Losing the Right to the City: What is the

Relation Between Perceived Spatial Intrusion

and Urban Riots?

Student Number: 1934436

Unit: POLI31555
Supervisor: Dr Chuka Agboeze

2021/2022

This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the
degree of BSc in Politics and International Relations

‘I declare that the research contained herein was granted approval by the SPAIS Ethics
Working Group.’

1
 Dedication

Dedicated to Brian Polley, 23 November 1934 – 19 February 2022

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 Acknowledgements

This dissertation would have been impossible without the tireless work of academic and

administrative staff within SPAIS, who have taught me so much and helped my time at Bristol

run smoothly even in the most difficult of contexts. In particular, I would like to thank my

supervisor, Dr Chuka Agboeze, for his advice and guidance while writing this dissertation, and

for encouraging me to critically self-reflect throughout. I must also thank my personal tutor,

Dr Andrew Wyatt, for his practical and pastoral assistance whenever I was struggling. My

gratitude extends to Dr Chris Rossdale, for helping me ground the project in its early stages

and for the invaluable lessons on the nature of rebellion.

Though they must remain anonymous, I cannot thank enough those who happily gave up their

time to be interviewed as part of this dissertation. My intention of using this research to shine

a light on unheard and underrepresented perspectives would have been fruitless without the

memories, insights, and advice that they all shared with me. I wish all of them luck in their

pursuit of a better world.

This dissertation was written during a turbulent time in Bristol’s recent history, and I want to

thank everyone who stood against police violence at Bridewell Police Station in March 2021

for encouraging me to study and understand Bristol’s proud history of resistance to injustice. I

can only hope that my research can help us to keep this history alive in our struggles. I offer

solidarity to all ‘Kill the Bill’ political prisoners who the state has punished in order to protect

itself from the possibility of change.

Finally, I am immeasurably grateful to my friends and family for their tireless advice and

support throughout this whole year, for the long library sessions, and for always being happy

to listen to me talk on and on about riots. I must extend particular appreciation to my Grandad,

for always inspiring me to think rebelliously and question everything.

3
 Abstract

Throughout human history, riots have been one of the few aspects of life to remain consistent

and persistent across distinct political systems, socio-economic structures, and cultural

contexts. Their occurrence offers a problem to political science that considers politics as being

that which occurs within institutions, since riots signal an unofficial and illegal form of

discontent that cannot be neatly quantified and exists in opposition to normative codes of public

conduct. Due to this, the importance of riots in political processes is often overlooked or

misunderstood by politicians, academics, and media figures alike. While typically presented as

chaotic and mindless, riots can be spaces of potential in which what is thought to be possible

becomes temporarily redefined. The notion of riots being productive spaces in which

participants can reconsider their identity and relationships to both their immediate environment

and the people around them is generally underexplored.

With this in mind, this dissertation explores the idea of riots as attempts to reclaim a

community’s right to control their urban space. To do so, it will employ Henri Lefebvre’s

theory of ‘the right to the city’, which argues that communities should reclaim the right to

control their urban environments, but that capitalist economic practices and social relations

prevent them from doing so. By using case studies of two Bristol riots – the 1980 St Pauls Riot

and the 2011 Stokes Croft Riot – this dissertation argues that, in response to a perceived

antagonistic spatial intrusion, these riots represented attempts to practice the ideals of the right

to the city and reclaim control of space for the community. Through this comparison, the

dissertation reveals the changes in power relations that the neoliberalisation of the UK has

produced, and the implications of these changes on urban spatial relations, policing, and the

nature of riots. While there is a blooming interest within urban theory in how neoliberalism

shapes our urban environments, little has been done to examine the position of riots within this.

4
Only by understanding previous moments of resistance can we hope to understand how

resistance may change in the politically polarised, economically unequal, and environmentally

unliveable world we face. By tackling such issues, this dissertation aims to promote a greater

understanding of the importance of riots and what they represent in both macro-level political

and economic structures and the micro-level social relations that these structures shape.

Word Count: 9997

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 Ethics Approval

On behalf of the SPAIS Ethics Working Group I am able to approve your proposed research.

Research Question: What is the relationship between perceived spatial intrusion and urban
riots in Bristol?

Methodology: Interviews

Date: 13/12/2021

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 Table of Contents

Dedication .................................................................................................................................. 2
Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... 3
Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... 4
Ethics Approval ......................................................................................................................... 6
Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................... 7
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................ 8
Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 9
Chapter 1: Theories of Public Space ........................................................................................ 14
1.i - What is public space? ................................................................................................... 14
1.ii - What is the ‘Right to the City’?................................................................................... 15
Chapter 2: Riot Theories .......................................................................................................... 17
2.i - Mad Crowd Theory: ..................................................................................................... 17
2.ii - Rationality Theory:...................................................................................................... 17
2.iii - Social Identity Theory: ............................................................................................... 18
2.iv - Spatial Control Theory: .............................................................................................. 18
Chapter 3: Pre-riot Spatial Analysis ........................................................................................ 20
3.i – St Pauls 1945-80 .......................................................................................................... 20
3.ii - Stokes Croft Mid-2000s - 2011: .................................................................................. 24
Chapter 4: The Role of Space in the Riots ............................................................................... 27
4.i - St Pauls: ........................................................................................................................ 27
4.ii - Stokes Croft: ................................................................................................................ 32
Chapter 5: Neoliberalism and the Space In-between ............................................................... 38
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 42
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 44

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 List of Figures

Figure 1 – Interview List ......................................................................................................... 12

Figure 2 – Boundaries of Ashley Ward .................................................................................. 20
Figure 3 – Boundaries of St Pauls/Stokes Croft. Stokes Croft (primary location of 2011 Riot)
marked in blue. Grosvenor Road (primary location of 1980 Riot) marked in red................... 27
Figure 4 – Relationships between space and alienation in St Pauls........................................ 29
Figure 5 – Proposed space of Cabot Circus site from 2003 .................................................... 39

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 Introduction

In a world where ownership and control of space is becoming more intangible, we must

reconsider how people respond to perceived spatial intrusion. This dissertation seeks to

understand the relationship between riots and urban public space, arguing that riots can contest

control of space and reassert a community’s ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre, 1968). I will compare

two riots from Bristol’s recent history, namely the 1980 St Paul’s Riot and the 2011 Stokes

Croft Riot, as snapshots of resistance within the neoliberalisation of the UK. The St Paul’s Riot

occurred in response to repeated police drug raids of a café that was popular among the local

Afro-Caribbean community (Joshua, Wallace and Booth, 1983), while the Stokes Croft Riot

developed out of discontent with aggressive policing that accompanied the opening of a Tesco

in a proudly independent area (Reilly, 2015: 756). In both cases, there is a clear sense that

spatial intrusion triggered the riots.

Theoretical Framework

I have employed the theoretical framework of Critical Urban Theory (CUT), which

‘emphasizes the politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested and therefore

malleable character of urban space’ (Brenner, 2009: 198). Specifically, I have used Henri

Lefebvre’s notion of ‘the right to the city’, meaning that urban communities should have the

right to shape their environments but are prevented from doing so by capitalist urban

development (Lefebvre, 1968: 147). This concept has been expanded by David Harvey, who

argues that

the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people

we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of

daily life we desire (2012: 4).

