Laurent John:
This episode includes references to rioting, fire, and racism. We include a full list of places which offer support in the show notes.

Imran Perretta:
Reeves Corner was not part of the plan.

Speaker 3:
Wasn't that like a sofa... No, it was a sofa building.

Speaker 4:
[Inaudible 00:00:25].

Speaker 3:
Yeah, it was a furniture store, yeah.

Speaker 4:
Oh, geez [inaudible 00:00:27].

Imran Perretta:
But one guy basically set fire to a mattress and then the whole place went up in smoke.

Speaker 3:
It was a furniture store and that's the other one across the street. I was seeing it from my house. I decided to come out and find out, man. I live all the way back there.

Imran Perretta:
By the time the 10:00 news came on, Reeves Corner was completely subsumed by fire.

Speaker 5:
The window was broken [inaudible 00:00:50], I parked the car, came back and there was two people who had come out of the shop and two minutes later it was ablaze. They'd just gone in and torched it.

Natalie Mitchell:
The first time that Reeves Corner, I saw it on fire, I was getting ready to go out on a night out and my friends were turned on the TV and looked like hell. I think I just started crying. I was like, "How is everyone that I know there?" I have friends there, family there, my grandmother was there. Even now I'm kind of getting shivers just thinking about it.

Imran Perretta:
Really, this stuff is existential. It's about the way that one engages with and navigates the world around them. How much material devastation, how much destruction is justified? How angry do I have a right to be? How much should I demand and from whom?

Speaker 7:
[inaudible 00:01:49]. This is the court of unemployment.

Laurent John:
Imran Perretta, one of the studio's artists here at Somerset House was in his early twenties when the riots began in 2011. Now 13 years on, he's been developing a work which looks back at that time after finding his old Blackberry handset.

Imran Perretta:
When I switched it on, I was flooded with a lot of stuff and in amongst all of that was a video of the night that Reeves Corner was burnt down.

Laurent John:
What started in London quickly spread across the country, but it was the footage of a furniture shop set on fire in Croydon, which stayed with him.

Imran Perretta:
What it brought up in me was a very visceral sense of injustice. It got me thinking about how little seems to have changed.

Laurent John:
For this work, Imran is creating a replica of Reeves Corner in the gallery space, accompanied by a score he has written for string quartet. A requiem, which charts the journey of the riots of 2011 and their aftermath.

Imran Perretta:
It's my film about the riots, but without a moving image.

Laurent John:
In this episode, Imran revisits Reeves Corner to reflect on its history, the nature of riots, and the ways sound can tell this story in new ways. Welcome back to The Process. I'm Laurent John.

Imran Perretta:
My name's Imran Perretta and I'm an artist, filmmaker, and composer. We are standing on Reeves Corner and just in front of us is where the House of Reeves used to stand, and it's now a patch of gravel with some concrete planters and some battered old trees and a white picket fence sort of encircling it. It sort of looked like this since 2011.
I think my work deals with a lot of things. It deals with ideas around coloniality, identity formation, but I think on a general level, my interest is power and the way that power articulates itself. In my mind, it's one of the most contested patches of Earth in London. It feels nostalgic in a way to be here, because I have so many memories of Croydon as a kid, but true to Reeves Corner, the emotions that I have standing here are very complex.
I also remember what used to be here, and I also remember those feelings of anger and disaffection really that live within me and a lot of people of my age because ultimately the condition we find ourselves in as a community are just as bad, if not actually significantly worse, than they were in 2011. That feels like a really scary thing to say out loud. Being here feels... It's a lot. It's a lot. You know? That's why I wanted to make this work because I think for me there was so much to reckon with. There is still so much to reckon with. In this podcast, I'm interested to find out more about how riots function, why they happen when they do. But I guess the big question really is what is the legacy of the civil unrest in the summer of 2011?

Professor Tim Newburn:
The underlying question of real interest is not why these things happen, but why they don't. They focus our attention on something really important and that oddly enough is order, and riots momentarily, as it were, disturb that everyday order. I'm Professor Tim Newburn. I'm professor of Criminology and Social policy at the LSE.

Imran Perretta:
To understand what happened that night in Croydon, I wanted to understand where the 2011 riots sat within the broader history of civil unrest in Britain.

