Having spent last night listening to a continual wail of sirens and alarms, this morning on my walk to work through Oval, Kennington, Elephant & Castle and Borough there was no evidence of civil atrocities. Not a surprise - the real local action last night was in Clapham Junction and Walworth Road. But on Borough High Street there was a police van parked next to a coffee shop. The rozzer in the passenger seat was fast asleep. His colleague stood outside on the phone, rubbing his unshaven cheeks and looking haunted. The two guys in the back were both staring blankly through the window.
They must have had a rotten night. This video of Clapham Junction says it all. I once visited the fancy dress shop there to hire a Henry VIII costume with a preposterous codpiece. It was an old-school costume place: higgledy-piggledy rooms and a range of stock that showed the fickle nature of fancy dress trends, with Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mingling with Ali G and Austin Powers. Last night it was burnt to a cinder, having first been looted for its masks. The fire also destroyed the residential flats above and the record shop next door.
As I walked home last night the staff of Everfresh, my superb local corner shop on Brixton Road, were standing outside the shop, watching the street. The nearest disturbance was a couple of miles away, but they were still visibly panicked, and rightly so. If the idiot mob had (or do, tonight) come that way they may have destroyed on a whim their entire livelihood, a business to which they have devoted every day of every week for years.
That’s the absolute, overriding madness of this all. It is local communities turning inwards and wrecking their own amenities and local economy. The cackling lemmings streaming in and out of the smashed Debenhams, waving trainers and cheap perfume, have no agenda or cause. They just want free stuff now, regardless of the cost in the end.
I have no idea what will happen tonight, and I think my part of South London probably has too few consumer goods shops to smash up to be too badly affected. But I don't think that will be any comfort to the guys at Everfresh, and it certainly won’t be to the owner of the fancy dress shop.