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Furthermore, I aim to avoid the class reductionism of traditional Marxist urban theory, in light

of Tajbakhsh’s analysis of the dislocation of identities in neoliberal urban spaces beyond class

(2000: 3). This has enabled an understanding of events that exist outside of traditional class

dynamics, which is necessary given the circumstances and the multiplicity of demographics in

the St Pauls and Stokes Croft riots. Furthermore, I have conceptualised neoliberalism as

constituting a process, backed up by ‘the active mobilisation of state power’ (Brenner &

Theodore, 2005: 103), of reshaping urban development toward market-led growth regardless

of the social inequalities such a process produces. The most fundamental aspect of

neoliberalism in this case is the perception of space as a consumable object to be bought and

sold, rather than a commons to be enjoyed and used. Finally, since policing is key in any riot,

I have drawn from critical theories that consider police as enforcers of dominant ideology.

Effectively, the police are tasked with enforcing what the state believes should be done in

particular urban spaces (Raco, 2003: 1872). As such, they are usually the recognisable target

against which anger caused by alienation can be directed.

Literature Review

While much has been written on ‘the right to the city’ and on riots as contestations of space,

research using the ‘right to the city’ as a means to understand riots is underexplored. My

research thus expands CUT by connecting this theory to the re-assertion of spatial control in

riots, taking influence from Dovey’s work on public space as a site of negotiating power

relations (2011: 349). Moreover, British riot literature remains primarily London-centric aside

from some Bristol-based academics. For instance, Roger Ball has written on the relationships

between riots and youth subcultures in 1980s Bristol (2012), while Matt Clement has analysed

the Stokes Croft Riot as resistance against neoliberal globalisation (2011). My dissertation

builds on these insights to provide a spatial analysis of riots and urban neoliberalism in Bristol.

The general neglect of Bristol within studies of British riots seems strange given that riots and

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civil disobedience in Bristol often precede events elsewhere in the country (Clement, 2013:

113), even as recently as the 2020 toppling of the Colston statue and the 2021 Kill the Bill

movement. There has also been excellent research on spatial politics within St Pauls and Stokes

Croft, such as Slater and Anderson’s analysis of territorial stigmatisation in St Pauls (2011)

and Buser et al’s research on place-based cultural activism in Stokes Croft (2013). However,

these riots have yet to be compared or analysed through CUT. Through comparison my

research examines the shifts in British urban power relations from 1980, when Thatcherism

was at its inception, to 2011 and beyond where the neoliberal consensus has been ideologically

entrenched.

Methodology

Since riots are inherently contested events, perceived differently by each participant based on

their own experiences, I felt it would be inappropriate to employ a positivist research

framework aiming to uncover the “truth” of riots. Rather, I used an interpretivist framework

that embraces the emotive context through which spatial intrusion is seen and allowed me to

analyse how perceptions can create conditions for riots. Based on this, I used a mixed approach

of gathering primary and secondary qualitative data, with the primary data gained through

semi-structured interviews of people involved in these events. I used semi-structured

interviews because these individuals’ experiences give them a greater expertise in these events

than myself. I therefore asked them about aspects of the riots or the areas in question, but they

were free to steer this in the direction they felt appropriate. This was important given that

narratives of both riots have been somewhat homogenised in media and academic coverage,

with St Pauls construed as purely a race riot and Stokes Croft as simply an anti-Tesco riot. I

was wary of relying on sources that reproduced such narratives and instead wanted to ensure

that participants could give their perspective.

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Since my research analyses how perceptions create conditions for riots and stresses the

significance of crowd heterogeneity, I am not claiming that the views given by my participants

constitute an indisputable narrative. Rather, the findings from these interviews represent an

important set of perceptions that have thus far been overlooked. However, I was somewhat

constrained by time and mistrust of academia within networks of people I approached. It was

also harder to find participants to talk about St Pauls, primarily due to the length of time that

has passed since the riot. To overcome this, I was able to draw from other research based on

oral history to supplement or corroborate information from my own interviewees, most

importantly from Ball (2012) and Reicher (1984).

My interviewees were:

Participant Focus of interview Interview Reference Code

1 Stokes Croft 210222

2 St Pauls/Stokes Croft 230322

3 Stokes Croft 080422

4 Stokes Croft 110422

5 St Pauls 130422

Figure 1 – Interview List

Ethics

I considered the ethical implications of this research and the sensitivity of individuals

discussing retrospectively illegal events. I abided fully by the University’s ethical guidelines

by ensuring participant anonymity and excluding identifying details. Furthermore, my

interview questions focused on participants’ perceptions of the riots, not their personal actions

during them. I have not included information of personal illegal activity. The secondary

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material was comprised of academic articles, books, pamphlets, and press releases, for which

ethical issues are minimal.

Structure

In this dissertation, Chapter 1 expands on theories of urban public space. Chapter 2 discusses

riot theories and establishes which a framework for this research. Chapter 3 offers a spatial

analysis of St Pauls and Stokes Croft prior to the riots, while Chapter 4 analyses the role of

space in the occurrence of each riot. Based on this, Chapter 5 situates these riots within the

context of Britain’s neoliberalisation. Finally, the conclusion considers the application of my

findings to understandings of riots and urban space. Throughout, I aim to resolve the neglect

within CUT of the overlap between riots and spatial intrusion, especially in a British and

Bristolian context.

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 Chapter 1: Theories of Public Space

1.i - What is public space?

The form and function of cities is determined by their multiplicity of spaces and the interaction

of people within them (Bodnar, 2015: 2091). Public space thus refers to spaces outside private

ownership and is categorised by free entry into the space, freedom of movement within the

space, and relative freedom of action inside the space (Tajbakhsh, 2000: 174). Since modern

cities are primarily designed as sites of capitalist production and consumption, public space

provides a blueprint for socio-spatial relations outside market logics. As neoliberal urbanism

expands, it produces ‘creative destruction’ whereby existing non-profitable practices are

destroyed and replaced by profitable practices, with public space being no exception (Harvey,

2006: 153).

With cities become increasingly privatised, public spaces offer one of the few remaining

examples of a democratised and accessible commons (Nemeth, 2008: 2463). This is because

privatisation of space usually precipitates commercialisation and securitisation, thus creating

spaces in which certain behaviours are incentivised or regulated (Amin, 2008: 7). In

commercialised spaces, consumption becomes the primary function, and the space reproduces

dynamics of consumer capitalism. Moreover, securitised spaces limit behaviour through threats

of coercion, thus strengthening the image of normality upon which neoliberalism relies. On a

macro-scale, racist and classist fears of “uncivil” public behaviour often provoke state-led

urban securitisation, with the police enforcing “acceptable” behaviour (Coleman, 2007: 171).

Within this process, entire urban areas can be configured as spaces in which certain behaviour

is both anticipated and enforced. Such forms of policing reduce the potential for public spaces

to be sites of possibility by monitoring behaviour that falls outside ideological norms. Once we

14
recognise public space as a site of interaction, we can recognise its potential as a site for

political mobilisation and cultural development (Merrifield, 2014: 30).

1.ii - What is the ‘Right to the City’?

