Southport is more than just anger and grief

On the 29^th of July, Patrick Hurley didn’t even have an office yet. Sat in a Westminster co-work with other freshmen MPs on a Monday afternoon, the newly elected member for Southport had only been in the job three weeks when a text came through that would threaten to define his entire political career. That morning, a 17-year-old had taken a taxi to a girls’ dance class on Hart Street in east Southport and began stabbing at the children at random with an 8-inch kitchen knife.

“You just go into survival mode and autopilot mode,” Hurley says about the situation. “You just do what you have to do.”

Almost a year later, we’re sat in a café near Southport’s tumbledown railway station. Dressed in a chequered plum blazer and a dark blue flat cap, the MP is calm but clearly still affected by last summer’s events. He’s caught in an unenviable spot: between not wanting to forget the tragedy or its victims, and a determination to not have the attack or its aftermath blight his town’s name in the national conscience.

Of the 26 girls who attended that dance class, ten were wounded and two died at the scene: six-year-old Bebe King and seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe. A third, nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar, died in hospital the following day. Shock and grief spread through the community — as did misinformation. False claims about the identity of the attacker – that he was a Muslim immigrant or asylum seeker – made their way across social media and news aggregate sites.

“On the Tuesday morning, I was back up in the town, laying flowers with the home secretary [Yvette Cooper] at the scene of the attack,” Hurley says. He’d hardly slept the night before, and this was about half nine in the morning. But by the time the prime minister Keir Starmer arrived in the afternoon, there was a tension in the air. “That tension manifested itself by big, burly middle-aged blokes shouting at the prime minister, saying, ‘This is on you. Keir Starmer, this is your fault. What are you going to do to save our children?’” Hurley recalls.

In the evening, concurrent with a vigil for the victims, hundreds of people gathered at a protest outside the mosque on St Luke’s Road, just a short walk from Hart Street.

What happened next is something Merseyside and the country as a whole has yet to fully grasp. The demonstration quickly turned violent. Jack Walton’s seminal first-hand reporting in these pages describes bricks and bottles raining down on the mosque, police injured by similar projectiles, and even a police van was set alight. But the riot was not confined to Southport, or even Merseyside. By the 5^th of August, far-right demonstrations, sometimes violent, had been seen in Darlington, Hartlepool, Stoke-on-Trent, Middlesborough, and other towns across the country. Hotels housing asylum seekers were attacked in Hull, Rotherham and Tamworth, where part of the building was set on fire. And, of course, Liverpool itself housed clashes between police and around 750 protestors, resulting in arrests, injuries, arson and other criminal damage.

The recriminations, convictions, and political fallout continue to this day. Echoes can be heard during anti-migrant demonstrations in Epping in recent weeks. We still do not know the motive of the attacker, Cardiff-born Axel Rudakubana, meaning full closure for those affected may never happen.

Regardless: a year ago, it started in Southport. Which means that word no longer simply denotes a seaside town in the north-west. Depending on who you are, “Southport” is redolent of a violent tragedy, a far-right outrage, online radicalisation or government betrayal.

But is that really Southport? Patrick Hurley is keen to stress that many of the original “rabble rousers” were not from here: “The last train leaves at about 11 o'clock at night, and the riot ended about quarter to 11. What does that tell you?” 

Of those since charged and sentenced, it’s true that Andrew McIntyre, described as a “key architect” of the riots by Hope Not Hate, was from Rufford, and Derek Drummond and Declan Geiron — jailed for respectively assaulting an emergency worker and setting fire to a police van — had both travelled from Liverpool. However, Christopher Carney, currently serving a two-and-a-half year sentence for violent disorder for his actions on the 30th July, lived a 20-minute walk away from Hart Street. John O’Malley, Gareth Metcalfe and Philip Prescott, jailed for the same offence, were also from Southport. Many others who participated in the riot will have been from nearby, if not Southport itself.

Nevertheless, Hurley describes the response of most locals to the attacks on the mosque and police as “bewilderment”. What, then, of those people who do live and work in Southport?

The sandy hillocks and dunes on the drive up from Liverpool dispute the very term “Merseyside.” This is the West Lancashire coastal plain descending towards the Irish Sea, closer to Blackpool than Liverpool. To date, Southport is the last Merseyside constituency to have voted Conservative, and when you do find a rare Scouse accent, it's softer and less audible than its inner-city cousin. Chippies, ice cream parlours, and penny arcades are doing steady if slow business on a hot but sunless July afternoon, and people stroll arm-in-arm or jog through the parks and funfairs between Rotten Row and Southport beach.

