Marcus Knox-Hooke was at the heart of the 2011 riots sparked by the death of his friend Mark Duggan in a police shooting. A new documentary examines what happened and follows him as he struggles to rebuild his life

Did you start the Tottenham riots? Marcus Knox-Hooke thinks about this for a moment. “I suppose. You could say so. But if they hadn’t shot Mark, there would have been no riots.” He pauses. And then: “It’s not something I’m proud of.” Mark was Mark Duggan, the 29-year-old who was shot dead by police on 4 August 2011 – the spark that lit the flame of the Tottenham riots, which became the London riots and then the 2011 British riots as the violence spread first around the capital and then to cities across the country. Five people ended up dead and more than £200m of damage was done to businesses and property. And when the police studied the CCTV footage and pieced together the sequence of events, they alleged that it ultimately led all the way back to one man: Marcus Knox-Hooke. They accused him of instigating the first act of violence – violence that then spread nationwide – and charged him with eight counts of violent disorder, burglary and robbery. “It’s not something I’m proud of,” he repeats. The accusation of starting the riot was eventually dropped – though he was found guilty of four other charges, including burglary and robbery, and sentenced to 32 months in jail – but he doesn’t deny it. “There were a lot of innocent lives that got lost. A lot of innocent businesses got harmed. A lot of people’s homes got destroyed. I’d like to say sorry. It wasn’t my intention, you hear me? I had no idea it was going to escalate in such a way.”

But then no one could have known it would escalate in such a way. It was the worst civil disturbance in a generation. And the second time a major riot had kicked off, not just in Tottenham, but involving the inhabitants of the Broadwater Farm estate. This August marks the fifth anniversary of that last riot, and while the burnt-out shops have been rebuilt and half a dozen reports, inquests and special inquiries have published their findings, arguably not a whole lot has changed.

Knox-Hooke’s story, however, is only now being heard for the first time, alongside that of his friend Kurtis Henville. They’re the stars of a new documentary, The Hard Stop, and it feels pretty timely because five years on, the question of why the riots started and whether they could happen again has been quietly shoved to one side. Though the gap between rich and poor has only widened, young people are even more marginalised and nowhere are these issues more pressing than in Tottenham.

Because Tottenham has changed in the past five years. It’s still one of the most ethnically diverse areas of London and one of the poorest, but it’s also now one of the fastest-changing. Who these changes benefit, however, is not clear. The developers have moved in, shiny new apartment blocks have sprouted, artisanal cafes selling free-range, organic fried chicken have arrived, and Knox-Hooke, out of prison having served his sentence, is homeless.

On the morning we meet, the location changes at the last minute because, he explains, he’s had an argument with the friend he was staying with and is back at his mum’s. “I’ve got nowhere to live,” he says. He’s about to turn 34. He grew up in a council flat but there’s no way he’ll ever qualify for his own. And he can’t afford to rent privately. Tottenham is the new frontline of London’s relentless gentrification. And Knox-Hooke is one of the people left in its wake.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Statement of intent: Knox-Hooke’s tattoo. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

The Hard Stop isn’t about that, though; his homelessness is simply another aspect of his ongoing struggle to rise above the world into which he was born. This is not something you can be in much doubt about: he has a statement to the effect tattooed on his neck. It’s in a large, florid cursive but I can’t quite make out the words. What does it say? “Rise and conquer,” he says, pulling back his T-shirt to show me. “Meaning, rise out of this.” Rise out of what? “Rise above the struggle. Conquer it. Stand above it. And loyalty obviously. I’m a loyal person. It’s a gift and a curse. Sometimes, I’m loyal to the wrong people.”

The “wrong people” were a group of boys, later men, he grew up with on Broadwater Farm. Together, they became involved in what he describes as “a certain badness”.

What kind of badness? Drug dealing? “Yeah, like drug dealing. Robbery. Extorting. All that kind of stuff.” They were TMD – Tottenham Man Dem. What the police called a “gang”, although Knox-Hooke describes it as a “group of friends who all grew up together”.