The ‘right to the city’ refers to the theory that urban populations must reclaim the right to

control the form and function of urban space. Lefebvre argues that this right has been removed

by urban capitalism, which priorities profit as the principal function of space (1968: 61). With

the state willing to use its power to enforce and ideologically legitimise these practices, the

potential to practice the right to the city usually remains elusive. This is especially for areas

that lack the resources, networks, or power to transform their space through the state. In effect,

many urban working-class communities suffer a contradiction where they are ignored in

aspects that could help the community such as housing, employment or the provision of public

spaces and amenities, and acknowledged in aspects that hinder the community like over-

policing and negative media portrayals (Domaradzka, 2018: 608). Areas are thus undesirable

until they become “cool” enough to be gentrified, at which point logics of capital accumulation

are applied by property developers to transform the space into something that satisfies middle-

class sensibilities and resembles the “normality” of capitalist daily life (Balzarini & Shlay,

2016: 505). In both cases, the ability to control space for the collective benefit of the community

is severely restricted. This predicament fuels urban alienation, as people who feel powerless at

work see this powerlessness reproduced at home (Lefebvre 1981: 30).

It is important to recognise that the right to the city is a collective right, since ‘changing the

city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of

urbanization’ (Harvey, 2012: 4). With neoliberalism dislocating traditional markers of

community identity like social class, shared workplaces, or common religion, we can see the

significance of common space in developing contemporary urban identities (Tajbakhsh, 2000).

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The right to the city is both a means of constructing an alternative to neoliberalism and an end

of ensuring that such an alternative works. To understand this, we must consider urban areas

as spaces that are the sum of their parts. A space is thus defined as much by its buildings, its

shops, or its houses as by its activities, it memories and traditions, and its social relations

(Lefebvre, 1991: 74). Such a conception is integral to our spatial analysis of St Pauls and Stokes

Croft, where community attempts to control space threatened either the maintenance of social

hierarchies or the potential for neoliberal urban development. With this in mind, the dissertation

will now turn toward a theorisation of riots and their function in urban politics.

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 Chapter 2: Riot Theories

For centuries social scientists, historians, and psychologists have sought to explain why riots

occur. While the elusiveness of a universal explanation demonstrates the relativity of riots, it

is still possible to identify generally consistent conditions. This section will thus examine

dominant theories of riots and determine an appropriate model for this dissertation.

2.i - Mad Crowd Theory

From the late 19th century onwards the dominant riot theory was Mad Crowd Theory (MCT),

which positioned collective violence as something irrational stemming from an impulsive mob

mentality (Newburn, 2021: 55). In their chaos, riots presented the antithesis to the

Enlightenment pursuit of individual rationality and civility. As such, this theory views riots as

aberrations from well-ordered social and political structures (Benyon & Solomos, 1988: 408).

The emergence of this theory is inseparable from the fear of “mass society” among ruling elites

in 19th Century Europe, who could use it to simultaneously legitimise social control and

delegitimise social reform. Despite the development of more critical crowd psychology, MCT

is consistently invoked by states following riots for the same reason as in the 19th century: to

separate the “rational” state from the “irrational” mob (Stott & Drury, 2016: 1). Such discourse

is rooted in fears of the working-class, with the “riff-raff” of the 19th Century and the “Chavs”

of the 21st Century occupying the same position of danger in ruling class imaginaries. This

illustrates that riot theory is not neutral, and that it can legitimise the same power structures

against which people may riot.

2.ii - Rationality Theory

As a reaction against MCT, social scientists have sought to rationalise riots. In so doing,

researchers attempt to create generalisable scientific methods for understanding riots. The

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analysis of riots as rational actions first gained traction with Meyer’s quantitative research on

the 1960s Detroit Riots, which found that rioters were usually better educated and more

politically active than non-rioters (Meyer, 2011). His conclusions have been developed, with

Holdo and Bengtsson arguing that riots become possible when low institutional legitimacy and

resentment of the police combines with a contentious event (2020: 163). While such models

represent a necessary shift from MCT, the search for scientific objectivity risks over-

rationalising actors to the point of denying their agency while concealing local contexts in

favour of generalisable conditions.

2.iii - Social Identity Theory

Social identity refers to the ‘part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his

knowledge of his membership of a social group together with the value and emotional

significance attached to that membership’ (Tajfel, 1978: 1963). This theory proposes that riots

emerge through a crowd’s self-recognition of a shared social identity and shared discontents

against illegitimate outsiders (Stott & Drury, 2016: 23). Interestingly, one of the first studies to

apply this theory was Reicher’s study of the St Pauls Riot, where he concluded that a shared

social identity rooted in a connection to the area of St Pauls explains the riots’ patterns and

targets (1984). While undoubtedly useful in framing the intersection of collective identity with

collective violence, this theory risks homogenising the motivations and identities of rioters and

obscuring the relation between people and space that this research aims to uncover.

2.iv - Spatial Control Theory

While the previously discussed theories generally focus on processes of identity, wider issues

of marginalisation, or short-term triggers, they are not wholly sufficient for understanding the

spatial element of the riots in question. Furthermore, seeing riots as a singular expression of

discontent ignores their position as part of longer processes of changing relations between

18
people and their environment. In this context, perceived spatial intrusion is salient since it acts

as both a short-term trigger of rioting and a long-term indicator of social exclusion. Rather than

neglecting the significance of wider issues and attributing the riots singularly to spatial

intrusion, I aim to integrate these ideas through an analysis of perceived spatial intrusion giving

an observable form to general alienation. Since the perception of spatial intrusion varies from

person to person, this model recognises that riots are not homogenous events and that

individuals use their agency to act collectively while representing their own personal

motivations.

This reflects Apoifis’ observations in his study of anarchist movements in Athens, which found

that collective violence can temporarily unify those with divergent views and experiences

around a recognised shared enemy (Apoifis, 2017: 27). Given the multiplicity of demographics

involved in the riots in question, it is fundamental to the utility of this research that

heterogeneity and agency be central to the analysis. Indeed, we will see that claiming that St

Pauls was simply a race riot or that Stokes Croft was only about Tesco obscures the context in

which the riots emerged. The concept of the ‘right to the city’ is integral since it synthesises

divergent perceptions of how space should be used with a convergent moment of collective

violence around which people can unite to defend a space. We will see that in both cases the

desire to re-establish control of the space from a perceived intruder unified actors with distinct

backgrounds, motivations, and desires.

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 Chapter 3: Pre-riot Spatial Analysis

To understand the role of space in the riots, we must first understand the context in which

relationships between communities and their areas operated. As such, this chapter will analyse

the dual processes of state top-down attitudes toward the areas and the bottom-up use of space,

as well as the conflictual power relations that these processes produced. We will see that state

practices in both areas reflected a desire for control, yet the differences in how this control

manifested demonstrates the shifting urban spatial relations that neoliberalism has precipitated.

