Hello all. I was wondering if anyone out there could explain how the recent riots in London started? I've been reading the coverage, but it's not explained how it happened?

Who's to say? The time was obviously ripe. The police shot dead a black youth who, at that particular moment, might not have been an immediate threat. A large part was, I suspect, "Let's see if we can get something going by messaging on our Blackberries. Blimey! Yes we can!"

I was working in London's West End that afternoon. I drove down Mare St, Hackney - one of the focal points - a few hours before it all happened. I spent the evening in Highbury, a couple of miles from the Tottenham epicentre. I saw and heard nothing of it, except on the media.

The courts have been handing out exemplary prison sentences. Higher courts will be very busy for the next few weeks reducing them on appeal - you can't get more for breaking a window this week than you would have for murder the previous one, even if a lot of other people WERE breaking them alongside you. We panic in response to public feeling. But we generally quietly put things right afterwards :-)

Interesting. So, the media hyped up the events to where it seemed a lot worse than it was?

A woman of my acquaintance had her house burned to the ground. She was left with literally nothing but the clothes she stood up in. So, for at least some people, no media hype was necessary.

So very unfortunate. So, maybe the media coverage wasn't as hyped up as other's were saying?

My impression is that the worst violence was confined to a number of relatively small areas, and in those areas it was very bad indeed. I imagine that that news reports focused on the worst areas. I guess it's like reporting on a forest fire -- you send the news crew to where the fire is, and assume that people will realize that the rest of the country is not on fire.

I can imagine that people who aren't familiar with the huge scale of London might have been misled by the news reports into thinking the problems were more widespread than they were. But I don't think the news reports overstated the severity of the situation in the affected regions.