All this is vividly dramatised in the documentary, a quiet, observational work that follows Knox-Hooke from the time of his arrest in 2012 to the final outcome of Mark Duggan’s inquest in 2014. It’s the work of film-maker George Amponsah, who started following Knox-Hooke and Henville without knowing exactly where it would take him.

He met Knox-Hooke through a friend and went to talk to him at Hammersmith hospital, where he was working at the time. “I asked him what happened the day Mark Duggan died and he just started crying. I’ve done a lot of television documentaries about hard men. Ross Kemp’s the world’s toughest gangs, Donal MacIntyre’s toughest towns… I know these kind of men. I recognise the look in their eyes but what I hadn’t seen before was this willingness to show vulnerability. They’d lost their best friend. They loved him as a brother. And by proxy, you get a sense of who Mark Duggan really was. Did he deserve to die? Or be vilified in certain sections of the media?”

Amponsah started filming on tape “which no one does, but it was just an old camera I had gathering dust on my shelf”. He had no resources and no funding until the Sundance Institute stepped in to help. It’s a subject matter that resonates in the States, where the Black Lives Matter campaign is exploring similar territory, and the film takes its title from the manoeuvre police use to force a vehicle to stop, the one used on the minicab in which Duggan was travelling on 4 August 2011. The film opens with a quote from Martin Luther King – “A riot is the language of the unheard” – and it’s a highly personal account of how and why the riots started by the people who were right there at the heart of them.

It’s unusual because the Knox-Hookes and Henvilles of this world don’t usually star in their own documentaries. Their voices really are unheard. And when they do start talking, it’s… well, a bit unsettling. At the start of the film, they come across as the kind of people you might cross the street to avoid. Knox-Hooke skulks around with his head down, his hood up, and Henville walks the streets with two massive pit bull terriers. When he goes to pick up one of the animals from a police station (where it’s being held under the Dangerous Dogs Act), he loses it and starts yelling at a policeman: “You’re a fucking dickhead, bruv!”

Henville may be someone with poor impulse control, you start to think. But he also goes on to make almost heroic attempts to find work. On the streets, he tells the camera, he could easily earn £500 a day. But having failed to get a job at Tesco or anywhere else, he ends up taking a job in Norwich, only returning to Tottenham at weekends to see his family.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kurtis Henville (left) and Marcus Knox-Hooke at Toronto international film festival, 2015 Photograph: Amanda Edwards/Getty Images for UK Film Council

Neither of them are straightforward subjects, in any sense. “They are no angels,” says Amponsah. “They don’t try to portray themselves as boy scouts in any way, shape or form.”

This is something of an understatement. But it’s also a rare glimpse of the kind of life that most of us have no clue about. And while it might not be true to say that Knox-Hooke was born into a life of crime, he was certainly predisposed to it. “My father didn’t really offer me anything in terms of skills or how to be a man. He just showed me how to be a worse, more horrible person, if anything,” he says.

We’re in a Turkish cafe in Tottenham. “I wouldn’t say it’s a life that I chose,” he says. “It was the life I knew.” But going to prison was a turning point for him. “I appreciated that experience. It made me a better person.”

In what way? “When I came out, I was more focused. I knew more about who I was as a person. One thing I did know was that I would never go back to prison.” And since he’s been out, he’s had a job with a charity, mentoring Mark Duggan’s eldest son, Kamani, who had been excluded from school. “I don’t want what happened to me happening to him. I don’t want him to have that life.

“I was suspended from school in Year 8 and that was it. I never really got another chance. And growing up on the Farm, you never had what I’d call role models. At the time, I looked at the role models there were and that’s what I aspired to be.”

Which was what? “A criminal, basically. It was losing Mark that changed things. I said to myself, ‘Nah, man, this is death. I don’t want this any more. It’s not fun.’ When they killed him, that hurt. It hurts still. And now, I just want kids like Kamani to have choices I never had. Do you get me? I want to set up my own mentoring organisation. Do you understand me?”