Figure 2 – Boundaries of Ashley Ward

3.i – St Pauls 1945-80

The neighbouring inner-city areas of Stokes Croft and St Pauls, which lie within Ashley Ward

as seen in Figure 2, have developed divergently from the rest of post-war Bristol. This stems

initially from the destruction of St Pauls during the Bristol Blitz and the post-war imperative
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to rebuild the country using a migrant workforce, with this process revealing the contradictions

of British racism. While migrants filled gaps in the labour market and were welcomed as

Commonwealth citizens, there was little desire within white society to mix or allow migrants

to fill anything but subservient jobs (Hansen, 2000: 6). Whether perceived as threatening or

benign, migrants occupied a subaltern position in the British consciousness that persists today,

exemplified in the state’s “hostile environment” that treat migrants with suspicion at best and

violent coercion at worst. With housing in post-war St Pauls largely unfit for habitation, the

local council could satisfy the perceived “problem” posed by migrants by containing them

there. The result was a relatively large Afro-Caribbean minority emerging in St Pauls,

alongside smaller but still significant Irish, South Asian, and Polish communities, and the

existing white working-class British population. As such, post-war St Pauls has been perceived

through an inaccurately racialised lens, seen as a space filled by populations who the state could

ignore the material conditions of.

In contrast to these perceptions, in 1981 only 1/5 of the population of St Pauls were born outside

the UK (Avon County Council, 1981). Moreover, St Pauls was the centre of multi-racial youth

subcultures and attracted white teenagers to socialise there, with these complex social networks

key in the spread of violence in 1980 beyond St Pauls into white working-class outlier estates

(Ball, 2017: 38). The supposed foreignness of the area occupied an exaggerated position, as

‘for White residents outside the inner city, St Paul’s was a euphemism for a supposedly ‘Black’

area of “vice and shame”’ (Dresser & Fleming, 2007: 159). External perceptions of St Pauls

thus racialised the space and spatialised race, creating an image of St Pauls that linked

blackness with criminality. This image tied into existing national narratives of black

predisposition to crime and generated new localised narratives that configured St Pauls as a no-

go area. That the police, under Home Office instructions, monitored the “law and order” issue

supposedly posed by black immigration to Bristol demonstrates the extent of this perception.

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Bristol Constabulary reports from the early 1960s claim that ‘their way of life is so directly

opposed to ours’, express concern over ‘breeding habits’, and reccomend that ‘the only remedy

appears to be to educate the coloured immigrant to the required moral standard’ (Hackett, 2021:

309). The implications of such colonial attitudes are pivotal in understanding the riot as an

attempt to reclaim spatial control, in so doing rejecting the notion of having daily life governed

by racist perceptions.

Ken Pryce’s excellent study into Bristol’s West Indian community in the 1970s provides an

important pre-riot snapshot of the relationship between community, space, and social exclusion

in St Pauls. Indeed, St Pauls had developed a lawless reputation due to relatively open

prostitution and drug use in the area, with Pryce’s respondents explaining that ‘many

Bristolians think of St Pauls as almost sinister. Even benevolent social workers see us as a

“problem”’ (Pryce, 1979: 26). In response to such perceptions, Pryce notes that

this attitude is completely different from that of the real denizens of St Pauls, the true inhabitants

who know it from the inside…It is the place where they live, the territory on which they hustle

and the only milieu in which they are really “in control” (1979: 26-7).

We thus see the importance of spatial control in St Pauls residents’ identity. Having been

spatially excluded from the city, there was a need to claim ownership of space within St Pauls.

Pryce also notes St Pauls residents referring to the area as ‘the jungle’ or ‘Shanty Town’ (1979:

27), thus identifying the same dynamics of social exclusion present in the working-class

Jamaican neighbourhoods many had migrated from. This reveals the importance of urban space

in creating ‘hybrid identities’ (Tajbakhsh, 2000: 35). While the urban space of St Pauls is

distinct from that of Jamaica, the residents recognised the same colonial dynamics that

controlled the space.

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The spatial forms of this exclusion are analysed in a Trades Union Congress report on the 1980

St Pauls Riot. For instance,

the shoddy nature of the environment was frequently commented on by witnesses, and several

of them used the term “second-class citizen” for the way they felt those who live in the area are

regarded by others…There was a general agreement among witnesses on the disastrous effect

that the creation of the M32 motorway, and its extension on Parkway Road, running as they do

through the enquiry area, have had on the neighbourhood. A large amount of housing was

destroyed, and the divison of the area has had a lasting effect on community spirit...Although

the area has the lowest car ownership in the city the needs of the car always seem to have been

given priority over the needs of pedestrians. Thus the feeder road and the motorway effectively

divide the area by generating a large volume of through traffic (Bristol Trades Union Council,

1981: 6).

Additionally, St Pauls lacked a library, post office, community centre, any public toilets, and

had many empty shops due to the limited financial capital of residents. Furthermore, the

secondary school that had existed in the area was turned into a primary school to disperse

immigrant teenagers to distant white-majority schools. This decision was based on Department

of Education guidance that immigrant children be kept in white-majority environments such

that they were forced to ‘learn good English speech and social habits’ (Hackett, 2021: 321).

Once again, state racism tangibly prevented the development of St Pauls on its residents’ own

terms. What is most striking here is that simply the practicing of daily life in St Pauls was

considered threatening to normative white British values. The state’s attitude toward St Pauls

is thus inseperable from its function of maintaining the racialised hierarchies upon which

British socio-economic practices are built. The fact that St Pauls was not even a majority ethnic

minority area during this time was incidental once it spatially represented the supposed threat

of black criminality. In this sense, attempts to practice a ‘right to the city’ and use space for the

community’s benefit remained largely abortive. Residents remained perpetually caught

23
between the under-investment and over-policing that forms the basis of systemic social

exclusion.

3.ii - Stokes Croft Mid-2000s - 2011

In contrast to the attempt to practice “normal” daily relations in St Pauls, the pre-riot

development of Stokes Croft reflects an active attempt to create an alternative to neoliberalism.

With the exception of the contentious Tesco Express, Stokes Croft today is mostly populated

by independent shops, restaurants, cafes, and bars. Countercultural attitudes seem on face value

to be built into the physical environment, which is decorated with street art by famous figures

like Banksy, while the area also acts as a centre for nightlife in Bristol with a high concentration

of clubs and pubs. It is thus worth mentioning that Stokes Croft, which is one fairly short stretch

of the A38, is perhaps more of an idea than a clearly defined place. Several of my interviewees,

in explaining that most of the activists who try to define the identity of Stokes Croft and the

people who visit it for recreation do not live there, proclaimed that ‘Stokes Croft doesn’t exist’.

It is a notable contrast with St Pauls, a tight-knitted community with a clear connection between

residence and spatial identity.

For decades the area had been ignored by local government, who in 1977 described it as a ‘ring

of dereliction’ (Punter, 1991: 345). However, its contemporary identity began to emerge in the

mid-2000s as part of an attempt by creative activists to transform the space without official

approval. This process was initially carried out by People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, who

began putting art on derelict buildings to challenge the perversity of the council criminalising

street artists for making the area look more appealing (Dobson, 2015: 163). Alongside this

physical transformation was a concomitant growth in the squatting of empty buildings,

facilitated by the financial crash and its erosion of the capital required for a planned

gentrification of the area. An interviewee explained that

24
 the brutal gentrification was stopped immediately. Because suddenly house prices fell. Land

prices started to fall. No one was going to take the risk of any new businesses in that climate.

