Our daughter was born during the night of the first major urban riot in mainland Britain in the 20th century. It was the following morning before we realised that part of the city we had recently made our home had erupted in civil unrest.

The disturbances, which took place in the St Paul's area of Bristol on the night of 3 April 1980, did more than shock the city. The television and newspaper coverage ensured that the riot had a national impact. Films showing large numbers of citizens confronting the police in mass resistance, the sight of angry people burning down their own neighbourhood, the images of conflict and crowd violence on the streets, delivered jarring messages to Prime Minister Thatcher’s government, a government that was seen to be increasingly out of touch with the communities it was there to serve.

The civil agitations in Bristol were followed a year later by an English ‘summer of discontent’. Urban unrest broke out in a number of inner city areas – including Brixton, Southall, Toxteth, and Moss Side. Lord Scarman was invited by the government to carry out an inquiry into the causes of the riots in Brixton, and his forensic analysis suggested that a cocktail of factors – including insensitive approaches to policing, racial discrimination and social deprivation – had led to a widespread sense of hopelessness.

Sad to say, there have been subsequent episodes of urban disorder in Britain. For example, in 2001 there were major disturbances in several northern English cities – including Bradford and Oldham. As in 1980 and 1981 the areas experiencing unrest were neighbourhoods with sizable ethnic minority populations.

In 2011 my home city of Bristol provided, once again, the prelude to a swathe of urban unrest in cities across England. On 21 April 2011 a campaign against the opening of a Tesco supermarket in Stokes Croft, not far from the location of the 1980 disturbances in St Paul’s, turned into a violent street riot when the police sent in 160 officers, in riot gear, to close down a squat in a building close to the Tesco store. Here, unlike the riots of the 1980s, a multi-national corporation was the target of public anger.