A library in flames, but the stories are still unfolding
A library in flames, but the stories are still unfolding
‘It’s like suddenly I don’t know this place anymore. It’s so sad’
Dear readers — today’s edition of The Post is not paywalled as we believe this on-the-ground reporting from the riots across the country should be accessible to all readers. However, if you appreciate our work, please consider signing up as a paying member if you haven’t already.
Your Post briefing
Despite worries of further rioting this week after a list of asylum centre targets appeared online, Liverpool emerged unscathed last night after huge groups of counter protestors gathered in the city. Hundreds of people stood waiting at the Asylum Link and Merseyside Refugee network in the St Anne's Centre, anticipating the arrival of a far-right mob that had earmarked the centre as a potential target for further rioting. Yet by early evening it became clear there would be no further violence; a heavy police presence helping to deter those that had threatened to attack the centre yesterday. “We considered this evening as being very pivotal in knowing the situation up and down the country,” one counter protestor told The Echo. “If the violence continued this evening it was likely it would be around for a long time. If it fizzles away and nothing really happens then its a sign that peace has been restored and I am optimistic that this is the end of it now.”
Three men from Liverpool have become the first to be jailed for taking part in the riots in Southport and Liverpool last week. Riots have swept across the country in recent days after three girls were stabbed to death at a dance class in Southport last Monday. Derek Drummond, 58, was given a three-year sentence for punching a police officer. 29-year-old Declan Geiran has been jailed for two years and five months after setting fire to a police vehicle, and Liam James Riley, 40, was jailed for one-and-a-half years for violent disorder and racially aggravated abusive behaviour.
And a recommended read from the BBC. This piece digs into Channel3Now: the website that first published a false name for the 17-year-old charged over the Southport attack, claiming he was an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK by boat. This website, along with other online sources claiming the attacker was a Muslim, has been credited for kickstarting the riots across the UK in recent days.
By David Lloyd
“We were messaging the kids and they were hiding under the beds having panic attacks,” Walton Youth Project’s Darren Simpson tells us. “The next day, their parents were saying they were too terrified to leave the house.”
As we chat, one of Darren’s colleagues arrives back at the Club’s HQ on City Road, which runs parallel to the scene of the weekend’s riots on County Road. She’s returning from a sports day that the club had organised in nearby Walton Hall Park.
“Only ten kids turned up,” she says. “We had 40 who said they were coming last week.”
It’s a sunny summer’s afternoon, and kids are too scared to play in the park.
These are the tales you don’t hear, despite being glued to the always-on news cycle, the social feeds and the push notifications. A frightened young kid doesn’t glean nearly as many eyeballs, or generate as much advertising revenue, as a looping video of a library on fire.
We can rebuild a library. Money is already flooding in. But the kids whose world has burned down? That’s going to take more than a GoFundMe appeal. The families with babies living above the looted and burning shops, the small business owners who’ve already packed up and left their community — these are the lives set alight and which will continue to smoulder still, even after that miraculous overnight clean-up swept these Walton streets clean of the hatred.
It’s not hard to wrap your head around the concept of parallel universes; the existence of multiple versions of reality. Coexisting, yet separated by a veil so thin it can, given the right atmospheric conditions, rupture. You don’t have to do a crash course in quantum mechanics to witness it. You just had to have been on County Road this weekend. Two polar opposite planes of existence intersected.
In one, a world of evil, bigotry and violence. In the other, the world the rest of us live in. The world that saw Darren and his friends on the streets at eight o’clock on Sunday morning, doing what they could to return their world to its rightful axis again.
“The council had already been out and cleared away most of the debris,” Darren says. “We were there with parents, kids and volunteers to show our support. People were coming up to us, asking if they could help. Picking up the shards and the burned-out remains with their bare hands,” he says.
For over 50 years, the Walton Youth Project has been engaging with young families and children, with after-school activities, residential breaks and one-to-one support. Darren’s been at the heart of it for more than half that time. “I can honestly say this place has the strongest community spirit in the whole city,” he tells us. “It’s the best of who we are.”
And yet, here we are, suddenly in the before and after times. At first glance, County Road looks the same as it always does. Dozens of small businesses strung out between Scotland Road and Rice Lane. A bright procession of hand-painted shop signs giving the chain stores a run for their money. Liverpool at its most independent, free-spirited and diverse. The nail parlours and the Turkish barbers, the Afro-Caribbean mini-marts and the Romanian grocery.
But look closer and you’ll spot a boarded-up door here, a smashed window there. Underfoot, the road occasionally bubbles up beneath your feet, the scarred and rutted reminders of the weekend’s pyroclastic flow of hate.
We walk past Spellow Hub, where a film crew is adjusting its tripod, ready for another to-camera piece. The presenter rehearses her script about the heartbreaking scene of devastation behind what’s left of the community centre’s windows.
“There was a great Polish shop next door to the library,” Darren says. “The owner had just spent £60,000 on setting up his business, and they destroyed it in one night. All of it, gone. I saw him yesterday, loading up what little he had left. Leaving the city for good.”
“Above the Polish deli, a mother was screaming from her window, ‘please don’t set it on fire, I’ve got a baby here’,” Darren says.
