Barbed wire and looking over your shoulder: Middlesbrough residents fearful after riots
Parliament Road in Middlesbrough feels a world away from the establishment it shares a name with, but for one Sunday in August, the terraced streets of central Middlesbrough were at the centre of national attention.
That afternoon, what was advertised as a peaceful protest, turned into a riot, with hundreds of people, many of them wearing masks, targeting livelihoods and businesses in one of the city’s most diverse areas.
They lit fires, smashed windows and clashed with the police.
Hundreds of arrests have been made and dozens of those people sentenced, but months on, the impact of that day can still be felt.
Not just in the cracked windows and debris still on the street, but in the deeper fabric of a community who are concerned about not just those events, but bigger issues they feel have blighted the area for far longer.
One of those people is Pervaz Akhtar, who has lived in Middlesbrough for more than three decades and runs a phone shop on Parliament Road.
After having his stock burgled on more than half a dozen occasions in two years, he decided to take matters into his own hands.
Every evening he spends more than half an hour unrolling a ring of razor wire, to cover both the shop floor and the counters.
“I’ve got the police alarm, I’ve got the CCTV cameras, I’ve got the shutters, everything.”
“But I think this is the best thing to do,” he says, gesturing to the razor wire, which he has to fold into wooden crates every morning while wearing protective gloves.
That process, which has become a daily routine, takes him around 40 minutes.
‘I’m depressed’
Even with a deterrent in place however, he still feels unsafe and is now considering leaving the business altogether.
“I just put the shop up for sale now,” he says.
“I think, before I’m not giving up, but (now) I’m depressed, because all the time I never know when somebody will come and show me a knife and take the phones away.”
Mr Akhtar’s discontent only deepened this summer when his home and car were damaged by rioters.
In footage he shared with Sky News, a group of young men climbed on top of the vehicle, smashing the windscreen.
The shop owner says his whole family were impacted by what happened.
His wife, who is a carer, needed to find another vehicle to get to work, while one of his two young sons has been left fearful about the prospect of more disorder.
“About one week later, he saw about 10, 12 people playing in the park, he ran back and said, ‘Dad, they’re coming again’,” recalls Mr Akhtar.
Another person living in the area and impacted by the disorder that day is John, who moved to Middlesbrough from Ghana and shares a house with three others from the West African country.
More than two months on, the front window of the property was still boarded up.
“I was quite surprised to see that there could be damage, because I was expecting a peaceful demonstration,” he says before sighing and looking at the front of the house.
“Whilst that is not in the original state, for sure that will frustrate me, but I have hope in the police department that once they said it is going to be fixed, it will be fixed,” he adds.
Once the damage is repaired, there are deeper community issues that will linger.
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Streets Ahead For Information are a charity who describe themselves as a “one stop shop” for people who live in the area, offering vital services for residents in one of Middlesbrough’s most diverse communities.
Twice a week, they organise a low-cost food shop, which is always in high demand.
Residents line up outside, before filling their baskets with items like eggs, fruit and vegetables, largely costing under £1 each.
The people the charity support are from a range of backgrounds. Some are asylum seekers, others have lived in the area for years.
Many of them still have concerns about the disorder that spilled onto Parliament Road.
One woman from Romania, called Diana, says she was away on holiday at the time, but watched the scenes on TikTok.
Now she has concerns about the place she and her children call home. “I look all the time on my back,” she says.
For Streets Ahead and the operations manager Kim May, the work in the coming weeks and months will be twofold.
The charity is still advising people who had their homes and livelihoods impacted by the riots, but she is hoping the uncomfortable spotlight placed on Middlesbrough will encourage more people to support a voluntary sector working to solve people’s day to day problems, many of which she sees first hand.
“It’s the community issues that are more important. We can fix windows, we can fix cars, we can do that. But fixing people’s state of mind is a completely different thing,” she says.
“We have a lot of mental health issues in our area. We need to get the hospital sorted out. We need to take care of poverty in these areas, we need to take care of health in these areas.
“It’s a much wider range of things than people actually imagined it could ever be. And for some people, it’s about having somebody to see them, to listen to them.”