How Chalk Farm survived the riots

For those emerging from Chalk Farm Tube station on Tuesday night, the scene was set. It’s unsettling seeing a place you know well boarded up, locked down and steeling itself for attack. Few businesses were taking risks, and their defences leant the area a taut, eerie atmosphere, like a place awaiting demolition.

One elderly resident — used to the bustle, noise and colour of hundreds of daily visitors to Camden Market — was spooked simply by the silence. Night-time revellers were replaced by policemen on every street corner (Camden had an extra 200 officers). “It’s like everyone’s been evacuated,” she whispered.

People were jumpy. A sole siren was like a pressure valve, prompting a flood of twitter messages and anxious phone calls. My emails out to residents, trying to fill an information void, were met with urgent queries and a hunger just to connect with other local people.

Away from the high street, and detached from the flood of online information, the sunshine brought an air of optimism. Children were playing in front gardens again, and the smell of barbecued bacon drifted across the road.

The contrast with the night before, when ugly clashes between rioters and the police sparked genuine terror, could not have been greater.

Yet, uplifting stories shone through even those bewildering scenes. On Haverstock Hill, a local grocer told me how he stood firm in the face of a gang’s demands for lighter fluid and plastic gloves (there were no property fires in Camden). Reporters from our local newspaper put themselves in harm's way so they could tweet the twists and turns of the mob, warning locals which areas to avoid (and building, in one night, a whole new online community). Residents at affluent Eton Hall threw open their doors so that those unable to return to estates across the road could shelter. On my own street, littered with bicycles from a raided shop, neighbours sipped tea on their doorsteps, talking to people they’d lived beside for years but never met.

These small anecdotes from one corner of London show how crises reveal the best in people as well as the worst. Difficult times bring people together far more than they push us apart.

For that reason, let’s not patronise London’s poorest communities by pretending the mob is in some way representative. Many in Camden are hard pressed and struggle to make ends meet. On Monday night, these families were cowering at home terrified, just like anyone else. We insult hard-working, law-abiding people by suggesting that adverse circumstances inevitably breed greed and criminality. 

Ultimately, people of all backgrounds were united against a barbaric and selfish mob.

Matt Sanders is the Liberal Democrat councillor for Haverstock ward in the London Borough of Camden.