Paul Lewis charts the journey from the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan to civil unrest on a grand scale

For me, it started when I saw a man walking through an estate in Tottenham, north London, carrying a flatscreen TV.

It was 10.30pm last Saturday, and I was checking out reports of fires and clashes with police.

Riot police had formed a cordon around the south end of the road. It was like an artificial boundary, separating a quiet north London suburb from another, unrecognisable world.

Tottenham, the scene of a peaceful protest against the police shooting of Mark Duggan five hours earlier, had erupted into a riot.

It dawned on me in stages. Two older women hurried past with a suitcase. Then other men and women came running past, looking terrified.

I turned the corner onto the High Road, and found a police car ablaze, and teenagers, some who looked as young as 10, ransacking a music shop. Inside the next store, a travel agent, a desk was on fire.

It had taken 48 hours and a host of unanswered questions for the ripples of anger from the fatal shooting of Duggan, 29, to lead to civil unrest in Tottenham.

From that point on the contagion would spread with breathtaking speed, igniting riots and disorder in towns and cities across England.

By the end of the week, five people would have been left dead from the disturbances, and more than 1,500 arrested.

Tottenham was the start of a five-day journey in which my colleague, film-maker Mustafa Khalili and I, would record similar destruction in dozens of suburbs in places as varied as west London and Gloucester, in what felt like a country at war with itself.

The first portal for communicating what we saw was Twitter. It enabled us to deliver real-time reports from the scene, but more importantly enabled other users of Twitter to provide constant feedback and directions to troublespots. While journalists covering previous riots would chase ambulances to find the frontline, we followed what people on social media told us. By the end of the week, I had accumulated 35,000 new Twitter followers.

At 1.30am on Sunday, I had returned home assuming the rioting had died out. Then someone sent me a picture of an ALDI supermarket on fire. The BBC and Sky had been ordered out because it was too dangerous, with reports emerging of trouble in Wood Green, two miles west of Tottenham. Around 2.30am I decided to head back, this time wearing a hoodie and riding a bicycle; to blend in, and because no one could have got through in a car. On the approach, roads were blocked with burning barricades. Mostly the streets were filled with bystanders. But in places there were men, some in balaclavas, guarding the streets as shops were looted.

A minicab was driving erratically down a quiet residential street. As it passed, a wide-eyed teenager stared out. He looked 14.

The looting on nearby Wood Green's main high street was brazen, and was still going on around sunrise at 5.30am. That Sunday afternoon I toured Tottenham Hale retail park. I found people peering into the smashed stores: Boots, JD Sports, O2, Currys, Argos, Orange, PC World and Comet.

Everyone was asking the same questions. How had police lost control? And was it going to happen again?

It was just before 9pm on Sunday when I saw hundreds of youths head to the G Mantella jewellery store on Enfield high street, six miles north of where the disturbances had begun.

Police had earlier warned residents that the suburb would be on the "frontline" that night and filled a Tesco car park full of police horses in anticipation.

By late afternoon, a police car had been attacked in Enfield, and a handful of shop windows broken. The attack on the jewellers was over in seconds.

Minutes later I was stood on a side-street, where young men were knocking down garden walls and collecting bricks to hurl at police. I used my bottled water to wash the bleeding hand of a boy who looked about 12.

This was the opening salvo in what would turn into the second night of disturbances. But Sunday was not, as was reported, a night of worsening riots. The disorder in Enfield, Hackney and Brixton was smaller in scale than the previous night, and felt like organised theft.

I was shown the BBM – Blackberry Messenger – broadcast circulated hours earlier, announcing Enfield as a target.

It called on everyone in nearby boroughs to "start leaving ur yards" and bring "bags trollys, cars vans, hammers the lott!!!". It warned against passing the message to "snitch boys" (police informants) and said the aim was to "just rob everything".

There was one line – "dead the fires though"; that seemed to discourage arson.

I saw only one fire that night, as I followed in the wake of the looting, through debris-strewn streets.

In Ponders End, a suburb east of Enfield, Tesco workers told me how dozens of youths had made away with TVs and alcohol. "The windows smashed and they just came pouring in from all four sides," one said.