Professor Tim Newburn:
The 2011 riots were the biggest outbreak of civil violence in the UK in the post-second World War period. We had major riots in the 1980s starting with St. Paul's in Bristol in 1980 itself and then famously in Brixton in April 1981. But 2011 was bigger I think. In 2011, David Cameron said of the riots and the rioters, "This is criminality pure and simple," and that couldn't be a more wrong-headed statement. It's not that there weren't many things going on that were criminal, but what it misses is all the other stuff that's going on.

Imran Perretta:
Tim led the Reading the Riots research in partnership with the Guardian in 2011. They talked to people all over the country who'd taken part to try and understand why they got involved in it all.

Professor Tim Newburn:
We interviewed in Reading the Riots 270 people. The first and most powerful thing that comes out from the testimony of those involved is the sense of carnival, of sheer excitement of joy, almost, of having fun. On one level, people find that incredibly shocking for reasons I think are understandable, because there's violence involved. But what actually is happening there is the rules are temporally suspended, and particularly for people whose lives are incredibly constrained, there's a moment when suddenly they feel in charge. Suddenly they're free and they can engage in a variety of things which would otherwise be entirely impossible and it's an often avoided subject.

Imran Perretta:
I think one of the things that felt so shocking about seeing Reeves Corner up in flames is that it didn't seem to make sense. It wasn't a shop owned by a big corporation or a conglomerate. It was a family-owned business.

Speaker 9:
My store has been burnt to the ground. It's been there since 1867, survived two wars, the Depression, yet the community seems to have burnt it down. Well, I'm 80 years old. It was my wedding anniversary yesterday and I came back and I saw it on television. I mean, I don't know how I'm here today, but I am.

Professor Tim Newburn:
The irony of riots is that people destroy their own communities, which is a desperate thing, given that they're already saying that they have very little. What that points to I think is the ways in which emotion drives a lot of what people do. They're not necessarily thinking through all their acts, and as a consequence, many things which in the cold life of today people may regret actually occur.

Imran Perretta:
I think the story of Reeves Corner doesn't quite fit the story of a community in its righteous anger punching upwards at the authorities. It is extremely hard to justify the torching of a local family business, but what I would say is that what's happened, or rather the lack of recompense since absolutely fits the narrative and I want to know why nothing has been done with it.

Natalie Mitchell:
The confusion with that site is I think people think it's publicly owned land, like it doesn't belong to Croydon Council. It's owned half by the Whitgift Foundation, who own a lot of land in Croydon. They're like a really super old trust and half owned by the House of Reeves, the family and the foundation of that. Why nothing's ever been done, I think there were attempts for people to buy the land and it fell through. I've always been a bit bemused why it's been left empty, but I think leaving something empty shows a lack of care. I'm Natalie Mitchell. I'm an artist and a community creative organiser. I was born and raised in Croydon and I found myself as I've gotten older, moving back towards it.

Imran Perretta:
I first met Natalie through her work with Turf Projects, which is this amazing artist run space in the old shopping centre in Croydon called the Whitgift Centre. She was involved in a load of community projects around disused public and private space around Croydon. One of the projects was based on Reeves Corner.

Natalie Mitchell:
Croydon has, if I'm honest, fallen into a bit of disrepair. There's a lot of empty spaces, which I think is why the project was so important and there's almost a lot of ghosts and echoes. I think that's why that site feels quite intense for people because it's just this echo of the pain that was on that site and then not much else.
Whenever I'd go down there, immediately someone would come up to you and start talking about what happened there that night unprompted. But I think it was a general thing of some people being really excited that we were doing something on that site and though the project was a temporary thing, there was a lot of hope that it would be turned into an ongoing thing. I think people just were excited that there was a sense of hope that people were trying to actually rebuild a bit of Croydon and rebuild a sense of community within Croydon.

Professor Tim Newburn:
You know, oftentimes I think these things become lost. They're not lost in the locality itself. I think if one goes to Toxteth, or to Moss Side, or to Brixton or elsewhere, there will be strong memories of riots, even those that took place decades ago. Indeed, people in 2011 in our research told us that their parents, for example, had talked to them about their involvement in earlier civil disorder, in some cases saying, look, "You mustn't miss this opportunity. This is really exciting. You need to get out there," sort of thing. More broadly, there's often a desire, I think, to move on. If government in particular decides that it wants to turn its face away from these things, it's actually quite difficult to maintain an interest, I think.

