Are London's teens out of control?

It was early evening by the time the kids set off the fireworks. Still light at 7pm, the rockets burst through the din of the police sirens and the dozens of screaming children amassed on Clapham Common. At the same time, shaky footage shows officers elsewhere in the park scrambling to extinguish a fire lit at the base of a tree, while those on the high street attended to shoppers barricaded inside stores as hundreds of children thronged the streets. "They were just harassing people," a local hairdresser named Hannah later told ITV news, "an older lady got tramped over because there were so many of them".

This was the scene broadcast from south west London last Tuesday, as much of the UK’s media turned its attention to the chaotic outbreak. On the Saturday before, around 100 people responded to a Snapchat flyer advertising a meet-up named “Clapham Courts” — nitrous balloons and weed encouraged — at the basketball courts on the common. Kids who saw the enviable fervour of Saturday’s link-up on TikTok swiftly organised a follow-up for Tuesday.

By the end of that second day, after the fireworks had been let off and the blaze put out, four police officers had been assaulted, six teenage girls had been arrested, and the city’s media and politicians had dutifully gathered around the fire of London’s societal breakdown. London has experienced similarly disruptive impromptu gatherings recently, like when hundreds of teenagers attended a pop-up in Soho and raided a police car. But the sheer aimlessness of last week’s disruption seemed to underscore a growing feeling about the capital. 

What we witnessed was not the product of bored teenagers with nowhere to go, we learned, or the consequence of cutting funding for youth clubs, but “the rise of a lawless, welfare-addicted underclass” (the Telegraph) for whom the only solution is to “bring back borstals” (the Critic).

Flicking through this increasingly frantic coverage, I wanted to understand more about where these viral link-ups first came from and what was behind them. Are the capital’s kids really out of control? And if they are — how can the chaos be stopped? 

Ferraris and TikTok

As anyone who’s used Facebook or MSN Messenger can attest, kids meeting up through social media is not new. But this particular brand of link-up — taking place in the school holidays, arranged through video platforms and played out for a public audience — only really began after the pandemic.

In August 2022, the first year since 2020 without any government-mandated lockdowns, hundreds of teenagers encouraged one another through TikTok to go down to Oxford Street, steal stuff and film themselves doing it. It was in the middle of that maddening heatwave, which seemed to bake the city to a halt. Kids nicked sweets from American candy stores, ran in and out of fast food stores and began fighting in the street. The Met responded by dispatching several armoured vehicles and a police helicopter. As a red Ferrari slowed to make its way through the mayhem, the teens began clambering on top of it to try and catch a ride. For anyone watching online, it was great content.