Tottenham: The Riots, a play by Gillian Slovo, at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre

I saw The Riots in Tottenham last week (Wednesday, 4 January). This thoughtful play is the result of the Tricycle Theatre Company’s own investigation into last summer’s unrest in London and the rest of the UK.

  Writer Gillian Slovo* based The Riots on 56 hours of interviews with rioters, riot victims, police and politicians. For instance, well-known actor Cyril Nri plays both Superintendent Leroy Logan and Reverend Nims Obunge; and Michele Austin was superb as gushing Diane Abbott MP one minute and, after a rapid costume change, as flamboyant children’s advocate and charity leader, Camila Batmanghelidjh.

   The government refused to hold an inquiry into the August 6-10 unrest that claimed the lives of five people – Trevor Ellis, Haroon Jahan, Shahzad Ali, Abdul Musavir, and Richard Mannington Bowes.

  The Tricycle has transferred Slovo’s play from its Kilburn home to show to Tottenham audiences at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre until January 14. The riots kicked off in Tottenham following the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, a young father from the local area, during a police raid in Tottenham Hale on August 4.

  Senior politicians, such as Michael Gove MP and Iain Duncan Smith MP quickly condemned the rioters as criminals, arguing only criminality and nothing political motivated the violence and looting. Slovo interviewed both politicians. Actors representing their testimony in The Riots will allow Tottenham audiences this week to make up their own minds.

  Testimony also includes a letter written by Chelsea Ives from Holloway Prison. Ives, a former London Olympic Games ambassador, wrote to the Tricycle with her story and views. Ives is serving a two-year sentence for criminal damage and burglary. Her mother Adrienne contacted police after seeing CCTV footage on TV news of her daughter involved in a group attack on a police car in the north London suburb of Enfield.

  On stage, Ives (played by Clementine Marlowe-Hunt) expresses remorse for her actions but condemns a media witch-hunt for trashing her as the country’s most notorious and archetypal rioter.

 A passionate and informed Tottenham audience took part in an after-play discussion with Gillian Slovo and Stafford Scott, a ‘veteran’ Tottenham community advocate and interrogator of police tactics from the days of the Broadwater Farm riots in Tottenham in 1985. Scott’s insights into how police approach black people and communities will be considered in some detail at www.londonintelligence.co.uk
 * South African-born Slovo is the daughter of Joe Slovo, leader of the South African Communist Party, and of Ruth First, the anti-apartheid activist and journalist who was murdered by a parcel bomb in 1982.

The Riots plays in Tottenham until January 14. For tickets and info: www.berniegrantcentre.co.uk

Paul Coleman, London, January 2011

The London Riots: The Question of Why?

© Paul Coleman, London 2011

I bought a Greater London Streetfinder Atlas the other day.
Terrifyingly, it's already out of date. 
Sony's massive distribution centre in north-eastern Enfield shows up on page 105 as a big orange rectangle. 
But in the wee hours of this morning the vast building itself exploded and was raised to the ground in a huge fire set by looting arsonists.

Float
Twelve hours or so later, at 1pm today (Tuesday, 9 August), bits of the building and its huge store of electrical goods - plasma TVs and games consoles and the like - continue to float past my window as dense smoke carried by the wind (click on photo to enlarge). Tonight, Londoners brace themselves across the city hoping to see 16,000 police officers visibly reclaiming the streets of London from these gangs of rioters.

Typically edgy is Enfield, where I live. 
Enfield normally runs shy of the news limelight. 
But, after the Sony centre fire, and Sunday night's now relatively minor skirmish between rioters, riot police and police dogs in sleepy Enfield Town, Enfield is now a familiar tag to millions who watch TV news.

© Paul Coleman, London 2011

Yesterday afternoon, Enfield even 'trended' on Twitter. But, after the worst devastation and fires in modern British history since the 1980s riots, the Blitz of World War II and the Great Fire of London in 1666, people worldwide are now also sadly familiar with Bruce Grove, Tottenham, Hackney, Lewisham, Peckham, Ealing, Woolwich, Colliers Wood, Catford, East Dulwich, Camden, Clapham Junction, Ilford and, perhaps most of all, with the two horrifying fires in Croydon.

   Mushrooming like Sony centre smoke hanging in this bright afternoon sky are several big questions, such as 'why is this happening' and 'why are they doing it'?  
Most politicians, senior police and pontificating pundits who've plonked themselves in front of cameras have struggled to find new ways to give old answers about 'inexcusable violence', 'mindless thuggery' and 'sheer criminality". 
To me, their dead-end condemnations seem pretty mindless, inexcusable and irrational.

Meanings
However, some of you might've caught Dr Clifford Stott, an academic from Liverpool University, provide his take on these questions on Sky News. Asked what is the psychology of young people attacking police and looting, Stott replied: "We cannot understand the problem if we dismiss it as mindless. It's driven by particular meanings that those rioters have in their heads. 

   "We have to ask where do those meanings come from and what drives them," added Stott. "And that takes us, unfortunately, to questions of social context and social conditions. I populate a very difficult position because by talking about the way this behaviour is meaningful and linked to economic and social conditions, I get called an apologist - as if by injecting some objective, rational debate into the situation I am doing something wrong.

  "But I'm not," insisted Stott. "What we have to recognise is that these targets in terms of the expensive, high-end goods are out of reach of the vast bulk of the people involved in this kind of rioting. And they are using these riots as an opportunity to attack the society from which they are so alienated and marginalised from.

  "So, we've got to ask, how did we get here? How did we get to a situation where this group of people are so angry with the world that they live in, and so angry that they're capable of coming out onto the streets and to attack us in this manner?"

