Hackney riots: ‘The message when youth clubs close is that no one cares

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* Vital services that keep the homeless young Londoners I work with in the circle of civilised society are evaporating. To those of us working on the front-line of youth services, it had become increasingly clear that something, in some form, was on its way to shake us.

By Monday morning it was clear that this something had started. By the afternoon, I had young people running into my office shouting: “Things are gonna kick off in Lewisham. Put the news on, put the news on.” Within half an hour, the news came through and they were right. Throughout the day, they demanded to know what the news was saying, what I knew, what was making it on to the TV screens. This is the first time, after a year of encouraging them to engage with the world around them, that any of them had shown any interest in what the media had to say. One of them asked of the news reporters, “What are they saying about us?”

I was struck by this use of “us”, this unquestioning affinity with the youth of Lewisham. At this point, not one of them had set foot in any of the riot zones, but there was no question that these were their people and this was somehow their story. On Tuesday morning, one girl told me that the leaders of the Cherry Boys, a notorious south-east London gang, had been ushering people in and out of the Charlton branch of JD Sports on Monday afternoon, telling people: “Keep it moving. Keep it moving. Get your stuff and let next man in.”