Do you understand me? Do you hear me? Do you get me? They’re the kind of expressions a lot of us use as conversational crutches, but Knox-Hooke’s speech is peppered with them. Listening to the tape, it makes me wonder if anyone ever has really heard him.

At least three bodies, including the mayor of London’s office and a committee established by parliament consisting of community members and victims, have reported back on the causes of the riots. They noted “toxic relations” with local police; a huge swath of young people not in education, employment or training; a highly transient population living in poverty. All of that may have been true. But what actually caused the riot, the proximate cause, the spark that lit the fuse, was much easier to understand than any of that. It was grief and shock and anger.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Director George Amponsah at a screening of The Hard Stop during the BFI London Film Festival last year. Photograph: Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images

If anyone had bothered to ask Knox-Hooke, the man the police identified as the person who started it, he could have told them. “Nobody knew what was going on. No police liaison or anybody even came to inform the family that he’d been shot. Nothing like that.”

On the day Duggan died, the police told the media he had been killed in a shootout, a story that the family didn’t accept, and that was later retracted. “Even the next day, no police had come to the house to inform the family, so that was why we went to the police station. Semone [Duggan’s partner] went to report his death. It was a peaceful protest.

“We were told the commissioner of police was supposed to come and speak to her. She was told to wait. And after six hours, some officers came outside and said he couldn’t make it, and to vacate the streets. We’re all out there – the family, aunties, uncles, siblings. When they told us to clear the streets, I said to myself: ‘No way.’ At the time, it was very busy because there was football on, there was police and Tottenham fans and I said to myself: ‘Before I leave this high road, I’m going to smash up a police car.’”

Why? What was going on in your head at that time? “Rage and hurt, man. I was confused. I’d thought: ‘OK, these police are going to come to speak to us and we’re going to get a better understanding.’ And then that didn’t happen.”

Did you really think that? “I was not expecting it to turn out the way it turned out. We were there with our mums. Mark’s mum’s there. My mum’s there. Little children and everyone’s there. That was the sort of crowd it was.”

Did they try to stop you when you went to smash up the police car? “No, there were no officers there. They actually cleared the streets. I was in a rage. When I started smashing it up, you’re thinking: ‘OK, a big riot van is going to pull up and loads of police are going to come running out.’ You understand? That never happened, so I’m thinking, ‘How come the police aren’t coming?’ So, there was another police car out there so we went and smashed up that one as well.”

Then what happened? “No police came. It just escalated. It just got worse and worse until the riot police came out there trying to clear the streets. You’ve got angry people trying to fight back. That lasted for about 13 hours.”

F ive years on, Knox-Hooke takes me on a tour of the Broadwater Farm estate. Here is the flat where he grew up. And, here, a few steps away, is the flat where Duggan lived. We’re on the first floor of a block called Tangmere, looking over other blocks, other towers. The concrete is crumbling and pigeon shit covers the balcony walls.

Built in 1967, and inspired by Le Corbusier, the estate is an architectural remnant of another time: a time not just of grand social experiments but when large amounts of public money were spent building decent homes to house the poor. Now, there’s not even enough money around to patch up the walls.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Burnt out cars on the Broadwater Farm estate after the riots in 1985. Photograph: Associated/REX/Shutterstock/Rex

It’s unique in British history in being the crucible for two major riots, a generation apart. Knox-Hooke was a child when the 1985 riots broke out and remembers his mum bundling him up in a duvet and taking him to a relative’s flat in a different block. Police had stopped a man, Floyd Jarrett, on suspicion of driving a stolen car, and in the course of them searching his mother’s home in Broadwater Farm, she suffered a heart attack and died. The estate – or the Farm, as locals call it – erupted into violence and in the chaos that followed, a police officer, PC Keith Blakelock, was killed. Relations between residents and the police have simmered uneasily ever since.

Suspicion of the police is something that “was passed down to us through our parents,” says Knox-Hooke.

