Oldham Riots: Looking back twenty years ago

It is 20 years since violence erupted on the streets of Oldham.

Tensions flared between gangs of young Asian and white men, and then the police over several nights in May 2001.

It has since been called the worst race riots in the UK for 16 years.

The clashes reportedly started after an argument between a white family and a group of Asian teenagers.

At one point a firebomb was thrown through the window of the ironically titled 'Live and Let Live' pub.

A total of 82 officers and 22 passers-by were injured, and hundreds of arrests were made as police were pelted with missiles and petrol bombs.

Appeals from community leaders seemed to fall on deaf ears and even when the trouble subsided similar outbreaks of violence were seen in neighbouring northern towns like Burnley, Bradford and Leeds in the following months.

In the aftermath of the riots the Government appointed Professor Ted Cantle to report on the causes.

He found that in Oldham and other northern towns white and Asian communities had developed and were living 'parallel lives', the situation was fuelled by the poverty left after the collapse of traditional manufacturing in these mill towns.

He called for efforts to end that parallel living, with an urgent task being to get children from both communities to work together.

An Interfaith Forum has been established in the town since the riots, and work has been carried out to create a cultural quarter.

It has been acknowledged that there have been valiant attempts to rectify the problems that led to the riots.

But in 2017 Professor Cantle himself said the efforts at integration had been, “lukewarm at best and probably non-existent at worst”.