Wood Green, an area two miles away from Tottenham.