In the aftermath of the 1985 riot, one focus of blame was the brutal modernist architecture. The authorities moved in and painted the walls baby blue and baby pink, and the first-floor concrete walkways that linked the blocks were pulled down. Crime levels dropped, and though the aesthetic may have fallen out of favour, Knox-Hooke calls it “the nest” and remembers it as safe and warm – heating and hot water is generated centrally and piped to each flat – a place where “there was a real community”.

Standing on the top floor of Tangmere, looking out across the estate, breathing in the faint aroma of a joint being smoked somewhere, it feels like an island a long way away from the rest of the city. The tide of gentrification may be sweeping across Tottenham, but it stops at the entrance to the estate. Some of the flats have been purchased under right to buy, but most of these seem to have been acquired by buy-to-let investors. Even living here is an impossible dream for Knox-Hooke these days: there are 10,000 people on the council’s housing waiting list and to rent a two-bedroom flat privately here costs £1,500 a month. It’s not the kind of money he has.

At the end of The Hard Stop, Knox-Hooke really has risen and conquered. He’s served his sentence. He’s doing meaningful work he’s good at and enjoys. But life doesn’t have the neat ending of a film. It goes on. The funding for the charity dried up. As well as not having a home, he doesn’t currently have a job either. He wants to set up a mentoring organisation. He’s genuinely passionate about making a difference. But how are you going to fund it, I ask him. “I’ve got a lot of people helping me,” he says. “I’m going to ask the government for money.”

I can’t help wincing and probing him on his back-up options. The government doesn’t have much money these days, I point out. But he comes back at me: “I have trustees. I have a lot of people supporting me. And we need this. These kids need this. Making this film changed me. It opened my eyes to a bigger world, different possibilities, meeting people I wouldn’t have met. Even the way I speak from the beginning of the film to the end, my mannerism’s different. You get me?”

Later, I talk to Jude Lanchin, his solicitor, and she tells me that he is “really, really trying. And he is really, really struggling.” She was a community worker on the Broadwater Farm estate during the first set of riots and knew both Marcus and Mark when they were children. “He’s really changed, even from when I first started representing him.

“He’s grown up in such a circumscribed world with such limited opportunities to move forward, but he’s determined to. Mark’s death and his imprisonment have shown him that things can’t stay the same.”

Things are apparently even tougher for Kurtis Henville, his friend, though no one involved in the film will say how exactly. I’m just told he can’t take part in the interview.

“Real life continues,” says Amponsah. “And the struggles that you see Kurtis going through in the film are still going on.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A rioter in Hackney, north London, in 2011. Protests later spread to Britain’s major cities. Photograph: Kerim Okten/EPA

It’s a timely reminder, perhaps, that five years on, the factors that came together to cause the riots, the sense of dispossession that many young people felt towards their cities hasn’t gone away. Nothing has got easier. Things have only got harder. And I wrote these words before the referendum results. On Friday morning, the outlook seems much, much bleaker.

I talk to Bryan Fanning, a professor of social work at University College Dublin, who has published a paper on policy responses in Tottenham after the riots, and he tells me that all the reports and studies that came out of the disturbances highlight the human factors at play. “You had David Lammy talking about the crisis in black families. You had government talking about the big society. You had the report from the mayor of London’s office, It Took Another Riot, that identified 900 dysfunctional families.

“But all the solutions have come down to one thing only: property-led regeneration. It’s been a sleight of hand. The reports focused on these economically deprived communities and the issues facing young people but the pendulum has swung back, as it always does, to giving the place a makeover. To change the mix of people. What’s happening is a form of state-led gentrification. But who’s it for? Are you lifting up marginal people? Or are you editing them out?

“It’s helping the area but is it helping people? At the end of the day, people worried about the young people, many of whom were vulnerable and seen not to have a place in modern Britain. If [what to do for vulnerable young people]is the question, then the answer they’ve come up with is to a different question.”

He pauses and then says: “Tottenham is where the inequalities of modern Britain come to sleep at night.”