So it was quite funny watching that happen again. You know, so that opened the space for

people then to start squatting places (Interview – 230322).

Squatters repurposed these buildings themselves into alternative spaces like free shops, pop-up

art galleries, or radical bookshops. The effect of these interlinked processes of reclaiming

control of space without permission was the development of an area in which the ‘right to the

city’ was being effectively practiced, with the council and private sector paralysed to act by the

financial crash. This process reflects what Buser refers to as cultural activism, meaning ‘an

activism that calls upon art and creative practices to disrupt commonly held assumptions and

expectations often by forging alternative spatial imaginaries or meanings’ (2013: 607).

It is important to note here that before the riot, Stokes Croft and the spatial idea it represented

had not yet entered the national or civic imaginary, with residents and activists fighting against

the narrative of dereliction. This gradual process of challenging the neoliberal narratives of

urban development would be critical in the later outbreak of violence. With this in mind, it

would be reductive to consider the riots as purely ‘anti-Tesco’, or that their purpose went no

further than attempting to remove the Tesco store. Indeed, mobilisation to defend Stokes Croft

from neoliberal development dated back to at least 2007 with a campaign to save nightclubs in

Stokes Croft and have them designated as cultural assets. Importantly, this campaign set the

precedent for non-resident mobilisation within Stokes Croft, since many of these who partied

in Stokes Croft had no stake in the area beyond recreation. With the financial crash halting the

process of closing the clubs and enabling greater squatting activity, this idea of Stokes Croft as

a space of freedom and recreation had time to grow. Without the development of an active

culture of reclaiming and repurposing space prior to the riots, such a willingness to defend the

idea of the space would not have existed (Frenzel & Beverungen, 2015: 1027). There was thus

25
a convergence of factors to create a spatial identity tied to creativity, anti-neoliberal political

activism, and acting without official approval through which a willingness to defend the space

against perceived spatial intrusion became possible.

26
 Chapter 4: The Role of Space in the Riots

Figure 3 – Boundaries of St Pauls/Stokes Croft. Stokes Croft

(primary location of 2011 Riot) marked in blue. Grosvenor Road
(primary location of 1980 Riot) marked in red

4.i - St Pauls

Having established spatial dynamics in St Pauls and the racialised configuration of the area,

we must now consider the role of space in the riot itself. As we shall see, the riot contested the

police’s control over the area, reasserted residents’ control of the space, and questioned what

kind of spaces the area should be composed of. For clarity, it is necessary here to provide a

brief narrative the riot. Police raided the Black and White Café on Grosvenor Road, marked in

red on Figure 3, at around 3:30 pm, initially composed of two plain-clothes police officers with

more officers immediately outside and more on alert nearby (Joshua, et al., 1983: 78). The

length of time taken to execute the raid and the fact that the school day had just finished led to

large crowd watching. While there are many accounts of exactly what happened next,

antagonistic police acts like the arrest of the Café’s proprieter led to confrontation between the

police and the crowd that escalated to police vehicles being pelted with bricks and projectiles

(Reicher, 1984: 9). This was followed by fluctuating periods of calm in turn giving way to

27
more similar violence. The night ended with police withdrawal, the burning of a Lloyds Bank,

and the destruction of several left-behind police vehicles.

Firstly, this raid was a contentious act in itself, due to both the symbolism of Grosvenor Road

as a frontline that the community perceived to be theirs by ‘public consent’ (Pryce, 1979: 31)

and because the Café had been the recent subject of repeated police raids on the pretext of

searching for illicit drugs and unlicensed alcohol. This frontline, with the Café at its social

centre, signified an area of spatial control that the population was deprived of elsewhere. It is

important to note here that ‘with a number of similar establishments having been shut down,

the Black and White café was, for many West Indians, the last meeting place they had available

to them’ (Hackett, 2021: 303). In this sense, the Café represented a space free from the

discrimination of British society, in which the community could simply exist. This was

effectively a microcosm of what the community was trying to do in St Pauls, yet were largely

prevented from doing so. By repeatedly raiding one of the few spaces that the community felt

was indisputably theirs, the police became the visible enforcers of the racial hierarchies and

social exclusion that St Pauls residents suffered from. Reicher’s respondents emphasise this

point, with ‘the police seen as making a fundamental attack on the right of the community to

control its own existence’ (Reicher, 1984: 14).

We must recognise here that urban spatial divides are as much physical as they are socially

constructed. While the M32 motorway, for instance, was and is a physical barrier that cuts

through East Bristol, the boundaries of St Pauls constituted a reputational ghetto that cut it off

from the rest of the city. Numerous testimonies state that simply giving a St Pauls address was

enough to cause job interviews to be terminated or for pizza deliveries and taxis to be refused

(Slater & Anderson, 2011: 539). These seemingly mundane activities are significant since they

constitute the processes by which narratives of St Pauls permeated into everyday life and

imagined demarcations were made real. By manifesting racialised misconceptions into

28
everyday operations, the police were perceived to be actively enforcing this invisible line

between St Pauls and the rest of Bristol. An interviewee elaborated further on this dynamic and

its impact on daily life:

you know you're not being treated the same as the rest of society and once you travel out of

your community, you see that certain things happen around you all in other spaces. And it

becomes very apparent then that you're treated different (Interview – 130422).

Such a function was essentially admitted to by the police themselves in research done by Reiner

in Bristol in the mid-70s, seen most clearly in a local constable’s assertion that ‘if you asked

[police] you’d find 90% of the force are against coloured immigrants. They’d never want you

to do that research and come up with that figure’ (1992: 126). The way in which these

conditions interlinked to produce a desire to control the space is illustrated in Figure 4 below.

Territorial stigmatisation – St Pauls seen

as an undesirable area of black criminality

Area policing – police Council ignorance Social exclusion –

racism and harassment – lack of lack of accessibility
investment/service to spaces/services
inside the space provision in the area outside St Pauls

Resentment of
exclusionary/oppressive authorities,
desire for freedom within the space
of St Pauls
Figure 4 – Relationships between space and
alienation in St Pauls

29
We can see this process in the way the riot played out. Indeed, while much of the official

narrative of why St Pauls rioted centres around macro-level issues like rising unemployment,

which was roughly 3 times higher in St Pauls than the rest of the city (Ball, 2012: 224), this

ignores the specific socio-spatial context of St Pauls at the time. The composition of black

youth who rioted is important, since they were the first generation to be born in Bristol.

Whereas their parents had been more willing to accept a subordinate position on Britain’s racial

hierarchy for the sake of securing the supposed better life that Britain offered, the youth were

more willing to question why they were not allowed to live freely. An interviewee described

that

the difference with us was our generation was born here, and so we thought we're not having

it. So we have people saying “fuck off you black bastard go back home.” What do you mean,

go back home? This is home, innit? (Interview – 130422)

Indeed, interviewees identified the mistreatment and abuse their parents suffered in silence as

a key motivation for fighting back. Additionally to this, St Pauls during this period was the

centre of a youth culture built around reggae music and Rastafarianism that was inextricably

tied to resisting injustice. This developed out of the need to create informal party venues within

St Pauls because black youth largely would not be allowed into nightclubs in town.