A few metres up the road we meet Arda in his general store and vape shop. “They took everything,” he says. “And they knew where everything was. They headed straight for the vapes, the till, they pried open the safe, and smashed the shutters.” Arda says it’ll cost him around £25,000 to get back what he’s lost. He’s already made a start by borrowing money from family and friends. Incredibly, the shop is gleaming again. “My family told me to come home, but why should I?” he says.
Arda shows me footage on his phone. A seething, frantic mob of 50 or so. Bald men, masked youths, grabbing, punching and kicking their way into Arda’s shop while a cordon of ponytailed girls hold phones aloft to capture it all.
“I know these people. They know me,” he says. “They live in these streets.”
As we talk, a young girl calls in to buy a bottle of Lucozade and a packet of crisps. “I’m so glad you’re open again,” she says, as she skips out.
Arda freezes the frame on his phone. “That’s her,” he says, showing me an image of the girl, scooping up vapes and cigarettes from the debris and rubble of Arda’s shop counter, and distributing them to friends outside, hands outstretched hungrily.
Throughout this entire episode, there are no police to be seen anywhere. They’re much further down County Road, funnelling the fired-up mob towards new opportunities for wrecking and looting. Turning Walton upside down, and leaving terrified families and hollowed-out businesses in its wake. No plan, no purpose, just opportunistic mayhem and revenge against a shapeshifting enemy.
“This was a shopping trip, no more, no less,” Arda, who moved here from Turkey just over a year ago, says. “This wasn’t about politics or immigrants, it was a night out.”
“I’m not taking anyone’s job, I’m giving people jobs,” he says, “and this is the thanks I get.”
As we leave, Darren is quick to point out that the weekend’s mob was far from a Walton-only affair.
“I saw dozens of people turning up in cars, getting dropped off. They’d slip a mask on, and jump out to join the crowd,” he said — a fact that appears to be borne out, just, in the initial release of names of those arrested.
The shopkeepers we speak to have the same story to tell: they were targeted. The crowd knew where it was headed. Mostly, to the general stores and small businesses owned by people of colour. To the shops they get their bread and milk from. The shops that keep County Road open for business.
“Of course, the flames were fanned by the far-right at first,” says Rakesh, who runs a convenience store on one of the little streets that burrow out from County Road. “But then people just came out to see what was happening and got swept along with it. Social media just whipped everyone up into a frenzy.”
A frenzy which saw balaclava-clad rioters attempt to wrench open Rakesh’s shutters too. “They couldn’t quite manage it,” he says, “so they barricaded the shop with wheelie bins and poured petrol on them to set them alight.”
While Rakesh and his wife watched the horror unfold from a safe distance, the tenant in the flat above wasn’t so lucky. “We called the police,” Rakesh says, “but they took over half an hour to get there. Fortunately, the fire didn’t take hold, and the mob moved on to the next place.”
For Rakesh, who’s been here for 20 years, the weekend was a turning point. “I don’t think this is the end of it,” he says. “Something has changed.”
“There’s always been trouble here and there,” his wife adds, “I’ve seen football violence and scraps with the police. But the rage and the fury aimed at innocent people. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
We retrace our steps to head back to the Youth Project, past two teenage lads swinging their legs on the wall outside Home Bargains. They’re singing ‘I predict a riot…’
The air feels jittery; static-charged. We chat to a woman pulling down the shutters of her beauty salon: “I’ve heard they’re expecting trouble again this afternoon,” she says. “It’s like suddenly I don’t know this place anymore. It’s so sad.”
We look over to the Library, prompting Darren to recall Sunday’s clean-up again.
“During the litter pick, we had an 11-year-old girl crying, asking how she’s going to read books anymore if the library’s burned down,” he says. “She was genuinely confused, asking why anyone would do that to a library.”
We’re desperate for neat stories that make sense of the chaos of existence. Some cling to those told to them by malignant actors sipping cocktails around a Cypriot hotel pool: Children die/The media lie — we all saw the placards in Southport. The rest of us, to: Torching a library/Nazis burning books. This week, that comforting library narrative has written itself into every news feature. ‘Burning library galvanises a community. They rebuild it — and Walton bounces back, better and brighter than it was before.’
But neither of these stories are true. This is not a simple tale. It’s a whole library of them and, right now, they’re all unfolding at the same time. In our city, on our streets, in the lives of the shopkeepers whose dreams have been burned to the ground.
Last weekend, we were reminded that the world in which Scouse exceptionalism commentators sat tweeting ‘Protests? In our city, we do things differently’ was the same world where kids were filling jerry cans and readying themselves for a night of terror.
Three hundred people, fired up and prepared to lay waste to a neighbourhood already fighting for its life.
These people, and their stories, are part of our story too. We can (and should) march, and fundraise. We can clean up our streets. But are we prepared for some uncomfortable reading?
Excellent reporting. I disagree though that it was the police presence that deterred the far right last night as that's never worked before, it was the huge community turn out.
It’s a sobering read, David, so thanks for a healthy dose of reality. As you say, it’s the ransacking locals that really pierce the heart. No politics there, just racism and robbery.