by Sean Mallen
“No problem,” I said. “Go Leafs.”
She smiled, as did a couple of other Canadians in the group. The rest looked puzzled.
Judith had lived in the neighbourhood for decades, managing to retain her hometown accent, and her tour revealed a deep and affectionate knowledge of Camden. In the last century it had been a tatty home for Irish labourers on the northern outskirts of London. Around the corner from the Tube stop was a childhood home of Dickens. The public lavatories opposite in the crazy intersection were thanks to a campaign by George Bernard Shaw to provide public conveniences for ladies. Male Londoners then and now still take a leak pretty much where they please, particularly after downing a couple of extra pints after closing time. But the boys later got a loo as well.
A few steps north along the High Street was the Electric Ballroom. It started as a dance hall for Irish labourers before earning fame in the late twentieth century for hosting performances by Sid Vicious, The Clash, and the like. All of which explains the piercing and tattoo parlours up and down the street. Transport for London proposed to demolish the whole block to upgrade the Tube station, but local opposition managed to hold off the bulldozers, and it survives in its spiky, middle-finger-raised glory. The ballroom later got a makeover, which unfortunately turned its gritty facade into a just another bland exercise in neon.
A couple of blocks over, Judith pointed out a pub where Amy Winehouse had one of her legendary blow-ups. Having gotten thoroughly hammered while playing billiards, she threatened to club one of her playmates with a cue. A peacemaker stepped between them and was rewarded with a Winehouse head-butt that broke his nose.
Next up was the Regent’s Canal. I looked out at it every day from my office window but really knew little about it. It was another one of those huge nineteenth-century British infrastructure projects, part of a plan to develop north-central London.
Judith told us that it would freeze over periodically during extra-cold winters, and an entrepreneurial hotelier would send his men to chip out chunks and bring them down to his swanky bar. He neglected to tell his well-heeled customers that the ice decorating their fancy drinks was drawn from a canal seasoned with all manner of horse droppings, human pee, and miscellaneous toxins washed in off the streets.
Her tour wrapped up in our section of the market, the Stables. In the nineteenth century it was a horse hospital — a treatment centre for those injured while hauling barges along the canal.
Every day that I walked to work I would duck off the high street and cut through the cobblestoned passageways for a more scenic route to work. On the days when it had not already rained, workers would be hosing down the passageways to clear off the cigarette butts and other garbage from the night before. The vendors were starting to open up and display their arrays of touristy kitsch, antique clothing, rude T-shirts, and various crafts that tourists would buy as souvenirs that they would later sell in subsequent garage sales back home.
My route would take me by my coffee stop, Terra Nera. Sadly, they were later forced out by a rent hike and I took my daily caffeine business to Café Crema on the West Yard, right beside the canal. They not only poured a beautiful cappuccino (with a discount for those who worked in the AP building) but too often tempted me with a warm croissant or pain au chocolat. The coffee and croissants remained just as fine after Café Crema was remade into a Mexican joint.
Does it sound like I miss it? Yes.
Along the way were giant bronzes of muscular horses in heroic poses, evocative of the neighbourhood’s roots. The sign at the entrance said SINCE 1854.
“Actually the market has only been around since the eighties,” said Judith. The nineteenth-century date referred to its previous incarnation.
I chatted a bit afterward with Judith, thinking I might like to turn her tour into a travel article. She was excited by the idea and asked if I might be able to get her into the Interchange building for a look around.
Sadly, neither happened. And a few days later the charm of the market was briefly overtaken by a night of menace.
London turned.
Chapter Eight
I awoke Sunday morning to news that Tottenham had exploded in anger overnight. On Thursday police had shot and killed a young black man named Mark Duggan. The troubles started with a peaceful protest march, but it was hijacked by those who wanted to do damage. Years of frustration boiled over into street violence and arson.
I called Dan in from his day off and we headed for Tottenham. A burned-out police cruiser stood by the side of the road where the taxi dropped us. Crowds of people were milling around on the street in front of a building gutted by fire, the smell of scorched wood still in the air.
We approached a few people in the crowd to get their take on it all. There was some regret about the damage, but little about the anger. The grievances against police were deep-seated and long-lasting.
“They need to learn a lesson,” a scowling woman named Eileen Edwards told us.
I asked her to explain.
“They need to learn what time it is. We want justice, that’s all it is.”
As it turned out, Tottenham was only the beginning, only the ignition point for something broader, deeper, and more troubling.
The following evening, there was more disorder throughout the city. As we watched Sky News in the bureau, there were live reports of street violence, clashes with police, and fires. They grew minute by minute, peaking with a giant fire in a furniture building south of the Thames. London seemed to be spinning out of control.
A Sky reporter named Mark Stone walked out of his flat, armed with an iPhone, and started shooting video with play-by-play. Pointing it into an electronics shop, he captured scenes of young men attempting to rip a TV off a wall.
“Is that fun? Is that funny?” he asked, provocatively, fearlessly, and probably recklessly. The vandals initially just pushed past him but then the video stopped. We learned later that they had turned on him and he had to run for his life into a nearby bar. All over the city there were reports of TV news crews being assaulted, having their gear stolen. We were spared the danger, we thought, because of the need to stay in the bureau to collect video from the various sources and prepare a story for an imminent deadline.
