Fifteen minutes later

Pauline Pearce did not know she was being filmed when she spoke out against the rioters running amok in her Hackney neighbourhood. Standing in the darkness, on a debris-strewn pavement in front of graffiti that read ‘Fuck Cameroon’, she seemed a lone voice of conscience amid the carnage. ‘Get real black people. Get real!’ she shouted, waving her walking stick. ‘You lot piss me the fuck off! I’m shamed to be a Hackney person. Because we are not all gathering together and fighting for a cause. We are running out of Foot Locker and thiefin’ shoes.’ Within hours, the video clip had hundreds of thousands of views online: Pearce learned of her accidental fame the next day when strangers came up to her and asked if she was the woman everyone was talking about on Twitter.

‘It’s been insane,’ Pearce says, shaking her head and gripping her stick tightly. ‘I’ve been on This Morning and I can’t walk out on to the street without someone wanting to thank me for speaking out.’ We are in the living room of her rented one-bedroom flat in Hackney. There is reggae music on the stereo, a statue of a jazz musician blowing a trombone stands next to her sofa and a Bible on the table. ‘I live on £180 a fortnight incapacity benefit and my television is back from when Noah built the ark,’ she jokes. On the night of the rioting, Pearce, a singer and DJ, had gone to a music studio; she emerged from it into violent chaos. Cars were set alight, bins were ablaze and yet no one seemed to care. It was hearing someone say the looting did not matter because the businesses were insured that provoked Pearce into her tirade. ‘It came from a place of anger,’ she says.