Later, I drive around Tottenham Hale, the train station and small, traffic-clogged retail park where looters cleared a JD Sports of hundreds of pairs of trainers. It’s now home to a cluster of shiny modern apartment blocks and new shops but there’s no shiny modern answer to the question of where the poor are going to live, where the young people are going to live. As property prices in Tottenham go up, so do rents. And if a new demographic moves in, the old one has to move out. But to where?

“It’s a hard enough city for middle-class, middle-aged people like myself to live in,” says Amponsah. “I’m always looking at young people and thinking, how do they do it?”

When the riots kicked off, he went out on to the streets of Clapham, near his home, to witness them first-hand, and it’s what led him to make The Hard Stop: to try to understand the human motivations behind it. “Mark Duggan’s death was the spark that ignited something that a lot of people are feeling, that is bubbling under. I suspect that a lot of the people who took to the streets in 2011 didn’t know Mark Duggan from a bar of soap but they had something, a feeling inside them, and it just doesn’t take very much for this widespread feeling to become an explosion.”

The riots were shocking at the time, and watching the archive footage in The Hard Stop, they’re still shocking now. It’s ugly scene after ugly scene. A young man who looks like he’s just stepped off a bus is punched in the face and he wanders, dazed, down the street mopping blood from his face as a stream of young men walk up to him and steal items from his backpack. Peel back a thin layer of civilisation, and what lies beneath is pretty frightening. “It was some of the worst days of my life,” Tottenham’s MP David Lammy, tells me.

“I watched the community I grew up in and have lived in all my life, burning. I comforted men and woman while I stood in front of their homes while they burned to the ground. There are people out there with post-traumatic stress disorder who lost everything. There are children who still wake up in the night and wet their beds. Riots are devastating to individuals. They’re like a hurricane or an earthquake. And devastating to the community that has to deal with the consequences.”

And most of what happened is baffling not just to outsiders but even to those who were there. Even to the man who started it. Maybe, especially to the man who started it. “My agenda was to fight the police for what they’d done,” says Knox-Hooke. “But everyone after that just used it as an opportunity to get free stuff.” He actually tried to intervene when one of the first shops on Tottenham High Road was attacked – a Dixy Chicken. “What was your agenda? What do you stand for? Especially those that went to prison, you hear me? Even when I went to prison, I went to prison feeling, you know what? I went to prison for a just cause.”

The “just cause” was Duggan’s death and the film follows the chain of events as his family try to find out what actually happened to him. In 2014, an inquest found that Duggan had not been carrying a weapon. But it also recorded a verdict of lawful killing. And in 2015, the Independent Police Complaints Commission cleared the firearms officers of any wrongdoing.

It was the end of a long and frustrating journey for the family, although they have won the right to appeal against the inquest’s verdict. I ask Amponsah if he thinks justice was served. “We have a way in Britain of giving people a sense of justice by rolling out the whole procedure of an inquest and a public inquiry and all the rest of it… and at the end of that, the conclusion is that you haven’t got anything more than you had at the beginning.

“We give you a sense of justice… but what does it all add up to if your son, your father, your friend was killed lawfully? And he didn’t have a gun in his hand? Is that justice?”

It’s why he included the statistic, at the end of the film, that since 1990, there have been 1,500 deaths in police custody or following police contact, but not one police officer has ever been successfully prosecuted.

Knox-Hooke puts it even more baldly. “No, we haven’t got justice for him yet. I mean, the riots were a small satisfaction but it didn’t bring any form of joy. Mark’s still dead. There’s still a lot of unanswered questions.”

He’s optimistic though that one day they might finally get some answers. “You got Hillsborough after so long. Maybe one day, hopefully, the officer [in the Duggan case] comes forward and says, ‘You know what? I made a mistake.’ Or, ‘This is what really happened. Hopefully, you understand.’”

There’s something quite touching about this, his faith that maybe one day the truth will come out. There’s no sense of vengeance or punishment. What Knox-Hooke wants is something really very basic: for the police to simply admit that they made a mistake. Time will tell, perhaps. The bigger question is whether London will burn again first.

The Hard Stop is released in cinemas on 15 July