He sings the songs that remind him of the good times

[venta]

Well, Ealing has got itself tidied up smartish. Positive armies of bright orange people are out there sweeping up broken glass, and glaziers hard at work already. I trotted out to see if #riotcleanup wanted any help, but there seemed to be a lot of nicely-spoken people milling about with brooms, and not actually all that much work left to do. Rumour had it that West Ealing was still in a mess, so I headed towards it chatting to an older gentleman called Irving. On the way, I bumped into a friend who'd come from West Ealing and said that actually, it was all pretty much under control now. Most of the shopkeepers had started their own cleanup, and there was already a minor army of brooms heading that way. So I stopped skiving off work after all.

The Broadway doesn't seem to be in too bad a state at all given some of last night's YouTube footage. I can't work out which bits of it were on fire, nothing looked particularly burned. Most of the roads are open again. The area towards Ealing Green is still cordoned off, and seems to be the worst hit with tales of burned out buildings and cars, but I didn't think the efforts of the police and council would be improved by another gawker so stayed away.

Visage, the hairdresser I pictured earlier, now has all the broken glass knocked out of its frames, and is trading as usual with its frontage open to the street. The daytime cafés are all also churning out teas and breakfasts. Pizza on the Green is dusting itself off and getting ready for tonight. A vicar of unknown denomination seemed to be popping in and out asking if the shopkeepers were ok and needed any help. Tesco is closed, but to be honest it doesn't look very looted - it's a tiny Tesco Metro that sells nothing other than food, and it certainly seems to have a large, intact-looking display of wine right by the door.

There are a lot or reporters and photographers around. Possibly "riot in genteel, leafy Ealing" is a better headline than "Brixton at it again". It certainly doesn't seem the worst-hit area, and the council and the businesses affected all seem to have the resources to get it straightened out again extremely quickly. I'm not trying to belittle the people who had a terrible time last night, but I think my summary is "could have been a lot worse".

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[venta.livejournal.com]

When I went by at 8am this morning, it had all its windows broken and all its furniture made into a barricade (on the inside). So it's not unharmed, but it fared better than its neighbouring Thai - there's footage of people kicking the Thai's windows in and emerging with bottles of wine (we do like our rioting civilised in Ealing).

Later in the morning, staff were untangling the furnture and knocking the broken glass out of the frames ready for glaziers to come in. I haven't been down there this evening, so I don't quite know what state everything's in.