Riot or Protest, the Hyde Park riot in Leeds, 1995

In the Hyde Park area of Leeds, there was a night of rioting on 10th July 1995 in response to police continued police harassment of locals, sparked by a raid on three houses in the area.

PDF reproduced from http://maxfarrar.org.uk/max-blog/writing/on-youth-in-the-multi-cultural-inner-city-in-the-1990s/ which contains this note on the article, originally written for the New Statesman.

‘Riot or Protest?’ – takes my analysis of young people in the multi-cultural inner city in a slightly different direction. It is set in the neighbourhood of Leeds called Hyde Park in 1995. The argument comes out of the experiences I had in the so-called riots in Chapeltown in 1975 and 1981, which I’ve written about in a more academic style. I’ve attempted to shift the discourse from ‘riot’ to ‘violent urban protest’. The most important parts of this article are the record of what these young men said to me.