One Irish-owned pub provided shelter to 16 people left homeless after the shop they lived above burned down, writes RONAN McGREEVYin Croydon
THERE CAN be no more incongruous soundtrack to the riots that have convulsed Britain than John Lennon's Imagine.
As a fire truck pumped water into the smouldering remains of what used to be a dry cleaners and launderette in London Road, Croydon, yesterday afternoon, somebody put the song, with its naive aspirations of universal peace, on the public address.
Either side of the dry cleaners, four shops and their upstairs apartments have been burned out. The front wall of one shop has collapsed flattening a bus shelter.
The scale of destruction wrought by marauding gangs on this dishevelled road, with its densely packed assortments of ethnic shops and high street chains, was quite extraordinary.
In their attempts to corral rioters and keep them away from the centre of Croydon with its two state-of-the-art shopping centres, the police action only served to drive the mob down London Road.
They burned a jewellers shop to the ground, a Ladbrokes bookie shop and a Pizza Hut. They smashed windows as they went along. Nothing was spared not even an undertaker’s windows.
It was not only their actions that were shocking, but the brazen manner in which they behaved that shocked locals.
“They were parking their motors up, filling them up and coming back for more in front of the police,” said Michael Cox, caretaker of a parade of shops all smashed and looted.
An Irish-owned pub, the Fox and Hound, provided a late-night shelter for the 16 occupants above the jewellery shop that was burned down. The foreign nationals included a Lithuanian couple with a six-month-old baby.
“They were well organised. They were coming out of eight- to 10-seater vans. What they did was mindless brutality, but it was organised,” said Alan McCabe (28) from Cavan, landlord of the pub that escaped the mob.
McCabe said the ethnic make-up of the gangs was clear. “IC3s every single of them,” he said citing the police’s ethnic classification for black.
Donovan Thomas, standing outside a club that caters for black people and is due to be closed by the police, said the violence was inexcusable. He described those involved as “common thieves”, but said those involved had trivialised the legitimate grievances held by black and ethnic groups.
He cited the example of reggae singer Smiley Culture who died during a police raid on his home allegedly from a self-inflicted knife wound earlier this year. “We’ve been waiting four months and still we have no answers,” he said.
Most people had no truck though with excuses, surmising that to explain was to excuse.
Yesterday British prime minister David Cameron, mayor of London Boris Johnson and his predecessor and rival Ken Livingstone visited Croydon and the ground zero of the rioting, the Reeves bed shop that burned to the ground live on television on Monday night.
It was noted that Cameron talked only to the emergency service personnel and not local people who had questions to ask about the police response.
The plaque that says the family-owned shop was established in 1867 remains on the wall. The shop survived Hitler’s bombs, which pulverised Croydon in 1940, but it couldn’t survive the two young thugs who went in and set fire to the building just as the owner was calling for help.
Annette Reeves, the wife of co-owner Trevor Reeves, watched from behind a police cordon yesterday as forensic officers searched through the charred remains. “I’m sad that the people who did this have not been brought up properly to respect other people’s properties, very sad,” she said. People had already pledged to pay for furniture they bought though it cannot now be delivered, she added.
Last night Croydon was enveloped by police smarting from being bested by rioters on Monday night. The rioting has claimed its first fatality a 26-year-old man shot dead in Croydon on Monday night.
“We lost the battle, but we’ll win the war,” said assistant chief police constable Bernard Hogan-Howe. “Nobody could anticipate the violence we had here on Monday night.”