Bristol Tesco protest explodes into riot

Submitted by AWL on 22 April, 2011 - 4:40
Tesco

Stokes Croft, Bristol, is home to numerous clubs, bars and cafes as well as a number of independent and cooperative businesses including Co-exist, who are hosting this year's Bristol Anarchist Bookfair.

In recent years anarchist groups have squatted several derelict premises on Stokes Croft setting up a Free Shop, bookshop, art gallery, and non-commercial club/gig space. The trouble started at Telepathic Heights, a long-running residential squat that is opposite a new Tesco Express. Over the last year there has been a strong community campaign against the store opening which has lobbied councillors and made objections to the planning process. A group of squatters had taken over the site last year for several weeks and used it as a home and community centre. When this was evicted last summer there was a demo of four hundred outside and minor skirmishes with the seventy police and bailiffs.

Since its opening in mid April a peaceful picket has called for an apparently successful campaign to boycott the store. The protesters were moved on Thursday afternoon 21 April with threats to arrest them for obstructing the highway and their banners and placards confiscated. In the early evening the police closed the road to attempt eviction of Telepathic Heights.

Whether this was in response to a request from the owners who had recently been granted a warrant of possession or because of complaint from Tesco is unclear.

Initially there were approx forty police and several dozen squatters and their supporters. The police lines pushed everyone fifty meters down the road where a stand off developed. Several bins were thrown across the road to stop further police advance and missiles thrown at their lines. At about half nine the police baton charged and injured several demonstrators with strikes to the head.

The crowd refused to disperse and quickly began to swell as people called friends and people drinking in nearby bars came out and joined the crowd. Running battles developed through the back streets of neighbouring St Pauls. The police repeatedly charged but were outflanked by the crowd who began putting up barricades of bins and wire fence from building sites. Several fires were lit in the streets and the police were pelted with bottles and rubble and at times engaged in hand to hand fighting.

By midnight when I arrived there were crowds totalling about four hundred fighting with the police at two or three different locations and several hundred more people on the streets in Stokes Croft. Increasingly the predominantly white squatters and their supporters were joined by young Afro-Caribbeans from the neighbouring streets.

At about one in the morning most of the demonstrators were again on Stokes Croft and for a short period contained by police lines on three sides. The police did not have control of their rear and were at times visibly shaken. Their must have been over a hundred riot police, many of them black clad TSG, many evidently drafted in from Wales and some local police.

The police attempted to retreat up the road with most of their cars and vans but soon realised they had left a lot of their colleagues surrounded and unable to move. They returned and moved on mass up Stokes Croft driving the crowd in front of them past Telepathic Heights and Tesco to the next traffic lights. Both sides stopped here and after a few minutes the police were ordered to quickly get in their vans and drove off at speed under a hail of bricks and bottles leaving about two hundred protesters without a policeman in sight.

The crowd was buoyed by this apparent victory and within seconds you could hear a call all around 'let's do Tesco!'. The crowd ran down the hill and set about the shop front with metal bars, rock, and even a bicycle. An impressively calm Tesco employee watched through the window for a few seconds and then dropped the metal shutters. The next target was a police Landrover which had been left outside. The police returned, the crowd retreated down Stokes Croft again. There were still hundreds of people in the streets when I left at half three.

So, why did it happen? Bristol has a long-standing squatting movement that has built up a practice of mass resistance to evictions. At a time of mass unemployment and cuts to the housing benefit system evictions are particularly resented. There is considerable anger towards Tesco and disillusionment with the council over their failure to act on the communities objections to the store opening.

Police seem to be claiming that the raid on Telepathic Heights was because of intelligence that there were petrol bombs on the premises that were to be used to attack Tesco. This seems unlikely but if true could be a consequence of the police suppression of peaceful protest. But this soon became a general anti-police riot. The aggressive policing simply made people angry and increased the numbers of people who came to support their friends and neighbours.

Certainly the Afro-Caribbean youngsters have had little contact with the anarchist and squatter community so they were getting involved for their own reasons including mass unemployment and police harassment. Nine arrests, minor injuries to eight police officers, a couple of dozen serious baton injuries.

Looking around the area this morning the only property damage seems to be Tesco, police vehicles and rubbish bins so hopefully the police won't be able to portray it as random violence. And the squatters have re-taken Telepathic Heights! With other squatted premises in the same area due for eviction over the next month there is potential for more of the same.

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