Birmingham Riots 2011

Yesterday afternoon I was tipped off that riots might be happening at the Bullring later that evening and it'd be worth getting some photos. That was all the information I had but little did I know the full extent of the situation about to happen. I was an hour away from the scene but I rushed over, managed to persuade my French housemate whom I've never had a conversation for more than 30 seconds with to come with me. Even I knew it would be idiotic to go it alone. He even lent me his 7D as I had just borrowed mine to my brother. How naively trusting but extremely kind of him!

With nothing to go off except twitter rumours, we headed out by car to try and get as close to Primark as we could as we'd heard it had been set on fire. By now (9pm-ish) it had properly kicked off. Helicopters were flying above the city centre and most roads were fully blocked off by police so we had a mission parking anywhere. As we set off on foot and regretting not wearing a bigger coat to hide the massive Canon it seemed like we had missed the most of it. Cyber Candy was smashed in and a bit of Whetherspoons but no action shots for us. The road to Primark was completely blocked off...there was no blagging press passes at all for this one. Hundreds of obscured faced youths were still hanging around though and just as we considered going somewhere else, they starting smashing H&M store front. My heart was pounding quite a bit as I tried to figure out the camera settings but in the end I just left it playing on video. Someone clocked the camera though so we dispersed hence very shaky floor footage. A few lads had some rather intimidating dogs with them too. Standing and watching for a bit as the police arrive and the crowd breaks up, some guy with his face covered by a stupid wig starts confronting us and we panic a bit. We stay close to security, paranoid that he's told his friends and split up to watch where we go. We make a hasty decision to walk alongside a security guy who's escorting a crying lady and head back to the car.

A bit further out we see a cameraman and a news reporter setting up. I cheekily ask them for a press pass in exchange for our photos but he gets arsy with me and tells me what I'm doing is illegal. I saw these pictures later on of them. Looks like I had more wits about me than he did somehow. Turns out they're from ITV. (Not sure when these were taken, it looks like morning aftermath?)

Me and my housemate headed back to his car. On our way out we got mega lucky and saw huge crowds heading towards the mailbox about to go down. We quickly parked up and headed over there just in time to witness them smashing through the Armani store! Some guy shouted my housemate, started to chase us so we legged it up the escalators and through the mailbox. I don't think my heart has raced that much in my life! The guy gave up and we reached a family coming out of a locked up Nandos. We told them not to go the way we had came so the manager locked them back in. Some other passerby asked us about what was going on, I showed him a snippet of footage but said we needed to get out of here asap. We had to go a back way to the car. At this point my housemate gets a call from his friends saying she needed picking up because she was scared so we got her and left the rioters to continue undocumented. It's just gone 12pm the next day, I'm tired and I can still hear the occasional police siren. I dread to think about how much damage has been caused.