One year ago, on a quiet cul-de-sac in Southport, a town on England’s northwest coast, a teenager chose to slaughter a group of young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. His barbarism unleashed a wave of riots that seemed simultaneously to threaten and to define our social order.
We are still haunted by the ghosts of last summer. This month, rolling demonstrations have taken place outside a so-called “migrant hotel” in Epping. The unrest follows accusations of crimes committed by an immigrant against a child. Like last year, demonstrators scream “Save our kids!”, and again, journalists write about “disinformation” and the “far-Right”.
We have had a year to pick through the rubble of the riots — to plot out the chain of cause and effect, ruminate about the role of social media, and self-loathe in the mirror of national reflection. But are we any closer to understanding what is really going on?
For the past nine months, I have been working on a documentary which traces the story of last summer from start to finish. The commissioners wanted to know, in their words, “What the fuck happened?”. And so I thought our mission was simple: to piece together a single ugly event which took place over 10 chaotic days.
But the more I worked on the project, the clearer it became that tracking the sequence of events only took you so far. To tell the story of the riots is to glimpse the deep veins of unease that run through our country. I wanted to understand what motivated ordinary people to commit destruction and violence on such a massive scale, and to examine whether the simple logic of cause and effect was enough to make sense of what had happened.
I first visited Southport in December, five months after the riots. Along Hart Street, pink ribbons were tied around lampposts and front gates in memory of the murdered girls. At one end of the road, I found a scrap of police tape still knotted to a bush. A five-minute walk away, tradesmen were fixing metal bars to the downstairs windows of the mosque.
I wanted to speak to Norman Wallis, who runs Pleasureland, the town’s historic fairground. Norman knows everyone, so I hoped he might open some doors if I could get his blessing for the work I was about to embark on, which would inevitably involve asking difficult questions of people in town.
I was immediately disappointed. “What we need now,” he said, “are happy stories.” His message was clear: if we’re not careful Southport will become Dunblane, defined by its worst day. So don’t dwell. Don’t talk about The Southport Stabbings or The Southport Riots. This town was, is, and will be a happy place. Nothing to see here.
Normally, you begin making a documentary with access to someone who is keen to tell their side of the story. You leverage that access to encourage others to talk. Not so here. No one wanted to talk, and everyone had a good reason not to.
“No one wanted to talk, and everyone had a good reason not to.”
The rioters wouldn’t go on camera because they thought they’d get locked up; their victims wouldn’t because they feared reprisals from the rioters; online provocateurs because they had no faith in the mainstream media. The police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the Government all refused to take part. I figured they wished it would all just go away.
The team decided that the heart of the documentary must be an interview with one of the families of the innocent children who were attacked that morning. The whole story stems from what those children endured. But it was way too soon to make an approach.
So we talked to whoever would talk to us: local journalists, residents who watched the riot from their bedroom windows, tradesmen in caffs who may or may not have been there. Conversation about the murders and riots often dried up fast. But people spoke freely about Southport as a place — about the town they grew up in and the town they have now.
If you’re born in Southport, you’re a Sandgrounder, and Sandgrounders have a proud history. Southport used to be advertised as “The Paris of the North”. The story goes that Lord Street — the town’s main high street — inspired Emperor Napoleon III’s plans for the boulevards of Paris.
Now the beach is turning to mud and no one can explain why. Deer can be spotted where there were once sunbathers. Lord Street still impresses, but the shops keep closing down. The town’s bathing lake was closed and then demolished in the early Nineties, and people fear the same will happen to Southport’s iconic pier. It has been closed since 2022, a mile-long finger of rust jutting out to sea, pointing nowhere.
“It used to be beautiful,” Tim, a local reporter, told us. “But if my parents came back now they’d be mortified.”
Sandgrounders can feel their home gently rotting. The beach, the pier, the closed shops are daily reminders that Southport is there and not there at the same time.
This sense of drift is not new, nor is it unique to Southport. It is felt in towns up and down the country, especially in England’s deindustrialised north and along the coast — places haunted by a loss of meaning as much as prosperity. But this unresolved mourning is now being exploited by a predatory ecosystem of online conspiracists, who paint a picture of a nation in freefall.
They say this: England is not yours anymore. The things you cherish are gone. You have been betrayed by globalist elites, and humiliated by immigrants who profit from that betrayal; “two-tier” police stamp down on patriots, while minorities and woke mobs get away with open revolt; you can no longer fly the England flag without being called a Nazi; you are witnessing an invasion of millions of “fighting-age males’” on small boats, intent on preying on your women from the comfort of luxury hotels which you’ve paid for. Patriotism, pride, the fabric of your democracy and your justice system are falling apart like wet tissue.
