Kim Aldis - The Brixton Riots of 1981 in Pictures

 The Brixton Riots of 1981 in Pictures

Words by Kim Aldis:

In 1981 I was living in Balham, not so very far from Brixton in South London. On the 11th of April that year I was in Brixton’s Coldharbour Lane shopping, probably for something mundane. I stepped out of a shop and just up the road a car burst into flames. This was the start of the 1981 Brixton Riots, some of the worst rioting the British mainland had seen in many years. According to Wikipedia 145 buildings were burnt or damaged, 56 police vehicles were destroyed, 299 police officers injured. The Atlantic pub on the corner of Atlantic Road and Coldharbour Lane, two stories high, was completely gutted. Nobody had ever seen anything like this before.

Early in the rioting the police were the target of the violence. A youth had just died in police custody, there was a background of racial intolerance and the police had been making enthusiastic use of the Sus – suspected person – laws to stop and search young black kids in Brixton and there were accusations, well founded, of institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police.

I recall seeing members of the public still shopping in Coldharbour lane while just around the corner rocks, bricks and Molotov cocktails were being thrown at police. In one instance I watched as an onslaught of bricks and rocks on a police line stopped as a man pushed through the line and walked to his house a hundred yards or so up the road, resuming as he entered his house. Later in the day, as rioters grew in numbers, they turned to looting anything in sight and things became very dangerous indeed.

The police were completely unprepared, initially with no riot equipment at hand and little organisation. Early on during the riots many of them many of them had no riot shields and took dustbin lids for protection.

At the time communication was not what it is today, it was several hours before the media arrived and I was on the scene well before any press or TV arrived, something I believe makes some of these pictures unique. Other than my own website and a couple of the photographs used on the Wikipedia article on the riots, they’re largely unpublished. In the weeks and months that followed, Britain erupted and rioting spread all over the country; Bristol, Toxteth, Southampton, Coventry and many other cities but Brixton, I think, was the worst and the riots that everybody remembers.

I’ve always regretted that I didn’t make more of an effort at the time to have these pictures published but I was fresh out of college and lacked both the contacts and an In the weeks and months that followed, Britain erupted and rioting spread all over the country; Bristol, Toxteth, Southampton, Coventry and many other cities but Brixton, I think, was the worst and the riots that everybody remembers. Truth be told I was also maybe a bit lazy, more interested in documenting events than I was in getting by-lines. Also, in hindsight, I feel I’d made a better job of documenting events than I thought I had at the time.

It was an absolute pleasure sharing work with such historical value. I am surprised that as Kim said, this work has not yet been published, so it is simply delightful to be able to share it all these years later. This is why I started the Collective; to share work, images and artists who have captured stories that are untold and have the power to change the world. I must also stress that I cannot continue the Collective without your help, so all I ask is that you share our content, interviews and features! It goes such a long way!