Furthermore, the council’s policy of “bussing” out St Pauls youth to white outlier schools had

a boomerang effect, with many white working-class youth visiting St Pauls for recreation and

breaking down the invisible barrier surrounding it. This eventuated in a shared awareness of

policing as a function of both racial and social control and the impartment of rebellious attitudes

into sections of white working-class youth. A certain level of multi-ethnic solidarity facilitated

by these social connections is evident in the disorder that immediately followed the St Pauls

Riot in Southmead (white outlier estate in North Bristol) and Filwood (white outlier estate in

South Bristol), with white youth taking inspiration from St Pauls to fight the police in their

30
own areas (Ball, 2017). With official narratives configuring St Pauls as a lawless space, this St

Pauls-based youth counterculture created an internal counter-narrative that configured St Pauls

as rebellious space. While the authorities saw the riot as a consequence of the area’s

lawlessness, rioters and their external sympathisers saw it as a manifestation of the place-based

culture of rebellion. Especially among Afro-Caribbean youth, workplace racism and job

interview discrimination meant there was not a widespread desire to work, indicated by the fact

that in 1980 only 70 black people in St Pauls were enrolled at the job centre (BBC Points West,

1980). This suggests a view that working legitimised the racist hierarchy upon which such work

was predicated, summed up by young community activist Simba Tongogara after the riot:

Would you spend your life following a system that you know, before you even start, is not

gonna accept anything you try, no matter how hard you try? (BBC Points West, 1980)

While Afro-Caribbean youth bore the brunt of it, the stigmatisation of St Pauls and the

consistency of police harassment was felt beyond those who had “dropped out”. In Reicher’s

research on the riot, a common thread runs through the testimonies of black and white

respondents of all ages in describing the police operation as an “invasion” and ‘seeing

themselves as ridding St Pauls of an illegitimate and alien police presence’ (Reicher, 1984: 14).

The distinctly spatial dimension of the riot is seen in the fact that the riot did not extend

whatsoever beyond the ward boundaries of St Pauls. While this could be seen as residents

reproducing their own segregation, it is more accurate to consider this as displaying a desire

for freedom within the space, in effect a “right to the city” that the state had hitherto denied

them. That expelling the police was considered a pre-requisite for this internal freedom is seen

in the selective looting of buildings seen to be against the community’s interest, most notably

the Lloyds Bank and shops owned by people not from St Pauls, and conversely the protection

and non-looting of black and Asian owned shops (Peplow, 2019). The highly selective targets

31
indicate a level of prefiguration within the crowd, who used the fleeting freedom of the riot and

the absence of the police to demonstrate what kind of space they wanted St Pauls to be. It is

this active attempt to reclaim the community’s right to freely control the space and practice the

ideals of the right to the city that the riot embodied.

4.ii - Stokes Croft

Whereas the St Pauls Riot was primarily an attempt by residents to claim control of the space,

the nature of the Stokes Croft Riot is initially harder to determine. Much of this owes to the

space’s liminality, both physically as a corridor between the outer and inner city, and

demographically through the temporality of the squats and the area being a destination for non-

residents to visit for recreation. Such dynamics were heightened in the outbreak of the riot,

which again must be briefly narrated.

Much like in St Pauls, unrest was initially triggered by an antagonistic police operation, with

police trying to evict the Telepathic Heights squat opposite the Tesco site with several riot vans

on the evening of a hot April Bank Holiday. All interviewees described being baffled that the

police turned up heavily in an area where they were not well-liked on an evening when all the

bars were full, the weather was good, and nobody had work in the morning. While the police

claimed that the squatters were planning to petrol-bomb Tesco, no evidence of this was found,

and the fact that they had turned up with reinforcements from South Wales indicates an

awareness that their presence was provocative (Clifton, 2012). As with St Pauls, the operation’s

slow execution caused an increasingly irritated crowd to gather, and also allowed for online

squatting networks to mobilise local squatters to resist the eviction. Rather than a homogenous

crowd opposing Tesco, interviewees said the crowd was largely composed of people out

drinking, locals irritated by the police presence, and local activists who had come to defend

32
against the police incursion. Despite differences in the crowd’s composition, one interviewee

described the general feeling being that

this is about 100 cops, police from South Wales who looked like it was planned with silly

surveillance [vehicles], weird stuff. And it appears to the crowd like they're trying to trying to

dominate our area. They have created a confrontation here, and they have brought tooled-up people

to deal with it. (Interview – 210222)

Personal accounts stress that the crowd at this point was observing and playing music, with the

outbreak of violence seemingly triggered by the deployment of riot shields and an attempt to

remove a sound-system from the crowd (Open Democracy, 2011). Several hours later the

police withdrew after sustaining damage and failing to disperse the crowd, leading to

celebrations and the smashing of the Tesco storefront. When the police unsuccessfully

attempted to shut down a screening of footage from the riots in nearby St Werburghs days later,

people began calling for a ‘celebration’ of the one-week anniversary of the first riot, at which

violence again broke out. This second riot was less spontaneous than the first, and testimonies

point toward more concentrated anti-police sentiment, as well as the presence of working-class

youth from elsewhere in Bristol venting their own frustration with the police.

With this in mind, we must interrogate the spatial element of these riots. As we saw in Chapter

4, a spatial identity linking Stokes Croft with freedom was often shared by those who didn’t

live there and arose in opposition to the planned gentrification of the area in 2007. While this

had been stalled by the financial crash, the implementation of austerity by the new

Conservative-led government led to a second attempt. Such an attempt makes sense on a

macro-scale, with the Conservatives’ expansion of New Labour’s privatisation initiatives

alongside central funding cuts creating an imperative for local councils to prioritise

profitability. Local planning processes thus became increasingly skewed towards big

businesses, despite the fact that any wealth produced would largely be hoarded by these

33
corporations and would not trickle down to the rest of the city (Clement, 2010: 40). This

observation is not intended to absolve Bristol City Council of blame for their planning

processes, but to reveal the insufficiency of neoliberalism in enabling community-led

development. Indeed, Bristol City Council’s own planning law in 2010 when the Tesco

planning application was submitted dictated that they ‘cannot discriminate between the impacts

of an independent retailer and that of a supermarket’ (People's Republic of Stokes Croft, 2010).

When development agendas are shaped by overarching ideologies and one-size-fits-all

approaches, they will not be able to adapt sufficiently to specific local conditions.

While Tesco was therefore contextually important, its opening intersected with a more general

increase in heavy-handed police evictions of the area’s squats, including a particularly tense

eviction of people squatting the Tesco site itself aiming to halt the construction process. The

logics behind such evictions can only be understood through neoliberalism’s ‘creative

destruction’ (Harvey, 2006: 153). Since these squats were not profitable, they had to be

removed to make way for something that was. That these squats were providing useful

community spaces, free resources, or free activities was irrelevant since they fell outside the

framework of profitability (Frenzel & Beverungen, 2015: 1025). In this development process,

the police are required to act as enforcers for the private sector and the protection of private

property rights. The necessity of the police in this role indicates that the neoliberal project is

intimately reliant on the state’s monopoly on violence to legitimise itself (Newburn, 2001:

832). The way in which these dynamics played out in Stokes Croft points to an increasing

association in the minds of people in Stokes Croft between the police and processes of

gentrification. The two outbreaks of collective violence thus represented a desire from residents

and non-residents alike with divergent experiences and intentions to defend Stokes Croft as an

alternative urban space and a space of escapism, and to fight against a generally disliked police

force. Indeed, one interviewee even argued that

34
 ‘[Some people] wanted Tesco's because there's nowhere to buy cheap food around Stokes Croft.

