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Wednesday 10 August 2011

The Morning After

At around 7 am this morning, I decided to have a ride around the streets of the city centre to survey the damage done by the looters. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the streets themselves had already been largely cleaned up by the city’s street cleaning crews. There was a greater police presence than usual, and a lot more glazers around than usual, but the damage itself seems to have been hugely exaggerated by the Twitter rumour mill and rolling TV news reports.

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The back of the BMW dealership on Upper Brook Street had a window put through. I often encounter their employees on this back-road, moving cars from the forecourt to the back. Based on my encounters with them, I don’t have a great deal of sympathy here.

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Admittedly, the smashing up of this poor bike could be unrelated to the wider disorder last night.

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KRO Piccadilly, widely reported to have been ransacked, seems to have gotten away with only some damage to the door.

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Caffe Nero at Piccadilly Gardens had a pane of glass smashed in their door, but is otherwise fine.

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Jessops on Market Street, heavily boarded up. Apparently the looters didn’t have much luck getting into here, despite their best efforts.

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Burned-out Miss Selfridges, Market Street.

scum

The scumbag who was recorded setting Miss Selfridges on fire

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Some damage to numerous shops on Market Street and the outside of the Arndale.

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Hard Rock Cafe at The Printworks boarded up.

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This independent jewellers near Shudehill was hit.

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Another small business, in the Northern Quarter.

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Odd bar (Northern Quarter) appears to have been re-glazed this morning.

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Another small business, a Northern Quarter jewellers was attacked.

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Despite loads of rumours to the contrary, Afflecks Palace, which was actually trending worldwide on Twitter at one point, is fine.

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As is Vinyl Exchange.

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This smashed up, abandoned monitor was the only piece of debris I saw on the streets.

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Forbidden Planet’s window was damaged, but the shop doesn’t seem to have been breached.

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These two establishments seem to have taken the worst of the damage on Oldham Street.

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A bit of door damage to high & Mighty on King Street.

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Another shop on King Street damaged.

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Looters reportedly hit Sainsbury’s Local on Deansgate early on.

There was similar damage to some other businesses I passed too, although not on the sort of scale suggested by reports on Twitter and the rolling TV news. Thankfully the damage seems to have been a lot less severe than everyone was expecting. The Greater Manchester Police seems to have done an excellent job of containing the disorder last night, despite using tactics which appeared significantly less severe than those used against the largely peaceful anti-fees/anti-cuts protesters earlier this year. Perhaps there is a lesson there at least.

6 comments:

  1. Thank you for this post. It's comforting to see the damage is not as extensive as Twitter and TV news divulged yesterday. Yet, I am feeling incredibly low by it all, seeing people being so detached with society, so ignorant of the consequences of their actions to think they could do this and I am also sickened and fed up with our society that has been drumming consumerism principles for the last 20 years. Looters may have not been political, but the root of the problem IS political and we can't ignore that.

    I was really shocked last night and saddened to read so many tweets of people who talked about the looters like as if they were alien beings, and not connecting that they are the dark and ugly face of our own communities, our own people.

    I have been reading this really interesting article:

    http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/

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  2. I agree LC and said as much on my facebook, that people seem to think all the looters have no possible connection to them when as is being seen in London recently it's not true, with school teachers and older men even having been found to have had involvement. Also all those who turned out merely to watch and enjoy the spectacle to be honest were part of the problem.

    Sure if I'd been nearby I may have taken a snap or two from my apartment building window, but you see in the footage some people just milling about taking pics with their cameras and have a good old time taking in the sights.

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  3. Not nice to see is it?

    Agree with what you saying up to a point LC, and you are quite right that these are our own people, but what they are doing is horrible. I don't wish ill treatment of anyone but am comfortable with thinking that some of them need more than a hug ;>D

    (And wondering how many of our tough talking politicians who've been grabbing airtime over the last few days to criticise the rioters have flawless records with regards to expenses...what a funny old world we're living in at the moment lol)

    Feel sorry for H.Pollock. We got our wedding rings from there, a nice guy.

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  4. Dear Mr C

    Further to my recent comment on the appropriate treatment of these hoodlums (which I notice you are yet to publish), I would like to add that when they have been shot with plastic bullets and then hosed down with freezing high pressure water for good effect, they should be put in stocks, birched to within an inch of thier miserable lives and then made to do hard labour with the key thrown away. And they should be castrated as well and not any of this namby pamby chemical malarkey. Chop the bloody knackers of them and don't bother with any anesthetic. Of course if we had National Service none of this would ever had happened. Terrible state of affairs, bloody terrible.

    I trust we see are singing from the same hymn sheet here?

    Yours (disgusted of Prestwich)

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  5. The "scumbag" you show who allegedly set fire to Miss Selfridges in Manchester has been released without charge after the police checked video footage and found it was an older and scumbaggier man who actually did the crime.

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  6. A number of things.

    I know I'm a pedalling pedant, but everyone's been getting it wrong. It's Miss Selfridge - it doesn't have 's' on the end like its estranged parent.

    Kro Piccadilly also had their cake fridge broken, so when I went in on Thursday they had a limited selection of only two types! That and the (unsurprising) cancellation of the usual Tuesday night Arndale Sweatshop run were the main points of "distress" to me, although I do think the thousands of minor inconveniences add up and shouldn't be ignored.

    I remember thinking as I cycled round the following day how many large glazed shop-fronts there actually are, and what a small percentage were damaged.

    And @Miss Kitty, the guy in the picture is they guy who did it - watch the video - but he isn't the guy they mistakenly arrested.

    ReplyDelete

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