Minutes later I came across a group of teenagers huddled by Edmonton Working Men's Conservative Club. Most of them were girls, and in a state of panic. I saw they were holding a topless boy, who looked about 17. "He's been stabbed," one said.

As soon as he was in the ambulance, his friends fled, telling police they did not want to talk to "Feds" (slang for the police). One screamed: "We hate you." Another shouted: "You're the reason this is happening."

Three teenagers cycling past stopped to look at the blood-splattered pavement. One looked at me and said: "Bruv, you the man from Twitter?"

He said he had been following updates from journalists about the riots, and told us to head to Edmonton Green, where there was a plan to attack shops at midnight.

As it turned out, lines of riot police protecting shop fronts appeared to have thwarted that plan. At 4am, as I drove home along Hackney's Kingsland Road, the scene of minor looting hours earlier, I saw pavements still filled with police.

They had rows of young men and women lined-up against the walls, queuing for their stop and search.

Twelve hours later, it was reportedly a stop and search about half a mile away, on Mare Street, that ignited more violent scenes in Hackney.

In truth, it was more likely the "copycat" contagion that would make Monday night the worst by far for unrest in London, with disorder spreading to cities such as Birmingham, Nottingham, Liverpool and Bristol.

I arrived at Hackney's Pembury Estate around 6pm, following the large plumes of smoke that could be seen from most of east London, to see a white van which had been ram-raided into a wall and set on fire.

Next a motorbike was turned on its side and set alight, followed by two cars; each time the crowd waited nervously for the fuel tank to explode, and then added fuel to the burning barricades that blocked all roads into the estate.

This was not looting, but a return to a visceral desire to fight police that was first seen two days earlier in Tottenham.

There was an excited, frenzied mood. There appeared to be more older people and particularly more women taking part, many helping carry fuel debris for the fires.

Some rioters turned on people taking images on mobile phones. I saw one press photographer pulled to the ground and beaten with sticks.

It took police three hours to retake control of the estate. One telling incident occurred when youths started attacking a patrol car with bricks. It was only when the car reversed the crowd realised there was an officer inside.

Around 10 men instantly sprinted towards the car, pelting it with bricks and blocks of concrete. One tried frantically to open the car door.

Unable to see through his smashed windows, the officer accelerated his vehicle into the crowd, almost crashing into traffic lights. "I've been wanting to see us do this to the Feds for years," said one man, in his 30s, looking on.

I took shelter in a pub on the outskirts of the estate that – remarkably – was still open. The TV was showing helicopter images of a fire in Croydon, south London, where Trevor Ellis, 29, would be shot dead in the midst of the riots hours later.

That night I would see a rapid series of incidents that was almost impossible to compute. On Kingsland Road, groups of shopkeepers, many of them Turkish Kurds, sprinted past our car as they chased looters away.

An hour later, and further west, I was in Chalk Farm to see men armed with scaffold poles attack passing motorists and smash their way into shops.

When the windows were broken, people of all backgrounds surged in to help themselves to the free goods.

Khalili and I were pretending to be part of the crowd, with hoodies pulled tight over our heads. A man in a balaclava came up to me and gave us a hard, searching stare.

He walked away, and spoke to a friend who returned seconds later, asking us for a cigarette. We left soon after.

Later that night, as we headed to the scene of what was possibly the largest fire of the riots – at a Sony distribution centre near the M25 – we suspected we were being followed by a car with a smashed windscreen, forcing us to accelerate through a red light.

It was not until around 3am that we arrived at the west London suburb where Khalili lives: Ealing looked worse than anywhere else we had seen.

It was here that Richard Mannington Bowes, 68, was reportedly killed as he tried to put out a fire. There were parts of Ealing where every single shop had been attacked, and every car set on fire.

When we arrived the disturbances had died down, the streets almost empty.

I spoke to an eastern European builder who had just boarded up his friend's ransacked wine bar. He could not keep his eyes away from a burned out buggy in the middle of the road which reminded him of a war zone.

"Surreal is a good word I think for this," he said. "Hollywood does not know what can happen in real life." Like almost all the looting victims I spoke to, the builder asked: "Where were the police?"

