Hull riots: Terror on our streets
MOB: Crowds confront police in King Edward Street
Far-right thugs rioted in the city centre on August 3. Co-Editor Simon Bristow reported from the scene and looks back on a day of infamy
“Try to be as sober as you can”, said the online invitation.
It seemed an odd request for what was billed as “a tribute and a short vigil” for “the little girls in Southport”.
The author also invited people to bring “flowers or teddy bears etc”, which would be “given to young girls of similar ages and their mothers around the city centre”.
Whether such gifts were either delivered or welcomed is not clear, but before the events which followed began a number of small teddy bears were placed on a Union flag on the steps in Queen Victoria Square.
That one image symbolised the malevolent conjuring trick pulled off by the far-right – it had appropriated the deaths of three girls in Southport for its own anti-immigration and Islamophobic cause, amplifying false claims on social media about the identity and background of the alleged attacker.
SYMBOL: Teddy bears on a Union flag in Queen Victoria Square
The people who did this did not see the Southport stabbing atrocity on July 29 as a time to mourn, they saw it as an opportunity.
The next day the hate they inflamed poured its way into that grieving community as a violent mob filled the streets, attacked police and targeted a mosque. It set the pattern for six days of racist rioting in towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland.
It was the worst outbreak of widespread disorder in this country since the riots of 2011. But there was a difference. This was not social unrest, it was political violence.
If tensions were not already high enough, beneath the veneer of respectability of the Hull “vigil” the organiser had left no doubt about what was at stake at the “protest” to follow: “This is about right and wrong and good versus evil.”
On a sunny afternoon on August 3, the “vigil” soon gave way to what for many had always been the main event – the chance to attack police and minority communities.
Many of the men and women of Humberside Police had initially not worn riot gear in an attempt to defuse the situation. Out with them before the trouble started were blue-vested police liaison officers, speaking to people, asking their names, and if they would move on if requested. But any efforts to pacify the large crowd in Queen Victoria Square were in vain.
There were flashes of violence as a counter-demonstration was quickly scattered and brief, ugly clashes with police trying to contain what had become an angry mob. But the numbers were too great.
Police came under physical attack from punches, kicks and missiles as the mob began advancing along King Edward Street, where officers tried to hold a line as the crowd roared and surged towards them. As the line began to buckle under a ferocious and determined assault police dogs were sent in to keep the thugs at bay.
This was serious violence. Of the 86 officers initially deployed on August 3, 11 were injured. These included a constable who was scarred for life after being struck in the face with a traffic cone opposite Costa Coffee in King Edward Street.
That line of officers faced a mob of about 500 and came under attack from a barrage of missiles, including smoke bombs, flares and other “pyrotechnics”, prosecutor Jeremy Evans later told Hull Crown Court. This seemed to be “a trigger for the appalling violence that followed”, he said.
VIOLENCE: Far-right thugs fighting police in King Edward Street
In a victim statement read out in court when the first rioters were sentenced, the constable said: “I felt a loud thud to the mouth which reverberated around my head. I felt punch-drunk, dizzy. I didn’t know what happened. I managed to stay on my feet and not lose consciousness.”
He was advised to retreat but didn’t.
Around the same time other rioters had begun to peel away to their main target – the Royal Hotel in Ferensway, which was being used to house asylum seekers.
Numbers in Ferensway swelled to about 1,000, initially around the cenotaph but quickly spilling onto both sides of the dual carriageway. The main thoroughfare in Hull city centre had been taken over by a racist mob.
Among the buses and vehicles brought to a standstill was a car driven by a woman with very young children in the back. She got out to lift one visibly distressed toddler into her arms to console them, and asked people watching the violence for a way out. No one offered flowers or teddy bears.
SICKENING: The BMW being attacked near Spring Bank
Instead, the items in the hands of those outside the hotel were stones, bottles, drink cans, tree shrubs, and eggs. These were pelted at the hotel and at another line of police who were bravely guarding the building and its occupants.
There was a loud roar when the first window went through on the first floor, one of eight smashed at the hotel. Staff later revealed they had placed tables and furniture against the windows to try to prevent anyone inside being harmed.
It had become a siege. Some were enjoying the freedom of the ground they now controlled, with a small man in a blue T-shirt lying down in front of a car on Ferensway, his arms raised in celebration. Minutes later he danced a jig in the no-man’s-land between the mob and police outside the hotel.
Other pathetic victories were also a cause for cheer. A former soldier got hold of a riot shield and waved it above his head like a trophy to roars of approval. He would be jailed for two years and eight months for his actions that day.
But those brief moments of mocking frivolity did nothing to mitigate the horror of what was happening, or the very grave danger the mob posed. All the time police officers were being assaulted, verbally abused, goaded, spat at. And the mob chanted and shouted: “Get them out!”, “We want our country back!”, “F***the immigrants!”, and “P*** c****, f*** off back home”.
At one point a man appeared at the side of the hotel asking how to get in. He seemed confused and frightened. A woman in black sat on the pavement nearby shouted gleefully: “Lads! Lads! There’s one of them here!” He was incredibly fortunate no one responded. In those circumstances, what was that, if not conspiracy to murder?
There can be little doubt that without the professionalism and bravery of the police outside the hotel people in it would have been seriously injured or killed.
Another line of police stood on the road in Ferensway, which by then had been cleared of vehicles and was blocked at either end by council refuse lorries. These officers also came under attack from missiles and large waste bins pulled from the side of the hotel, which were pushed or rammed into them, some on fire.
One bizarre and disturbing feature of the disorder, and it was not unique to Hull, was the spectacle of a racist, far-right mob chanting a campaign slogan of a former Prime Minister: “Stop the boats!” Some had the phrase emblazoned on specially made T-shirts. Others had also gone to the trouble of making placards bearing messages directed at the current Prime Minister, including “Keir Starmer – Traitor”, and “Two-tier Keir”.
By late afternoon the destruction wreaked by the rioters was evident in the broken windows of at least six shops in Jameson Street, most of which were ransacked and looted.
AFTERMATH: Damage to Lush and other stores. Picture credit: Chris Fenton / Octovision Media
Some of the worst incidents occurred in and around Spring Bank after the rioters had begun to move and forced the closure of St Stephens shopping centre, with staff locked in their stores. Paragon Station had already been shut down.
In Milky Way off Spring Bank, the Romanian driver of a BMW carrying two of his cousins found himself confronted by a mob of about 100, and was so terrified as it came under attack he reversed it into a fence. Its windscreen was smashed and people pulled at the doors before the occupants fled. One man tried to hit the driver with a metal bar.
Every other vehicle in the garage business nearby was damaged, with one car burnt out. A pile of tyres dragged into the street was set ablaze, its acrid smoke billowing into the garage where the owner had barricaded himself in with his wife, 16-year-old son, daughter aged 12 and two customers. His son started to have a panic attack.
In audio clips later played in court, one man shouted: “Open the door, mother*****. Open the door or I will kill you.” Another said: “You b****** foreigner, come out.” That attack lasted about 40 minutes before the mob moved on, with one group attacking a mosque at the Spring Bank corner with Park Street. Men who were there to defend it were injured by missiles.
Of the dozens of victim impact statements gathered by police after August 3, one read in court on behalf of a girl aged 17 said: “Not only am I worried about my mother, I am worried about living in this city. It’s not comfortable to be scared in your own community. I feel trapped in my own home.”
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