There is something primal in the story, and appealing to a certain kind of man. Your house is falling down, with rising damp and peeling wallpaper. A stranger strolls in uninvited, raids the fridge, and curls up in bed with your daughter. You are the man of the house in name only.
The complicated truths of our uneven justice system; the real but not existential threat of small-boat migration; the truths of Islamist terrorism and urban ghettoisation; the decaying of proud places — it all concertinas into a single, compelling story.
And last July, in the days leading up to the Southport stabbings, a rapid succession of events seemed to show this story reaching its tragic climax. First came the Harehills riot on 18 July. The local Roma community took to the streets after social services tried to take a family’s children into care. A police car was overturned. The narrative spread that the police had retreated in an act of “two-tier” leniency. There were whispers that the rioters had actually been Pakistanis.
“Sandgrounders can feel their home gently rotting. The beach, the pier, the closed shops are daily reminders that Southport is there and not there at the same time.”
Five days later, on 23 July, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Teeton was allegedly stabbed by Anthony Esan, a black man. To some, this looked like the murder of Lee Rigby all over again.
That same day, a video was released showing a police officer stamping on a British Asian man at Manchester airport. Men chanting “Allahu Akbar” gathered outside Rochdale police station to protest against police brutality. The officer in question was pilloried in the media, only for more video to emerge which recast his actions as a response to a brutal attack on his colleagues. Cue accusations of “lying media”, “two-tier justice” and Islamic extremism.
On 27 July, thousands of Tommy Robinson supporters rallied at Trafalgar Square — the event was called “Unite the Kingdom”. The next day, Robinson was arrested using powers afforded under the Terrorism Act for failing to comply with a police search. His followers quickly connected his detainment with the rally the day before.
Less than 24 hours after Robinson’s arrest, Axel Rudakubana walked into the Southport dance workshop with a knife. To many people, this felt like an escalating pattern of rapid deterioration. England was losing her mind before their eyes.
The cacophony of conspiracy and half-truth was prelude to everything that followed. So it is unsurprising that some people felt they knew who to blame for the Southport attack almost instantly — they were working to a script.
I scoured X for audio recordings of discussions going on in the immediate aftermath of the attack. That evening, in an X Spaces chatroom titled “THE TIME IS NOW UK NATIONAL ACTION”, users were hardly able to contain themselves. “People keep saying oh wait till the name comes out, even by the one percent chance it’s not a Muslim or a black man,” one user mused. The emotion was raw: “I’d rather die on my feet than fucking live on my knees to these fucking ratbags,” another user said.
And then a name did come out — “Ali Al-Shakati”. He had apparently come to the UK by boat, was known to mental health services, and was on an intelligence watchlist. The name sounded Muslim. The name was a complete fabrication, but it didn’t matter. The misinformers and the misinformed were partners in one dance. “Shakati” made sense of their grief — he was the nemesis in England’s national tragedy.
Andrew Tate grasped the tenor of the moment. He posted a rant on X from his sports car: “The soul of the Western Man is so broken that when the invaders slaughter your daughters, you do absolutely fucking nothing.” The provocation was clear: “Prove me wrong.”
We began sifting through the online archive of those hours between the murders and the first brick being thrown, searching for the moment that Southport’s tragedy was destined to become a national catastrophe. The tipping point was streamed live to a huge audience by a YouTuber called DJE Media, who is notorious for videos where he flies his drone over private property and trolls anyone who tries to stop him. That day he was filming on Hart Street.
It was late afternoon in Southport, the day after the murders. News had just come through that a third child, Alice da Silva Aguiar, had died overnight in hospital. The crowd had been waiting for Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the baking sun and the tension was rising. DJE Media’s camera was trained on Starmer as he arrived to lay flowers. “Is it my children next?” an onlooker asked. The mood soured. Instead of turning to address the crowd, Starmer retreated to his black car without saying a word. “Make a real change, Prime Minister! You’re not wanted! Go away!” The camera pivoted to a woman in tears — “I’ve just found out that my friend’s nine-year-old daughter has died — the child I held in my arms, and you can’t do shit! He can’t do shit!” She was now wailing, bent over. “He’s meant to be the prime minister!”
The whole thing lasted about a minute. Unedited footage of a local community grieving their children was being fed to a national audience who thought their homeland was unravelling. The lines between local loss and collective loss were blurring into one. A critical mass of emotion had been reached, and there was no going back.