Then it came to us.
Dan, the Twitter master, said, “A reporter just tweeted that there’s trouble in Camden Town.”
I looked out my window down into the West Yard, the home of my treasured food vendors. It was now dark, the food guys having all closed up hours ago. Peering around a corner was a cop in full riot gear, joined seconds later by a colleague. They took tentative steps into the yard, clearly looking for troublemakers.
I thought about my wisecrack at the hazardous environment training course — the one where I said I was all prepared in case of an attack on the Camden Market. Now it was here.
“Let’s go check out what’s happening on the High Street,” I said. “See if we can shoot a bit of our own video and maybe a stand-up.”
Dan grabbed his smaller, more compact camera, the better to be able to run if need be.
We walked out the back door of the Interchange, along a short street called Camden Lock Place, which during the day is normally bustling with market vendors. Sure enough, police had set up tape across Camden High Street, blocking it off. Farther north, just out of sight, vandals had trashed a bicycle shop.
Young people strolling out of the many pubs and clubs in the area seemed oblivious to what was going on. There were a few guys with hoodies pulled up over their heads, hands in pockets, watching nonchalantly. The likely troublemakers, I thought.
“YOUNG LADY!” a cop snapped at a woman lifting the tape to try to walk past. “That is there for your safety. Choose another route!”
Dan and I shot a quick stand-up in front of the police line, with me describing how the trouble had come to Camden. We walked back along Camden Lock Place toward our office. What was picturesque in daytime now was ominous: aged brick walls, a cobblestoned street, an
d no one in sight. Jack the Ripper stuff.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed two guys following about twenty metres back. Earlier they had been barking at us — the usual kind of “Hey, it’s an American TV crew” that can happen just about anywhere. In normal times, harmless idiocy that you can laugh off.
But not now that these two yobs were wordlessly in our wake. Not with what was going on throughout the city.
The back door to the Interchange compound was an old metal gate that slowly creaked open when you flashed your pass card. It was a charming quirk most of the time, but a nerve-wracking failing tonight. The second we could fit through, I said calmly to Dan, “Let’s just pick up the pace up the stairs.”
“Yup,” he said, having also spotted our followers.
We dashed in, and from above we could see our friends turning around and heading back to the High Street. Odds are they were more curious than predatory, but I was just as happy to have a high fence between us.
Not long afterward, our CTV colleagues Tom and David also tried going down to the High Street, but the scene had further deteriorated and they beat a quick retreat for safety’s sake.
Later, we heard stories of how news photographers were being mugged in the hotter areas of London. The bigger TV agencies, Sky and BBC, hired security guards to protect their live trucks and still suffered damage. Many stories that night were shot on iPhones with reporters dressing down to blend in with the crowd.
There were days of troubles, with the craziness spreading to other cities. Even nice neighbourhoods were hit — thugs pushing their way into restaurants, demanding that patrons hand over their wallets and purses. This was no longer solely a race issue, public order was breaking down. Hooligans used social media to organize meetups to cause trouble.
A sixty-eight-year-old man named Richard Bowes tried to stamp out a fire started by goons in his Ealing neighbourhood. The mob turned on him and beat him to death.
Parliament was recalled. Prime Minister David Cameron said it was evidence of a “broken society.” Outraged Brits demanded that welfare recipients who took part in the riots have their benefits yanked.
As it turns out, there is a long history of this kind of thing in the British capital.
In Peter Ackroyd’s masterly portrait of the city, London: The Biography, he observes that “it stretches back as far as the written records.” Ackroyd reminds us that when King Richard I was crowned in 1189, Jews were slaughtered in the streets.
In 1780, in what he describes as the worst riot of the last thousand years, mobs protesting against laws that would further the rights of Roman Catholics ruled the streets for days, burning several prisons and killing at least two hundred people. Hundreds of rioters were locked up and twenty-five offenders were hanged on the spot of their offences.
More recently, there was the Broadwater Farm riot in 1985. Residents of a mainly black housing development rose in anger after a woman named Cynthia Jarrett suffered a fatal heart attack during a police raid on her home.
In those days, tensions with police had been building for months and this was the spark that set the neighbourhood ablaze. In the midst of the mayhem, Police Constable Keith Blakelock was surrounded by rioters who set upon him with knives and a machete and effectively hacked him to death.
Ackroyd makes the point that in both 1985 and 1780 the troublemakers were generally poor and desperate, observing: “In both cases, however, the riots burned themselves out fierily and quickly. They had no real leaders. They had no real purpose except that of destruction. Such is the sudden fury of London.”
In 2011, the initial theories as to the cause of the latest riots focused on a generation of disenfranchised youth, with few prospects of employment or advancement. Here, too, there were no obvious leaders, just a loose network knitted together through social media.
Speaking of which: Twitter, Facebook, and the rest also showed the good angels of London’s nature. As Tuesday dawned, law-abiding citizens were organizing cleanup campaigns.
I came upon one on Chalk Farm Road as I walked into work.