Imran Perretta:
That was one of the unique things about 2011, unlike the Brixton riots where there was a public inquiry, the Tories chose not to do one. What's so inspiring about the work Turf and other organisations are doing in Croydon, is that it shows that even if there is apathy at the government level, at the grassroots level, those small changes add up to something quite profound.

Natalie Mitchell:
The opposite of loving something for me isn't hate, it's complacency. One thing that art does do is highlight why those spaces are important. You take notice of it a bit more. The fact that that site, before we started doing projects on there, people probably just walked past and forgot that it was there, but as soon as we were making art on there, people, whether they were agreeing with what we were doing or not, they took notice of it. It might ignite a little spark in them to be like, "Why has it been left? Who do I question about why it's been left?" I think that is actually what art wants, or at least what I want from art, which is a conversation. I don't need you to agree with why this art project is happening, but I want you to feel something.

Professor Tim Newburn:
My sense is that people's understanding of 2011 is still quite fragile, quite thin. Then it's no one has tried to write the story. In discussions of these things, academics in particular are very wary of emotion and that's where other artistic forms really come into their own.

Imran Perretta:
My background is as a filmmaker and my instinct is very often to make films about the objects of my research, but when I watched back the fire, it felt somehow re traumatising in some sort of way, perverse. I don't know. It felt like the way that I should articulate my research around this work was to begin to think about how I could do it without a moving image. I started to think about if we were to build a replica of it in the way that production designers do and for film sets, we might actually be able to open out Reeves Corner to the public.
I started to think a lot about that and I wrote a requiem for a string quartet called A Requiem for the Dispossessed, and it was originally conceptualised as like a soundtrack. We have the stage and we have the soundtrack. The music you'll hear when you enter the space is the requiem. It's my film about the riots, my film about Croydon, but without a moving image. I went up to Manchester to record it with four members of the Manchester Camerata led by Will Newell who arranged the music with me.

Will Newell:
Guys, stop. Well, should I give you a que at D? [inaudible 00:17:12]. I will try and remember to do that.

Imran Perretta:
Just a little bit. Obviously you need the runway to go up, but I think maybe just like a little bit more.

Will Newell:
Sure.

Imran Perretta:
Yeah. The requiem is something that has its roots in the Catholic church and the structure of it relates to, I guess, the passage from the mortal coil into heaven. For me, there was a sort of interesting parallel with the sort of narrative structure of the way that the riots themselves played out. A good example I guess is Dies Irae, which means the day of wrath. If you think about the riots as a sort of wrathful moment or the lighting of the mattress as a wrathful moment, there's this kind of interesting relationship between these movements within the context of a requiem and the unrest that happened that night.

Rob Szeliga:
We don't really understand our auditory experience, and so as a result, perhaps what we hear affects us more than what we see, but we just don't know it. My name is Rob Szeliga. I'm a sound designer. I work on film, I work with artists and also with musicians.

Imran Perretta:
I've always been interested in thinking about music and its relationship to the moving image, how it can give it momentum and direction and emotion. I was keen to learn more about how music works in this cinematic context.

Rob Szeliga:
When I consider the soundtrack and consider my job as a sound designer, I think of the functional aspects of the storytelling, a city, a culture, a time. I think with music, score is really driving emotion and mood. It's something that can tap into the viewer in a way that sound design can't as efficiently. Music can arouse emotions very quickly.
We are aware of things that feel joyful or dark or unsettling and can function quite easily and quite quickly as underscore just to help a mood, to help a character, to help a particular moment in a story we might use, say, rhythmic music, to give us a sense of action, a sense of drama, a sense of forward momentum. Equally, I think the size of the score can also, I think, give us a sense of scale. Large ensembles of sound can create the impression of something very large, if you like God's eye view. For example, a panoramic sweeping landscape, sense of God's creation, sense of the cosmos.

Imran Perretta:
I was drawn to the requiem because of this idea of narrative art, but also this idea of ritual and this idea of things unfolding in a ritualistic way, which I think is somehow, even though riots feel kind of alesque, there is a ritual there. There is a kind of a movement, a trajectory. I was interested to ask Rob how else the requiem has been used and what associations it had in relation to film and cinema.