By 8pm, hundreds of people had gathered on St Luke’s Road outside Southport Mosque chanting “Who the f**k is Allah”, setting fire to a police carrier, and injuring more than 50 officers. Was the mosque targeted because the rioters made a cold causal calculation that the killer had been a worshipper there? Or did the killing of those girls and the presence of the mosque both remind the rioters that their homeland no longer resembled itself?
As the bricks flew, they chanted “We want our country back! We want our country back!”. Their words were a lament just as much as a threat.
It became clear that I would need to spend more time in Southport if we were going to make any headway finding people to go on camera. Driving up from London, I stopped overnight at my grandmother’s house in Ellesmere Port. The next morning, I reminded her I was heading up to Southport.
“Oh we’d go to the beach there. It has a wonderful pier,” she said.
I had explained my plans the night before, and twice already over breakfast. At the front door, she asked me again where I was going. “Southport, Nanna,” I said.
“Oh we’d go to the beach there. It has a wonderful pier.”
Driving away from her house, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was angry at my grandmother. I was struggling to accept who she had become because I couldn’t let go of who she had been.
In 1999, the psychologist Pauline Boss first wrote about something she called “ambiguous loss” — situations of unresolved mourning. Something terrible has happened but it is unfinished and indeterminate. It is “frozen grief”. It baffles and immobilises and gnaws at you. It gnaws at me when I speak to my grandmother, who is there in flesh and blood and at the same time no longer there at all.
Could the logic of frozen grief help me make sense of what had happened in Southport too? Nearly everyone we met, to some degree, shared a feeling that English people were becoming estranged from themselves and their homeland — their very identity was hollowing out. They felt cut loose from a proud history, and condemned to watch the ensuing decline.
“Could the logic of ‘frozen grief’ help me make sense of what had happened in Southport?”
Ambiguous loss can cause what some therapists call “complicated grieving”, distinguished by its intensity, duration, and its tendency to trigger severe dysfunction. It can provoke violence. You fixate, freeze, and spiral. And in the era of the echo chamber, it is easier than ever for ordinary people to become trapped in the grievance vortex. As the fires in Southport burned into the night, online spaces came alive with discussion of what was unfolding.
The disorder spread: Hartlepool, Aldershot, Whitehall, Sunderland, Nottingham, Hull, Liverpool, Tamworth. Over 10 days, nearly 30 towns and cities erupted. At Manvers, near Rotherham, rioters tried to burn down an asylum hotel with more than 200 residents still inside.
We spoke to one of them — a man who had fled Central Asia more than a decade ago and had been drifting through our immigration system ever since. His room was on the first floor of the Holiday Inn. “We smashed the hotel up,” he told us. “Some of us broke furniture, others grabbed fire extinguishers, or knives. We were ready to fight.”
Had police not managed to drive the rioters out of the ground floor lobby, the battle through those smoke-filled corridors would have been brutal and bloody.
Watching the footage of the riot, we found that this wasn’t just a mob of hardcore, masked-up thugs. While the most violent rioters were universally young men, the crowds of baying onlookers were more mixed: you could spot teenage girls, OAPs, and mums with their kids.
We wanted to understand what could make hundreds of ostensibly ordinary people cheer on such extreme violence. So we drove to Manvers to meet Katie Edwards, a writer who had grown up a stone’s throw from the estate.
Like Southport, Manvers is a place that has lost its way. “The centre of the universe, if you’re from here,” Katie said, pointing at a Costa Coffee near where the riot took place. The estate, she told us, was built on top of the old Manvers Main colliery, part of a trio of pits which together made up a vast mining complex. The pit was closed in 1988 and in its place came call centres. Then they closed. Now there’s an Amazon packing warehouse. “There’s a very strong sense of having been something and now there’s nothing,” Edwards told us. “There’s that sense of kind of being lost.”
Manvers was planned as an aspirational newbuild development, all trim gardens and picket fences. There was going to be a supermarket in the centre — an upmarket one: Sainsbury’s or Waitrose perhaps. It turned out to be an Aldi. Next to the Aldi was a hotel, which started life as a Radisson Blu. Then the Radisson became a Holiday Inn. Then, without announcement, the Holiday Inn stopped taking public bookings. To begin with it housed Afghan refugee families. But families are prioritised for re-housing so within a couple of years the hotel was home to men only. The residents were given about £8 a week and weren’t allowed to work. So they sat in their rooms, played cricket in the car park, and wandered around the lake. By the summer of 2024, then, Manvers was home to a glorified low-security concentration camp.