The expectation that lawlessness would prompt communities to defend themselves in what could spill into vigilantism was well-founded.

The fear that it could turn into something far worse – racial conflict – did not transpire, despite pockets of far-right activity in parts of London. I saw one worrying development in Enfield on the fourth night, Tuesday.

As we drove north up Hertford Road, we came across more than 70 white males, in their 30s and 40s, running in unison down a street shouting "get the Pakis", "get the blacks".

They looked drunk, and people told us they had been chasing black teenagers. I reported the incident as a "minor skirmish", but my reports quickly became viral and, taken out of context, were being used to stoke fears of imminent racial conflict.

Worse, some took the report to be a misleading reference to a peaceful gathering of citizens who had come together to defend their community elsewhere in Enfield. It was a sobering reminder of the power of social media. The streets were in chaos, but so too was the internet, which was both the fastest source of reliable news and, unchecked, a means of spreading panic.

Tuesday turned out to be relatively quiet in London. I headed to Birmingham, to see yet more scenes of looted shops and torched cars.

Elsewhere, Manchester and Salford witnessed widespread looting, with shops attacked in Liverpool, Leicester, Bristol, Leeds and Nottingham, where a police station had been firebombed.

But the most tragic incident occurred in Birmingham, when three men guarding a petrol station – Haroon Jahan, 21, and brothers Shazad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31 – were killed in an apparent hit-and-run incident.

Around 3am, as rumours circulated about their deaths, we began to receive reports of a major fire in Gloucester.

We arrived in the small city at dawn, to see there had been a riot there, too. The damage was not on the scale of bigger cities, but in places it appeared just as intense. I talked to Dale Millar, 26, who had spent the night photographing the riots. He described bins and bricks being hurled at police, adding: "I heard one little kid, 17, shout out 'I done my job today, I hit a police officer.'"

Four teenagers lingering nearby showed me BBM messages that had been calling on Gloucester to be attacked since Monday. One said: "Pussys stay at home! Bad man dnt come alone. Tell a fren to tell a fren!"

So why did the English riots of 2011 stop? Police chiefs will argue their strategy, which took three days to formulate, of flooding the streets with riot officers, proved a significant deterrence. The fact police numbers were bolstered by people determined to protect their own streets must also have had an impact, as did the rain.

But there was also a social pressure at work, and it came from the very same "culture" that David Cameron has blamed for the riots.

I spoke to parents who said they had persuaded their children to stay indoors, and young people who had held back their friends from taking part.

Even in the midst of the seeming immorality of rioting without a cause, there were signs of a moral compass, with young men trying to rein back others they felt were going too far.

In the early hours of Thursday, the first night of calm, I stood at what could have been a flashpoint: the Jet garage forecourt in Birmingham where three Asian men had died the previous day.

The fear that the deaths could trigger retribution against the local black community remained unspoken, but well-founded.

As soon as I arrived on Dudley Road I heard racist language used to describe the three men's killers. Around 300 Asian men – Sikhs and Muslims – had gathered, some in masks. I met Upinder Randhawa, who had spent the previous days using his tiny broadcaster, Sangat TV, to provide gripping live reports from the frontline of the disturbances.

Randhawa was talking hurriedly about shared religious values and the need for unity when a teenager in a mask barged in. "Fuck that man, I'm gonna get a gun and shoot somebody," he said.

But there were no guns and no shooting, in large part due to the debate that ensued after prayers. They decided collectively to abandon a planned march into the city, and avoid what many felt would be inevitable violence.

If Birmingham was on the brink that night, it was saved by the very same demographic that, elsewhere in the country, has been blamed for causing civil unrest. These were angry young men – many of them poor and the children of immigrants.

Disorder could still break out, but whatever happens in England over the coming days, the debate on that petrol forecourt should serve as a hopeful reminder; of grieving young men who would show restraint in a time of crisis that some would say has eluded politicians, police chiefs and judges.

"We need to tell the media we will not tolerate the tyranny, but we will not react either," said Harpreet Singh, 28. "We are capable, but we will not do it."

• This article was amended on 22 September 2011 to replace the phrase "second-generation immigrants" with "the children of immigrants".