The sorry phlanx who might denounce Stott as 'an apologist' do us all down. These riots reflect more about the psychology of our own consumer-led, profit-driven society.  Sadly, our politicians can't see this kind of logic through the dense smoke of their own populist, sound-bite rhetoric. 

Postscript: Almost on cue, shortly after my original posting, Mayor Boris Johnson, speaking to angry riot victims on a Clapham Junction street, said: "It's time people engaged in looting stopped hearing economic and social justifications for what they're doing."

Photos: The last round? Enfield Civic Centre shrouded by smoke still swirling over north London from the Sony centre fire attack started by rioters several miles away.

Photos: Copyright Paul Coleman. No re-use without permission.

Paul Coleman, London, August 2011

Tottenham 2011: the background from 1985

"On 5th October 1985, four Tottenham police officers entered the home of a Black woman, Mrs Cynthia Jarrett, and searched it. During the course of the search Mrs Jarrett collapsed, and soon after she died. 

   "On the following afternoon a demonstration outside Tottenham police station passed off without any serious incident. But during the evening and night of 6th October, a violent disturbance took place at the Broadwater Farm Estate, Tottenham. A police officer, PC Keith Blakelock, was killed.

   "Several buildings were set on fire, as well as many motor vehicles. Guns were alleged to have been fired at the police. Officers armed with plastic bullets and CS gas were deployed but not used. 

   "In a television interview, the senior officer for the North London area, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Richards, claimed that the disturbances were "the most ferocious, the most vicious riots ever seen on  the mainland". 
   "In the weeks and months following 6th October, police officers remained on the estate in considerable numbers, and raids were carried out by large squads of police upon dozens of homes."

Source: The Broadwater Farm Inquiry, Report of the Independent Inquiry into Disturbances of October 1985 at the Broadwater Farm Estate, Tottenham, Chaired by Lord Gifford QC.

Paul Coleman, London, August 2011

Council vote rejects development for Wards Corner, Tottenham

Councillors in the north London borough of Haringey voted late on Wednesday night (20th July) to refuse planning permission for a controversial housing and retail development at Wards Corner in Tottenham, north London.

If you'd like more details please visit my news story on the 24 Housing website.

Paul Coleman, London, July 2011

Ward's Corner: Just smile and say cheese

White balloons went up in Tottenham, north London, last night. Emblazoned with the slogans, 'No demolition, No Dereliction' and 'Plan for the Community', the balloons helped to inflate the raucous nature of a meeting between developers Grainger and Tottenham residents and market traders. 

The meeting, held inside the local further education college, was called by Haringey Council to consider Grainger's controversial plans to demolish Ward's Corner, a popular Tottenham landmark that houses a thriving market run mainly by Latin American, African, Caribbean and Indian traders. 

Grainger want to replace Ward's Corner with a gleaming shopping centre and 197 solely private apartments built on a site that straddles four tube tunnels at Seven Sisters, a busy Victoria Line station.

The stakes are high. Paranoia levels rose higher than the balloons. Roy, a member of the Ward's Corner Coalition that bitterly opposes Grainger's plans, told me Haringey officers were refusing to allow coalition members to display their colourful posters depicting their alternative, 'community friendly' re-development scheme for Ward's Corner. 

Just as Roy and I spoke, a Grainger ranger, clad in an open shirt and sports jacket, breezed in to the meeting carrying a plastic box that housed a smart model of Grainger's planned development.

"How are my leaflets going to harm that model?" asked a coalition member when she tried to put her wad of leaflets next to the model sat on a table inside the meeting hall. "I'll fetch you something else to put your leaflets on," replied a Haringey officer.

Worse was yet to come. Paul Smith, the council's Development Manager, apologised for the late start and explained the purpose of the meeting wasn't to make a decision but to ask questions about Grainger's plannning application. He requested a "courteous level of behaviour" but then discourteously demanded that "no photographs be taken during the meeting without permission".

Smith even asked a freelance photographer why he was taking photos. "I'm an interested freelance photographer," replied the snapper, who lives in Tottenham. "I'm a member of the National Union of Journalists and a bona fide news-gatherer."

Smith also took umbrage at the sight of a film camera operated by campaigners against Grainger's development. "I would say that you probably can't film this meeting," said Smith, provoking an enormous clamour inside the room.

"Nobody has asked us for permission to film," added Marc Dorfman, the council's assistant planning director. "Normal process would be for any requests to go to the Council's communications unit."

I tried to ask Smith if anyone from the communications unit was on duty at this very public meeting. Smith waved me away before he and Dorfman entered into a prolonged, huddled whisper with Grainger's development director, David Walters. 

"Grainger aren't happy with the meeting being filmed. It could be doctored," said Smith to Dorfman. 

"It could be manipulated," I heard Walters complain.

Wasted time passed slowly. Valuable discussion about the nitty gritty of Grainger's interesting proposals was delayed even further. The meeting descended into a meeting about taking photographs. During the ensuing hub-bub, I was told nobody from the communications unit was present. 

Finally, Walters ploughed through Grainger's presentation. "We're not entirely comfortable (about being filmed) but we're entirely committed to talking to you this evening," said Walters. "I hope that any photographs or videos will be used in the spirit in which this presentation is made."  

On the morning after the meeting, a Haringey spokeswoman told me: "The development management forum is a public meeting and we would expect some media to be present."

If Grainger are genuinely trying to win Tottenham hearts and minds over their Ward's Corner plans, this camera-shy episode didn't help them. 

As for Haringey's council officers, their knee-jerk reaction to initially try to stop film-makers, photographers and journalists from going about their honest business shows how press freedoms can be fragile even at the local level.

More postings about Grainger's Ward's Corner planning application HGY/2008/0303 will follow soon. 

The Development Management Forum meeting took place in Tottenham on Tuesday, 2nd February, 2011.

Paul Coleman, London, February 2011.