After Southport mourned, it burned. Acrid smoke and the sound of fireworks filled the night sky barely an hour after the town had gathered to pay respect to the victims of Monday’s stabbing atrocity.
Young girls, the same age as those who were murdered, stood in sombre silence with their balloons and seaside toys.
Although the overwhelming mood in Southport at 6pm on Tuesday was of grief and collective support, febrile undercurrents had begun to bubble to the surface.
Keir Starmer, the prime minister, was heckled shortly before 4pm as he laid flowers at the scene of the attack on Hart Street, with shouts of “how many more children will die?” and “get the truth out”.
Over the previous day, a “swirling morass” of “lies and propaganda” had spread about the identity of the killer and his motives, said Patrick Hurley, the MP for Southport. Some locals were adamant that police and the media were covering up evidence that this had been a terrorist attack.
Outside the police cordon on Hart Street, officials expressed fears that a far-right rally had been timed to coincide with a vigil at 6pm in front of Southport’s grand arts building, the Atkinson. In the event, that “rally” amounted to six men with two St George’s flags and a crate of cider, who sat on a bench before being told to move on.
The separate vigil – to mourn the loss of Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, and Bebe King, six, and pay tribute to the 10 others injured in the stabbing attack – passed off peacefully but there were signs of a town on edge.
A car backfired on a nearby street, startling the crowd, shortly before speeches began. Then the ceremony was briefly interrupted when a young man collapsed, prompting those around to shout for medical help.
Just as mourners were leaving, police officers scrambled to their cars and vans and sped on blue lights up Lord Street, the town’s main thoroughfare, followed by onlookers. A man in a balaclava had been apprehended with a flick knife about 500 yards from the vigil.
A crowd quickly gathered and filmed on their smartphones. One witness, who lives on the street, said: “I’m scared, bro. We’re scared to go out.” Merseyside police later confirmed that a 32-year-old man, from a village about 20 miles from Southport, was arrested at 6.50pm.
By that time, hundreds of people – mostly young men – had begun making their way to Southport mosque for an 8pm far-right demonstration that had been advertised on social media.
Merseyside police had picked up intelligence that supporters of the English Defence League would be attending, even if the far-right group has not existed as an on-the-ground force for years.
Within minutes of police arriving shortly before 8pm, it turned ugly. Shouts of “Whose streets? Our streets!” and “England ‘til I die” rang out as demonstrators squared up to a line of about a dozen police officers, armed only with batons.
Young men, some wearing face coverings, tried to tear off a riot van’s wing-mirror while others jumped on its windscreen and tried to push through the lines of ill-equipped and out-mobbed officers. A firecracker exploded underneath their feet.
Around the corner in a redbrick Victorian terrace, Lauren Leatherbarrow, 30, was trying to get her son, three, and daughter, one, to bed when she heard the commotion. She rang her father, Richard Furness, screaming down the phone. They decided to evacuate as the angry crowds swelled.
“There was people brushing past us with masks on. I was shaking putting them in the car. I was petrified,” she said from her front garden on Wednesday. “It’s like they were terrorising us.”
Her partner, Steven Lang, a former soldier, said: “I’ve been in Afghanistan and that [the riot] was worse. At least you’ve got protection in the army, but we were by ourselves, with young kids.”
The family’s bin was set on fire and rioters tried to break into their garage, said Lang. “It’s just very sad, isn’t it?” said Furness, 50. “Everyone was coming together … It was somewhere that was grieving and struggling. There was the vigil and everyone was coming together, and this [the riot] disrupted the whole thing under the headline of ‘protect our children’ – which is ridiculous because everyone on our street was terrified.”
Bricks, bottles, wheelie bins and paving slabs were launched at officers, while missiles were hurled through the windows of Southport mosque.
Sheltering inside with eight worshippers, the mosque’s chairman, Ibrahim Hussein, said he feared rioters were trying to torch the building and those inside. “It really was terrifying,” he said. “The whole building was shaking [because] of the missiles they kept throwing.” The smell of smoke filled the building on Wednesday morning.
The police, penned in between their own vehicles and rioters, were defenceless. One of the vans went up like a Roman candle as black smoke towered into a greying sky. It was 8.36pm.
Young men jumped out of vans and others arrived on scrambler bikes as riot police struggled to bring the chaos under control. A resident’s car was hot-wired and driven at police. Petrol bombs and bricks bounced off riot shields as police dogs yelped.
By 9.30pm, the disorder had spread. Masked groups broke into Windsor mini mart and ransacked the cigarettes and alcohol. An industrial wheelie bin outside was set ablaze and rammed into police.
A man living above the shop pleaded for the rioters to stop, while the owner, Suzanne Jerran, was at home with her son. She had feared for the lives of her tenants.
“Why are they picking on us? Why are they damaging our town?” she said through tears on Wednesday morning. “This is a struggling seaside town as it is. We’ve lost so much to the likes of Liverpool. And now our struggling community is under attack from these yobs that are coming in.
“What did we do to deserve this? We’ve already lost our children. Our community is grieving. How dare they come here to our town and do this? It’s disgusting. It really is disgusting.”
Returning home through the debris at 6am on Wednesday, Lauren Leatherbarrow’s three-year-old son had asked for a dustpan and brush “to help clean up the fire”. He waved at firefighters who were dusting away the embers of the night before.
At the Southport mosque, flowers, candles and treats including medjoul dates, Maltesers and donuts had been donated to the worshippers, as workmen replaced its broken windows.
“Southport people are like you see here,” said Hussein, gesturing to the flowers and gifts. “They are beautiful people. They support us and we support them and we love each other and we’ve been living in harmony for 30 years, so it’s not going to change now just because a few idiots have put something on social media.”
