birmingham

Last night marked the fourth day of riots in Britain, with the focus turning away from London, and towards Manchester, Birmingham and a whole host of other UK cities. Now familiar scenes played out as rioters looted shops, set fire to buildings and attacked police, leading to 479 arrests and, for the first time, three deaths.

The Spread of Violence

The long list of towns and cities affected by violence last night includes Manchester, Salford, Birmingham, Gloucester, Nottingham, Liverpool, Leicester, Bristol, Wolverhampton and West Bromwich, encompassing the South-West, Midlands and North-West of England. Whilst the biggest numbers of rioters were seen in Manchester, some of the most shocking scenes were elsewhere.

In Nottingham, a police station was set alight by a group of 30 to 40 men who firebombed it at around 10pm, though there were no injuries. Unfortunately, the same can not be said for Birmingham, where three men lost their lives after they were hit by a car. It is thought that they had been protecting their neighbourhood from the rioters, and their deaths are being treated as murder, although it is currently unclear whether the collision was directly related to the riots.

Riots that started in small pockets of London on Saturday night, had last night spread throughout much of the Capital as well as to several other cities in the UK. Buildings and cars were set on fire, shops were looted and police were attacked in what are being called the worst riots in living memory.

It all started in Hackney, in East London, as early as 5pm yesterday afternoon, as young people, many of them teenagers, clashed with police. It quickly escalated and spread throughout the Capital as the police struggled to control the widespread violence. By midnight, huge fires blazed and shops had been emptied of their goods in Croydon, Peckham, Lewisham and Clapham in the South of London, Enfield in the North and Ealing in the West.