Rob Szeliga:
I often think of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey. The sequence where you have the apes and the arrival of the black monolith. It feels to me not only uncomfortable, but it feels like there's a large crescendo. We're going somewhere, something's going to happen. The story here is life, space, the meaning of life, big, big stuff. The composer, Ligeti, who created this piece was exploring the form.
Now the question of how it makes us feel is an interesting one. How much is too much and how much can be suggested, and overuse of these types of approaches to music, seeking that emotional response through the music can create challenges, for fear that our audience is checking out. Our audience is no longer engaged in the work. With Imran's work, the first and main risk for me that comes to mind is pushing out rather than inviting in a spectator. What will be interesting is how the emotion of the requiem, how that lands with a spectator.

Imran Perretta:
Well, I think one of the interesting things about writing for a quartet as opposed to a full orchestra or a bigger ensemble is that the music can both feel big and also can feel like you receive it much more intimately. I don't see risk because I think ultimately what this work is about is not to have a didactic or knowable destination. It's about encouraging thought and reflection and meditation. That's the difference between the objectives of traditional narrative cinema and what's happening in this exhibition space. When I first started thinking about this idea, it felt really clear to me that the conditions and the atmosphere that created the unrest that we saw in 2011 still existed now, but what I didn't see coming was what happened this summer.

Speaker 12:
A wave of unrest started after an attack at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport.

Speaker 13:
[Inaudible 00:26:59].

Speaker 12:
But fueled by racist misinformation.

Imran Perretta:
The fact that the riots were underpinned by this white supremacist ideology.

Speaker 13:
Stop that boat. Stop that boat. Stop that boat.

Imran Perretta:
I wanted to ask Tim about whether he saw it coming.

Professor Tim Newburn:
I personally couldn't have predicted the 2024 riots, and I think anyone who claims they could is they're better than I am. Riots are very unpredictable by their nature. One of the really interesting things, thinking about a contrast between the events that we witnessed in 2024 and those in 2011, is how dissimilar the riots are. The 2024 riots lasted much longer. The 2011 ones were much larger, they involved much more damage. The 2024 riots were in very different places. They tended to be in small towns rather than our main metropolitan areas. Then the focus is different. The focus in 2024 appears to have been targeted at ethnic minorities and immigrants, whereas in 2011, what you've got mainly is ethnically diverse group of people on the streets whose focus is very much the authorities.

Imran Perretta:
I'm still left wondering what the legacy of 2011 is. To me it at the time it felt huge and somehow it doesn't seem to have happened at all.

Natalie Mitchell:
Is there a legacy? I think sometimes these things kind of get swept underneath the carpet a little bit. I don't feel like the legacy of these things are always taken as seriously as they need to be. I think the fact that Imran is making a requiem is quite fitting because to say it's a death of a moment, I feel like I have a big belief that moments live in bricks and mortar, that they live in the bones of a building or in the barrel of where the building used to be or the pebbles or the dirt. I think maybe there does need to be a mourning on that site so that we can move forward.

Professor Tim Newburn:
I think it's very hard to identify a legacy of the 2011 riots. The sad truth of the matter is that something like Reeves Corner might be a symbolic testament to the absence of legacy. That the legacy sadly is destruction, is an absence, is a vacuum.

Natalie Mitchell:
I don't always believe that the death of something is the end of something. I think it's just a moment to pause, kind of reframe what's happened in the past and think about what could potentially come out of that situation.

Imran Perretta:
My reflections at the end of this process feel just as unresolved and complex as they did at the start, especially since everything that's kicked off this summer. But having said that, what I've seen over the last year in terms of public protest around other causes such as freedom for Palestine, solidarity can achieve so much. And you see it through people's artistic practises, making music, making film. There are so many gestures towards change that feels like something we can build on.

Natalie Mitchell:
The people that really hit hardest is still in their memory projects that I've worked on really trying to hold people accountable and almost like going like, "No, we haven't forgotten. You might have tried to forget. We know you haven't. What are you going to do about it? We're not going to stop reminding you."

Laurent John:
Thanks to Imran Perretta, professor Tim Newburn, Natalie Mitchell and Rob Szeliga. Imran's piece, A Riot in Three Acts is running at Somerset House until the 10th of November. The Process is produced by Alannah Chance and presented by me, Laurent John, for Somerset House. The exec producer is Eleanor Scott. The theme music is by Ka Baird with additional music by Harry Murdoch. And the series is mixed by Mike Wooley.
For further support on any of the subjects dealt with during this podcast, head to the show notes for a list of resources. Somerset House is a really special place to work and we've just recently experienced a fire in the building, which luckily had very minimal damage. We've been overwhelmed by the love and the wonderful messages that you've all shared with us. Thank you so much for that and see you next time.