When Brixton went up in flames
Ican still recall, with almost psychedelic clarity, the moment that it started – a brick arcing through the air, the crunch of an imploding police van windscreen and the glitter of flying glass in the afternoon sunshine. Shortly after, Brixton was ablaze as roaming mobs vented years of pent-up anger.
I'd arrived with Neil Libbert that Saturday morning, sent down from the Observer's newsroom, then in St Andrew's Hill, Blackfriars. There had been trouble the night before and the area was awash with policemen and vehicles, all part of Operation Swamp, launched by the Met to show who was boss of the shabby streets. They were watched by groups of sullen youths, most, but not all black, gathered at street corners.
The ingredients for an explosion were there and just after 4.30pm it happened. Neil and I were standing in Atlantic Road, near an off-licence, when two very young-looking cops, dressed in jeans and bomber jackets, grabbed a young black man for no obvious reason and announced, in best Sweeney style: "You're nicked." As Neil snapped away with his Leica, they bundled the young man towards a police Transit van. It was, as Neil remarked later, "an extraordinarily provocative and stupid thing to do".
The watching crowd burst into furious life. Missiles flew, glass shattered and the violence rippled outwards like an underwater earthquake to Railton Road, Acre Lane and Brixton Road. Soon, police vehicles were overturned and torched and fire brigade tenders were pelted with paving stones, bricks and iron bars.
The police seemed surprised by the turn of events. It was some time before riot gear was issued but even then they were repeatedly beaten back by mobs drunk on anarchy and, as the evening wore on, looted liquor. Until late into the night, misrule reigned. Men and women swarmed through smashed shop windows, emerging laden with clothes, radios and televisions. The Windsor Castle pub was an early target. The fire took hold in minutes, bathing the mob in flickering red light as they capered outside, swigging the stolen stock.
The rioters – in the beginning at least – seemed as full of glee as anger and there were several touches of black comedy. At one point, I saw someone climb into the driver's cab of a number 37 bus abandoned in Railton Road. Both decks immediately filled up with rioters. Is it my imagination or did someone ding the bell as it set off towards the phalanx of policemen with only plastic shields to protect them, stretched across the end of the road? I certainly remember the look of stark terror on the officers' faces as it lurched towards them before mercifully rolling to a halt, blocked by an overturned car.
There were hardly any reporters around at the outset and the rioters did not seem bothered by our presence. Later that changed. Shortly after the bus incident, I was shoved against a wall, mauled and kicked, while snarling faces screamed that I was an undercover cop. I was rescued by an older man who checked my press card and sent me on my way.
Deadline was approaching and I had to find somewhere to file. Mobile phones had not yet been invented and the phone boxes were all trashed. Just as I was getting desperate, I came across the offices of some far-left group – the SWP perhaps. I knocked on the door and was admitted. They grudgingly allowed me to use their phone. My dictation was constantly interrupted by a stream of criticisms of the "bourgeois" slant of my report.
To the public-school lefties monitoring my words, it must have seemed that the revolution had finally arrived. It certainly felt to me like the start of something big and, indeed, that summer was long and hot with riots in Handsworth, Southall and Toxteth. But the crisis was averted. The police took a battering that day. Nearly 300 were injured and it was a miracle no officer was killed. When the Scarman report appeared that November, though, it was the police who bore the brunt of the criticism, forcing a strategic change in their relationship with the public that endures to this day.
Looking back, the riot looks like a minor skirmish in the Thatcher revolution, a sideshow compared to the social upheaval of the miners' strike three years later. As for me, the events of the day confirmed a latent taste for danger and excitement. The following year, I sailed as the Observer's correspondent with the task force sent by Thatcher to recapture the Falklands. It was the first of many wars, but the events of that mild spring Saturday have stayed with me, revived forcefully now by Neil Libbert's great pictures.