London is burning: A dispatch from inside the riots, looting and arson

Improbably, London is burning.

I returned from a long celebratory weekend in Antwerp on Monday afternoon. It was a grand weekend, full of very good meals, great conversation, and retail discoveries. While away, I'd read about rioting in Tottenham on Saturday night in response to the shooting death of a man named Mark Duggan at the hands of a policeman on August 4. I'd sensed from some news reports and Twitter than things had escalated, though to be completely frank I hadn't paid much attention.

Transferring from the Eurostar to the Tube at St. Pancras this afternoon, I encountered a sign that things were off-kilter in the form of an announcement that there were no trains to Brixton. Hmmm. Then, transferring from the Tube to a bus at Old Street, it became clear that the city had temporarily morphed into a different place. The air was charged. Pedestrians crossed streets carelessly. Sirens were ongoing. I overheard snippets of conversation about Tube closures and bus detours. Three police vans screeched past our bus towards Hackney. My phone started to pulse.

I received eight text messages in a row from my partner. There was rioting on Mare Street, just ten minutes from our flat, and he asked if I would quickly do some grocery shopping before the shops in the area boarded up. He biked home from work early.

The Turkish proprietors at the grocery store downstairs seemed shell-shocked. They'd pulled their metal gate part-way down so that they'd be able to shut quickly if needs demanded. Three helicopters hovered overhead. Two middle-aged women came into the store. "Peckham," one said, looking fatigued. "It's really bad in Peckham." My sister and I snapped up groceries and sat inside, keeping one eye on the street. Sirens waxed and waned. The news channels proved to be a chaotic and depressing distraction, so we turned the television off and refreshed various news sites online at an obsessive pitch.

So to Twitter, where the breadth of the rioting--mostly, it appeared, looting, with liberal lashings of arson and violent clashes with police--became evident. The looting is widespread. Buildings and cars have been set on fire. The stories of carjackings and bicyclejackings came fast and furious. Thankfully, in the midst of this frenzy, nobody has been killed.