If you watch videos from the Manvers riot, you’ll hear shouts of “paedo” and “nonce”, reflecting the painful legacy of Rotherham’s grooming scandal. But the rioters also chanted “Yorkshire! Yorkshire! Yorkshire!” as they launched their assault on a building which in a very real sense signified the community’s fading away. It was a stupid, cruel and futile attempt to recapture their dream of a happier past.
Does Keir Starmer understand that this is a problem of the emotions, just as much as a problem of policy? Boss writes that “the greater the ambiguity surrounding one’s loss, the more difficult it is to master it”. What has the Prime Minister delivered but greater and greater ambiguity? In May, Starmer gave a major speech on immigration, presumably designed as an exercise in listening with a capital L. “Fair rules,” he said, “…give shape to our values.” Without them, he claimed, “we risk becoming an island of strangers”. Two months later, however, he doubled back and said he deeply regretted saying “island of strangers” at all.
The people I have met over the last nine months believe they are already living on that island of strangers: estranged from an older, better version of England. It does not matter that the country they mourn is half-remembered and half-imagined. What matters is that they feel the loss deeply.
“The people I have met over the last nine months believe they are already living on that island of strangers”
The past year has seen a steady drip of concessions to the rioters on immigration, delivered by Starmer with all the vigour of a hostage reading a list of ransom demands. Until last year, the centre-left had clung to the belief that, for all its faults and frictions, Britain was a non-violent, multicultural place. The rioters tore that utopia to shreds. And now liberals feel like their prime minister, maddeningly, is picking up where the rioters left off. Disenchanted and estranged, they mourn their fragile utopia and scream “Far-Right” just as their enemies scream “illegal immigration”.
Under Starmer, Britain is becoming a begrudgingly tolerant country. It will never satisfy the Right but it dismays the Left. And so this island of strangers gets stranger, as we sink deeper into collective bewilderment at who we have been, who we are, and who we may become.
There is, however, nothing ambiguous about the loss suffered by the victims of last year’s knife attack. One family agreed to give us an interview. Two of their daughters survived that day, though their eldest suffered serious internal bleeding from multiple wounds. She has to sit in a special chair at school because the normal ones hurt her scars.
Six months before meeting her, we stood outside Liverpool Crown Court listening to her victim impact statement on the trial’s livestream. She was the only child to address the court in person and did so against the advice of adults who were worried about her wellbeing. She overruled them, and addressed her words directly to her would-be killer: “I hope you spend the rest of your life knowing that we think you are a coward.”
On the day of her interview with us she had that same stubborn dignity, making us wait while she did her makeup and showed off her new nails: squared ends and black tips. She cried only once, quietly and briefly, when she said she wished she could have saved Alice’s life. She said she thinks about it every day. And then she stopped crying and raised her eyes back to the camera. A victim’s power often lies in refusing victimhood. That is her power.
We asked her mother if it mattered to her that the man who stabbed her daughter was the son of immigrants, or that he was not white. “I choose not to make that a reason,” she replied.
Driving away from their house, I wished the rioters had been there at those interviews and witnessed the raw power of responding to loss with grace.
Nine months spent examining last year’s riots has left me with a profound sense of unease. I met many people who were pessimistic about Britain’s future while grieving an irretrievable past. For this hungry audience, conspiracists will continue to spin wild tales from the real threads of our national decline.
While we work out how to arrest this decline — something that could take the political equivalent of geological time — we will have to come to terms with our unresolved grief. The idea of ambiguous loss can help us understand the chaotic, self-destructive, and compulsive behaviour exhibited by normal people last summer, and today. To recognise the riots as a phenomenon of frozen grief as much as politics is to recognise their staying power.
“If we ask the fundamental question, ‘Why did this happen?’ we must be prepared to look beyond the neat equations of cause and effect and learn to live with uncertainty,” Boss writes. “This is a frightening thought for many.” It frightens me. The programme I helped to make lays out the neat equations of cause and effect. But it does not get to the bottom of the unresolved mourning.
My grandmother will watch the documentary. After the end credits, she will turn to me and tell me that she used to visit Southport. That it has a wonderful pier. I cannot make her remember, any more than the rioters can make their England feel like it used to.
We have entered a period of complicated grieving, and we must brace ourselves for what that means.
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One Day in Southport was broadcast on Channel 4 on 24 July, and is available to watch online. James Parris is writing in a personal capacity, and not as a representative of Amos Pictures or Channel 4.
