----Tottenham--BROADWATER FARM,,HIGH ROAD--BRUCE GROVE/// 1981/1985//2011//----!!!----
CROYDON--Thornton Heath/// --Upper Norwood-Green Lane
Peckham--QUEENS ROAD------RYE LANE !!!!2011//2011//2011//!!!!
NOTTING HILL----1976//2011------
1981. .. all going up ,, Leeds, Dalston, Brixton, the whole lot, Handsworth, Toxteth,, Bristol again,, erupting in flames.
BROADWATER FARM--TOTTENHAM 1981//1985
COMMUNIQUE JULY 1995---WOODHOUSE/BURLEY//CHAPELTOWN--- LEEDS, WEST YORKSHIRE///----DALSTON LANE, E8:There’s no angels heralding the next epoch, it’s just us, the swarming underclass, the surplus people animated round fires lighting up the tawdry streets. It’s coming. The next epoch.
To some it’s too late.
To us just the start.
Leeds 6, dirty, violent. Attacked in phone boxes, transit vans crawling slowly up and down Quarry Street eyeing up chances to rob houses.
Leeds 7. Harehills, Chapeltown, rows of redbrick back to backs, washing spanning the streets, fires lighting up the night, milk bottles out front, sirens and plumes of black smoke.
1981//1995 // 2011 // 2012 Britain lit up with uprisings, riots, a feverish grab at something beyond drab everyday existence. Time out of joint. The summer of 1981 seized by a warped temporality, an attenuated present.
Because suddenly in the blazing heat, out of the scorched landscape came a sense of urgency. 1995, 2003, 2010 and 2013. I stood out , silhouetted before those blazing bonfires, cut out of a bleached landscape. It had always seemed dark til then, the terraces black, except for the pink neon in the Asian video shops and the frosty spans of red and gold through pub windows at Christmas. Always the darkness in our towns until they blazed bright orange against blue skies for those glorious days.
1981. 1990. 1999.
Not old then, and nothing to lose, thinking it lost already. The greasy flat in Leeds 6, the other bedsit in Bradford. The mates already down South, me ready to go, sick of Yorkshire, packed for London not knowing it was more of the same, same shit peeling walls and cockroaches, rats squealing in the bins. Me thinking it’s all glamour and money down there. Me not knowing the darkness going there with me.
1981, Leeds, darkness shattered by this hot weather, a summer of a thousand Julys. Me laughing with the rest of them behind the fires with the houses scorched around the edges. Me thinking I’ll have the last laugh with Yorkshire before the case in the hall gets dragged out and I leave it forever.
St Pauls, Moss Side, Toxteth, Tottenham
1981 BRIXTON.
‘Cars were overturned and set alight, and buildings - including a branch of Lloyds Bank - ransacked and looted as youths fought running battles with police.’
1981. 1995. 2011
Radiant Future.