There's nothing here, you know? And so we don't want a fucking fresh and wild or some fucking

expensive eco shop’ (Interview – 230322).

This observation in itself reflects the often problematic relationship between cultural activism

and gentrification, with the development of creative spaces transforming an area into

somewhere with an “alternative” image that property developers can then profit off (Frenzel &

Beverungen, 2015: 1033). That Tesco was the flashpoint for the riot was somewhat incidental

and owed more to the nature of the policing operation surrounding its opening, since it merely

signified the processes of neoliberalisation that many in Stokes Croft positioned themselves

against. This was reiterated by two of my interviewees independently of each other:

I'll say right from the start, I contest the word Tesco's riot, because although it might have some

relationship to the incident, and the Tesco's is why the police were there, it was much more

about the fact that the area of Stokes Croft was being contested. It was about contestation in the

streets (Interview – 080422).

People mentioned the Tesco a lot. It's kind of a point about the gentrification, but I think it is a

relatively minor one. I think it just got a lot of press at the time. But I think the riot would have

happened exactly the same way without the Tesco, and I didn't think it was a necessary catalyst

(Interview – 110422).

Instead, participants pointed to the highly aggressive policing both on the night and in the

preceding months and the link between policing and gentrification as producing the violence.

This speaks more generally to the function of policing under neoliberalism. Since British

policing generally claims to operate by consent, this consent must be obtained. For

communities who benefit from existing socio-economic structures, the police are usually not

problematised and consent for their role in “fighting crime” is largely given. In contrast,

communities who suffer under these structures and rebel against them must be coerced into

35
their consent (Briken & Eick, 2011: 5). This presents a negative construction of consent as

simply the absence of public disorder, rather than approval of policing. Much like in St Pauls,

respondents therefore identified the police as intruders and recognised their function of

violently inducing consent in a community where they feared they were losing control. Here,

crowd heterogeneity becomes highly significant and contrasts with the more defined social

identity tied to St Pauls residence in the 1980 Riot. Despite divergent experiences, different

reasons for being in Stokes Croft, and distinct views on Tesco, the crowd could unite around a

shared recognition of the police’s illegitimacy and a desire to expel them from the space. The

way in which even non-residents felt a spatial attachment to Stokes Croft, and were willing to

defend it from a perceived police invasion is clearly explained by one interviewee:

A lot of people who fought on that night would have said that yeah, we're not that bothered about

[Tesco], but what we are bothered about is cops thinking they can fucking run the city and take over

our areas…We're not a bunch of atomised individuals. It’s our fucking place. But it wasn't like we

all live here. It's where people do political stuff, squat, go to clubs, go to parties, go to the pub. I

think my feeling is that it was about contestation of spaces. This is our space, our place. Fuck off.

(Interview – 230322).

The nature of this spatial identity is again demonstrated in the property damage that occurred.

As with St Pauls, police vehicles were the primary target while the infamous Tesco was only

attacked following police withdrawal, perhaps in a similar vein of possibility as had prompted

St Pauls rioters to attack the Lloyds Bank. Participants spoke of attacking Tesco as an

afterthought of the riot rather than its purpose, in stark contrast to the media headlines and

academic articles that have dubbed the events as the Tesco Riots. In both cases we see riots

creating a temporary setting in which unwelcome components of the space can be physically

challenged. Riots thus create a dual process of shaping space negatively by attacking that which

36
is unwanted and positively by creating that which is wanted (Duarte, 2016: 166). The way in

which the riot redefined what was thought possible and altered urban spatial relations beyond

Stokes Croft is fascinatingly described by an interviewee:

In the immediate aftermath of the riot the area felt so much better. People were more chill with

each other. It's like not only had aggression been let out, but it had been focussed in one

direction. One example was just, I've never lived in Stokes Croft, but I lived in Easton, and

there's always varying degrees of antagonism between organised gangs and kids between these

two areas and that was like gone. People crossed the postcodes and linked up and made

connections on that night (Interview – 110422).

This observation reveals the often-ignored notion that riots can, as much as they are destructive

and violent, be temporarily productive and positive means of fighting against alienation,

building community, and reclaiming dignity in the face of oppression. In Stokes Croft as in St

Pauls, the temporary absence of the police acted as a pre-requisite for constructing an inclusive

space and reclaiming the ‘right to the city’ that the culture of squatting, graffiti and public art,

and grassroots community initiatives in Stokes Croft had embodied. Tesco was therefore a

secondary target representing the wider neoliberal order and process of gentrification that the

police had been seen to protect.

37
 Chapter 5: Neoliberalism and the Space In-between

Having compared the 1980 St Pauls Riot and the 2011 Stokes Croft Riot, we see that their

differences illustrate the changes in urban power relations and policing that neoliberalism has

produced. They both occurred at formative moments of modern British economic history, with

St Pauls occurring against a backdrop of an incipient Thatcherism and Stokes Croft rioting

soon after the introduction of austerity. While these riots could be seen as indicating a desire

for more interaction with the state in moments of its stripping back, responses from my

interviewees and participants interviewed elsewhere suggest a desire for freedom state violence

and the economic inequalities both tacitly and actively enforced by the state.

The most revealing difference between the riots is the distinctions in policing. Indeed, in the

1970s and 80s there was no economic incentive for St Pauls to be policed so aggressively, with

operations reflecting and reproducing racialised assumptions of migrant criminality. Policing

thus upheld British socio-economic-racial hierarchies and asserted the state’s monopoly on

violence over marginalised populations. These policing practices should be situated in the

context of mainland British police learning from the Northern Ireland conflict and moving

towards area policing that could contain and criminalise “unruly” urban spaces (Ball, 2012:

271). In contrast, by 2011 the police had taken on a more overt economic function of facilitating

neoliberal urban development, effectively reconfiguring their overarching purpose of

protecting private property, while criminalising spaces that do not have a productive economic

use (Laub, 2021). Whereas previously the police could keep “undesirable” populations in their

place on the hierarchy, neoliberalism signifies a paradigm shift where these areas become

potential sites of profit accumulation. Indeed, the state learned from 1980s riots that the police

could no longer be publicly seen as racist and therefore constructed discourses of policing by

38
consent, reinforced by images of inclusivity and minority representation that obscure functional

violence (Bradford, 2014: 25).

While such a shift requires gradual changes within institutional norms, we can see it tangibly

with the construction of Cabot Circus shopping centre in Bristol, which borders St Pauls. While

a drug gang turf war had been going on for several years, armed police were deployed for the

first time on the British mainland in St Pauls when the planning application for Cabot Circus

had been submitted. The application received preliminary approval in December 2002, armed

police were deployed in St Pauls from January 2003 (Davies, 2003), and official planning

permission was granted in June 2003 (Insider Media, 2008).