A group of women were there, sweeping up broken glass from the vandalized bike shop. I spoke with Sia Yama, who had walked down with her broom from her home in North Finchley. “I’m ashamed of what people have done, basically. So I’m doing my bit to help, to ease my shame a bit,” she said.
“You feel ashamed?” I asked.
“I do, as a Londoner.”
Ms. Yama pointed out that she had been unemployed for two years, but would never dream of inflicting the kind of outrage on her city that was perpetrated Monday night.
As I prepared to leave the scene, another woman, who had observed my foreign accent, came up to me and said simply, “I apologize.”
London is both the metropolis of “sudden fury” as described by Peter Ackroyd and also the city of deep civic pride, as displayed by the people with the brooms.
At the end of the week, after the madness had subsided, we went back out to Tottenham to see how people were doing. Walking along the High Road, we met a genial cop named Sergeant Jim MacPherson. The police were steamed because Prime Minister David Cameron had implied that they were slow to react to the riots. Cameron had been on vacation in Italy when things exploded.
MacPherson had not had a day off since it started and was unlikely to have any break for weeks.
He would not respond directly to the PM but did point out: “Being a cop as long as I have, you could have fifty thousand cops out here and it seems like it’s not enough. It’s a big, big city.”
I asked for suggestions of business owners who might want to speak and he pointed me to a storefront with the sign H. GLICKMAN LTD IRONMONGER.
It has stood on the spot since 1880. Derek Lewis was the owner, having taken over from the Glickmans decades earlier. On the first night of the trouble, rioters broke in and ransacked it.
“It does hurt,” said Lewis. “It’s very sad because I’m very involved in the community around here.”
Things were still tense in the neighbourhood. The famed football club, Tottenham Hotspur, cancelled its scheduled game, fearing that it was still too early to allow crowds to gather.
Lewis, though, had no thoughts of shutting down or moving.
“They ain’t gonna get me down. Been here too long, so I ain’t gonna be beaten.”
That weekend, I met Caroline for brunch and learned she was caught up in the nuttiness too — returning home to her quiet neighbourhood in North London to discover someone had spray-painted “ROIT” on the front of her house.
“Is that ‘roit’ as in the Cockney way of saying ‘right’?” I asked.
“No, that’s someone misspelling ‘riot’ — evidence of the shortcomings of the British education system,” she said.
As Caroline stood in front of her place, ruefully assessing the damage, she encountered another, less savoury side of London.
A neighbour walked by, stopped, and appeared to commiserate for a moment.
“When do you suppose you’ll be cleaning it?” he asked. She had no immediate answer.
“Well, you see, I’m trying to sell my place and I have an open house next week, so I’d be most grateful if it could be gone by then,” he said in an impeccably mercenary tone.
London is blessed with many wonderfully generous people, but is also infested with a healthy share of self-centred shits.
Walking out of a play the next weekend, I looked at my iPhone and there was an email from our reporter, Tom — the specialist in war coverage: “Are we thinking of going into Libya?”
After months of vicious fighting, Moammar Gadhafi’s regime appeared to be close to the end. The rebels were closing in on the capital, their military victories assisted in no small part by a NATO bombing campaign designed to keep the colonel from slaughtering his own people.
We would likely be sending someone and it appeared I was about to be faced with the question I had hoped I would be able to dodge: Was I ready to go to
a war zone? The answer from my wife and daughter would be a loud no.
Back at the flat, I stayed up late watching Sky News’s coverage. British reporters are renowned for their fearless reporting from conflict. At the top of the heap was Sky’s Alex Crawford. Many of us felt that her bravery veered toward recklessness. Earlier in the Libya conflict, she and her crew were trapped in a rebel outpost, surrounded by Gadhafi’s forces. She said later that she thought they were dead, but they somehow managed to survive.
Now Alex was leading the international journalistic pack in the regime’s final days. I would flip over to the BBC News Channel’s coverage and their top-flight, courageous reporters were on the outskirts of Tripoli, ducking gunfire, doing their best to convey what they were hearing was happening inside the capital.
Flip back to Sky, and there was Alex reporting live from the back of a rebel truck as they rode right into the centre of Tripoli as Gadhafi’s forces apparently melted away.
It was an astonishing, award-winning coup for Crawford and her team. The next day, as the BBC reporters were again caught outside Gadhafi’s compound, dodging bullets, wondering what was unfolding within, Alex was live inside, interviewing a rebel who was wearing the colonel’s cap, which he had looted from the strongman’s abandoned bedroom.
The Telegraph and some tabloids delighted in reporting Alex’s triumph and mocking the BBC for being beaten. All more than a bit unfair. As I learned from Caroline, the BBC has a rigorous protocol to be followed before deploying journalists into hazardous environments — procedures born from hard and tragic lessons learned when they had people killed or grievously injured. It does not prevent their reporters from bravely following stories into manifestly dangerous places — it just ensures that they do so only with serious advance thought and planning.
Alex Crawford, by comparison, had fewer restraints. She also had a most understanding husband and two children. I met her a year or so later in South Africa, and found her to be a modest, pleasant, and approachable woman with not a hint of arrogance, despite her fame and courage.