But, of course, the famous pier itself is closed. The oldest iron-made pier, and the second-longest pier in the entire country, Southport’s has been shut for safety reasons since 2022, when a survey found it to be “rotting from within”. Once the jewel in town’s leisure and tourism crown, now it stretches empty, a colossal wreck across the beach’s lone and level sands. Turning inland towards the town centre, it’s hard to ignore the boarded-up shops and former hotel windows. For every interesting book shop or tucked-away micropub, there are visible signs of decay: the rotted-green roof of an arcaded walkway or buddleia sprouting from crumbling red brick.

Outside the Town Hall, a fountain sends a refreshing spray via a summer breeze. A local group in blue hi-viz are tending to the summer flowers, part of a recently announced regeneration of the garden space in memory of the murdered girls. They, along with eight or nine other people we speak to, understandably do not wish to discuss either the killings or the riots; nor do the two police officers patrolling the gardens. But Debra, 64, does. She’s sat on a bench near the Town Hall while her two-year-old grandson plays with his toy cars.

“You just can’t get your head around anybody hurting little girls,” Debra says about the stabbings. And her grandson and his mum were just getting off the train from London when the riots were happening. “Helicopters were going overhead. It was horrific.”

Debra is conscious about her town’s perception. “When I moved up here, nobody, none of my southern friends, knew where Southport was,” she says. “Now everybody does.”

Debra admits she has not been aware of any racial tension in the past year. We talk about the need to move past what’s happened, while remembering to have empathy for the families affected. “At the same time, let's have some beautiful things to look at and experience as well,” she says, looking across the Town Hall gardens where volunteers busy themselves with trowels and secateurs.

Sat alone on a nearby bench is Jeff, 65. Like his MP, Jeff is convinced a lot of the troublemakers were out-of-towners. “A lot of them were from Manchester, Widnes, St Helens, all over the place,” he says. “They just jumped on the bandwagon and made an assumption that [Rudakubana] was an Islamist. And even if he had been, it doesn't justify attacking a mosque.”

Like Debra, Jeff is worried about what Southport may become synonymous with. “It's a bit like Dunblane,” he says. “You mention it and people say, ‘Oh, that’s where such-and-such happened.”

The area around Hart Street is quiet. Like so many in the town centre, the bar staff inside politely decline to be interviewed. But Taylor, a resident of Hart Street, speaks to us while her two young sons wave and pull faces in the living room window.

“We’ve not discussed it in the house,” Taylor says, nodding to the innocent boys. “We don’t want to scare them.”

She admits that despite the singular and senseless nature of the attack, and how nice it’s been to see the community come together since, she feels less safe than she did a year ago. “Maybe I’d feel different if we lived on the other side of town,” she says. “But it’s the fact it was just over there.”

Back in the café, Patrick Hurley is unequivocal about what we’ve seen around town. “I’m old enough to remember Southport being a very prosperous town on the coast. But you walk down Lord Street now, and you can see the decline.” He mentions homelessness, street drinking, and “eye sores” like the railway station. “I don't want to overplay this, but it's a town that's seen better days.”

While he acknowledges people have legitimate concerns, “nothing justifies throwing petrol bombs through the window of a children’s library” – a reference to Spellow Library in Walton that was burned down in the wake of the Southport attack – “or setting fire to a police van or an asylum house or whatever it is.” He is keen to downplay talk of racial tensions, either before or after the attack. “There’s more class tension than racial tension,” he says.

Hurley is also confident that the government will make good on promises made to Southport, which include a £10 million investment on the Town Hall gardens and £73 million for the Marine Lake events centre. Last month, the chancellor Rachel Reeves also said Southport Pier – repair costs for which are estimated at £13 million – could benefit from a new Growth Mission Fund, and Sefton Council have said they’re ready to go ahead within weeks of funds being agreed. These projects could provide the regeneration the town clearly needs. “Not a single one has yet had spades in the ground,” Hurley admits.

Of course, it’s only a year since Labour came to power and Hurley unseated his Conservative predecessor. But while a week can be a long time in politics, twelve months passes remarkably fast in people’s memory. Patiences ebb and flow, cause and event are muddled, social problems tangled with tragedy. After the 1981 riots in Toxteth and Brixton, the Scarman Report concluded that the unrest was a spontaneous outburst of accumulated resentment, created by "complex political, social and economic factors". While that report was criticised for exonerating the police, it’s hard to dispute that poverty and deprivation played their part alongside racial discrimination.

“Southport wants to remember what happened,” Hurley says before we set off back for Liverpool, “but not be remembered for it.”

The community, including the bereaved families, have been doing their part to wrest Southport’s narrative away from negativity, decline, violence, and hate. Sergio Aguiar and David Stancombe even ran the London Marathon to raise money for charities set up in their daughters’ memory, and Lauren and Ben King were there to cheer them on. But for Southport to be associated with something more than mindless violence and not become an emblem of Britain’s social decay, the government needs to match these efforts and more.