Figure 5 – Proposed space of Cabot Circus site

from 2003

Notably, the planned gentrification of Stokes Croft in 2007 intersected with the opening of

Cabot Circus, as it offered a lucrative route into this centre of consumption. Since there was

now an economic incentive for imposing “law and order” in St Pauls, namely the smooth

construction of a new shopping centre and ensuring that those visiting Cabot Circus would not

witness violence, the police were required to act as enforcers. The proximity of St Pauls and

Cabot Circus is shown above in Figure 5 (Bristol Live, 2020), with the boundaries of St Pauls

running immediately to the right of the proposed site, shown in red. Clement notes that ‘the

39
design of [Cabot Circus] literally turns its back upon St Paul’s by placing all of its public

entrances on the city centre side, while neighbouring communities become new road conduits

and car park overspills.’ (2007: 104).

In the words of an interviewee, the change in policing practices and state attitudes toward St

Pauls showed that

They could have always done it. They could have always made it safe. They could have always

given us a good opportunity. But they didn't care (Interview – 130422).

This illustrates the tension within neoliberalism between the illusion of normality needed to

maintain a stable consumer culture and the structural violence required to uphold this illusion.

The current gentrification of St Pauls would have been impossible without this shift in state

practices toward cleaning the area up to enable neoliberal development. An interviewee

recalled friends being paid up to £10,000 by the council to leave St Pauls to facilitate new

housing that would attract wealthier demographics, a process they described as an ‘ethnic

cleansing and recolonisation of the community’ (Interview – 130422). While St Pauls may now

be safer from drug-associated violence, residents are not safe from property development that

forces them out of their homes. Having spent decades trying to contain St Pauls, neoliberalism

has incentivised the area’s gentrification and opening to middle-class homeowners and

corporate investors. Such a dynamic is further seen in the fact that spaces like the Malcom X

Community Centre and the Rastafari Cultural Centre have been victims of attempted sales by

the council to property developers in recent years, since their utility cannot be measured in

profit. The extent of gentrification is shown by St Pauls’ 2016 inclusion on property website

Zoopla’s list of the UK’s 10 “Hipster Hotspots” following a 38.5% 5-year increase in average

house price (Glaister, 2016). With this in mind, we can see prescience in Simba Tongogara’s

post-riot observation that

40
 it doesn’t matter how much money you spend within our community if you’re not gonna let us take

an active part in it for ourselves. At the end of the day, we own what we have and it is ours, and we

can use it to the best ethic in our culture here (BBC Points West, 1980).

There is continuity here with the gentrification of neighbouring Stokes Croft, which as we have

seen fully exemplifies the shift in policing toward facilitating neoliberalism. This forms a

process through which communities’ power to control their space becomes increasingly

intangible as the forms of power that govern their lives become increasingly diffused. A

proposed initiative by PRSC called the Stokes Croft Land Trust, which aims to organise

community ownership of buildings in Stokes Croft as a means of resisting gentrification, offers

an intriguing example of how place-based resistance adapts to this context (People's Republic

of Stokes Croft, 2022). While people rose up in St Pauls in 1980 because they could clearly

identify the police as agents of social control, the nature of neoliberal urbanism means that

power has spread beyond state institutions, residing in intangible webs of development that,

because they cannot be as overtly seen, cannot be as effectively fought. Interestingly, the Stokes

Croft riot was a rare moment at which the intersection between state violence and neoliberal

economics became visible, with police operating specifically to enable the opening of Tesco

and more generally to suppress non-profitable spaces. That St Pauls youth joined the riot

despite not being part of the anti-Tesco campaign or the local squatting networks reveals

lingering resentment of the police, against whom this was an opportunistic moment to vent

anger. Above all, these riots illustrate the shift from a state-led economic system willing to

exclude “unproductive” spaces and populations toward a privatised economic system that

exploits the potential profitability of such spaces. While its forms and functions have shifted,

policing in both cases remains consistent in its use to protect exclusionary systems over the

welfare and independence of excluded communities.

41
 Conclusion

This dissertation has aimed to reveal the spatial dynamics of urban riots and analyse them as a

means of reclaiming the principles of the ‘right to the city.’ Such a conclusion reaffirms

Harvey’s argument that for urban populations the urge for a ‘right to the city’ arises through

lived experience of urban marginalisation rather than studying and theorising. Rather than

present this as a universal model of riots, the intention has been to challenge the trend within

academic literature and mainstream media coverage on riots towards homogenising narratives.

Instead, I have presented a lens that prioritises crowd heterogeneity and agency, identifies the

complex intersection between macro and micro-level factors, and analyses how divergent

social actors can unite against recognised shared opponents. In both St Pauls and Stokes Croft,

rioters identified the police as illegitimate and united in a desire to control space by removing

them. Moreover, both riots were as tied to localised relationships between community and

environment as they were to wider contexts of oppression and exclusion. This suggests that

riots should be considered as more than general expressions of rage and discontent and that

their potential ability to alter the form and function of community space should be given more

recognition. Rather than being singular and aberrative events, riots are part of wider processes

of renegotiating the production of urban space that exist beyond these brief spectacles of

violence and possibility. Above all, we have seen that the desire to practice a ‘right to the city’

and the perception of spatial intrusion seen to prevent this can act as a key trigger of riots. In a

world becoming increasingly urbanised, increasingly unequal, and in many cases increasingly

unliveable, I believe such findings offer an important lens for understanding both present and

future urban dissent.

Finally, I feel that these specific riots offer rich findings for further analysis. While it was not

the subject of this project, it is notable that both riots occurred one year into the rule of a new

42
Conservative-led government who in both cases were intent on a weakening of the public sector

and a strengthening of policing power through “law and order” discourses. Examining these

riots as extra-electoral expressions of discontent by alienated communities could be the subject

of useful future research. Likewise, literature on British riots could benefit from a critical

discourse analysis of how local and national media responded to these riots to legitimise police

narratives at times in which there was institutional fear of disorder spreading beyond Bristol.

Lastly, I believe it would be productive to research the involvement of working-class youth

from outside Stokes Croft in the 2011 riot, and how their involvement is situated in their

identity and relationship with the police.

It must also be said that this dissertation has been researched and written in a context of

increasing state authoritarianism and police power in the UK, as seen in the Police, Crime,

Courts, and Sentencing Bill with its restrictions on freedoms of protest and assembly, its

expansion of police powers like Stop and Search, and its reinforcement of a failing prison

system. It would be reductive to claim this Bill and the March 2021 riot against it in Bristol

have not shaped my research. My hope is that by understanding shifting dynamics of resistance

in previous riots, we are better-placed to understand how resistance will adapt to creeping state

authoritarianism and the role of collective violence in this process. It seems that policing in the

UK is at another critical juncture and, especially in light of the approaching cost of living crisis

and the possibility of climate collapse, it remains to be seen how its functions will shift.

Whether we continue to pursue an economy, supported by state authoritarianism, that extracts

profit regardless of the impact on communities and environments alike depends on our ability

to learn from previous moments of resistance. It is imperative to understand the alternative

ways of thinking, acting, and interacting that these moments represent, however fleeting they

might be, and harness them into tangible change beyond the temporality and spectacle of the

riot.

43
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