Two police carriers packed with officers sped through Tottenham's suburban streets. In the front passenger seat of the lead vehicle was a 29-year-old constable, sweating and using an iPhone to navigate the way to the riots.

By their own admission police had been slow to call for reinforcements, but around midnight teams of officers from across London were pouring into Tottenham. "I knew that police officers had been hurt and things were on fire and it had all got crazy," the constable said. "And I had to get our guys there."

As the two vans got closer, the police radio relayed a steady stream of bad news. "It's one guy after the next guy after the next guy … 'Officer down, officer injured, we need a medic, officer down, we can't find so-and-so, does anyone know where he is?'"

The vans travelled 20 miles from Sutton, south-west London, inadvertently into the very centre of the riot on Tottenham High Road. "Suddenly bricks and bottles and scaffolding started being thrown at us. And we were like, jeez, OK, it's actually happening now. It's so loud in the van when those things hit the side, it echoes around a sort of big tin chamber."

They carried on driving, past burnt-out police cars and a flaming double-decker bus. "Just endless smashed windows and bricks, and I thought: this is not real, this is like a movie set."

The constable – one of 130 police officers of all ranks interviewed for the Guardian and London School of Economics study into the English riots – was heading for an experience likely to stay with him for the rest of his life.

"I just thought: how much longer will this go on? This is almost a living hell," said a 52-year-old inspector who was knocked unconscious shortly after arriving in Tottenham. "If some of my officers start going down now, we'll get overrun. They will kill us."

1am Sunday 7 August

Tottenham had been rioting for four hours. A protest outside the police station over the police shooting two days earlier of a local man, Mark Duggan, had turned violent. Looting was beginning to take place two miles west, in Wood Green. Still using his iPhone, the constable guided the two vans through brown smoke, past blazing buildings and along streets carpeted with debris.

The vehicles were forced to stop when they came across an obstacle in the road next to an Aldi supermarket. "All of the shopping trolleys from the Aldi had been pulled out in one big chain, flipped on their side, and just used as a barricade," he said. "You can't drive over the shopping trolleys. So we stopped there. Everyone had a quick note to check their helmets were on, and they had all the kit they needed."

When the van door slid open, he was struck by the noise. "Chanting, shouting, things smashing, bricks, bottles, sirens in the distance." He and his colleagues joined a line of about a dozen police who were battling 300 rioters. "It's difficult to breathe with the smoke. The helmet steamed up immediately, so I could just about see where I was going."

In the distance, the constable saw the rioters had access to a building site. "You could see a hole in the fence. And that was just this infinite source of brick and scaffolding and everything that you want to throw."

The trolleys formed a natural dividing line over which a nonstop barrage of missiles came flying through the air. The police repeatedly tried to get over the trolleys. "That was like a bridge too far," the constable said. When he and a handful of officers finally made it across, they found themselves isolated and under attack from the mob.

Making a hasty retreat, the officers managed to scramble back over the trolleys – except him. "I couldn't quite get off [the trolley]," he said. "Next thing I knew, all I could feel were hands clawing down the back of my overalls, trying to grab me and pull me back. There was a moment where I thought: if I get dragged back, there's so many people here, it's so dark and it's so chaotic, that might just be it. I might just be gone. Just disappeared."

6am Sunday

The incident occurred 500 metres from where PC Keith Blakelock had been stabbed to death by a mob during the Broadwater Farm riots 26 years earlier. Blakelock had 40 cuts and wounds, several fingers missing and, according to a pathologist, a facial wound indicating a blow "almost as if to sever his head".

For the bronze commander on the ground, the Tottenham riots prompted memories of 1985 when, as a wide-eyed 20-year-old constable, he had served alongside Blakelock. Now in his 40s and a chief inspector, he said: "I did have concern that someone was going to die that night [in 1985]. And I would put the first night [of last year's riots] on a parity with that.

"I only had about 50, 60 officers in my command the whole night. So a lot of my decision log was: I am aware that these people are spent, I'm aware these people are tired, I have no option but to keep using them."

As dawn broke, the chief inspector returned to the station. There were police lying asleep on the floor; in the canteen, vending machines had been smashed open by officers desperate for food and drink. After a debrief, he went to bed at 10am. He awoke four hours later, as crowds began to gather for the second night of riots, in Enfield and Lambeth.

9pm Sunday

Although the start of the English riots was notable for intense violence against police, the second night consisted mainly of roaming gangs who targeted shops and warehouses. Some of the most frenzied looting was in Brixton.

When a 25-year-old female constable arrived in a bus full of officers, she saw people sprinting along the roads carrying TVs and laptops. The police parked next to a branch of Currys. "The inspector just said: 'It's being looted, we need to surround it to stop them getting out.'"

The constable and two officers stood guard by one exit, watching the nervous movements of looters inside and shouting: "Stay back, you are surrounded, don't come out." But as the looters poured out, one pointed a fire extinguisher into her face and fired foam. "I had my visor down, but [it went] right in my face, and it went all up to the inside as well … I don't know what it was – it didn't taste nice."

She struggled blindly, waving her baton and "snatching at anything", until the foam cleared enough for her to see a colleague grappling with a suspect on the ground. "Then, all of a sudden, I presume it was my inspector just shouted: 'Everyone, get out of here now.'"

A large crowd was descending on the police, switching the balance of power. The constable scrambled into her van. Inside were two other police officers and three prisoners, including a woman who was "screaming her head off". The driver tried to find a way through the crowd, driving forwards, then backwards. "We weren't moving anywhere," said the constable. "I was just super-scared of that side door coming open and being dragged out."

As the officers tried to bolt the door, a brick was hurled inside. "My colleague at the back suddenly starts shouting: 'The window's broken, the window's broken!' [My other] colleague was still trying to keep the door shut – I don't think he'd got the bolt on properly, so he had his hand on the door," she said. "Obviously there was a big hole in the window now, and then suddenly this machete knife came through and started, like, hacking at his hand. Thank God he had his gloves on which protected him."

5pm Monday

In Hackney, east London, a 25-year-old part-time actor had just begun his first day of work as a Met special constable, a volunteer role with the same powers as paid officers. London was set for its third, most intense night of rioting. Police, by their own admission, were unprepared as unrest spread to 22 of the capital's 32 boroughs.

Called to the assistance of officers being attacked by gangs of youths in Mare Street, the special constable stepped out of his vehicle with no helmet, shield or riot training, and no sense of what would happen next.

"I remember somebody said to me: 'You need to keep with your driver.' And I was like: 'I've lost her already.' Another officer drew his baton and I was like: 'Oh yeah, my baton.' That kind of epiphany moment: oh shit, I might need this."

Rioters in front of him were breaking paving stones to use as missiles. Others had attached utility knives to poles and spades. "Bloody hell! What do you do? I remember just thinking: God, I really want a shield right now."

The special constable found his driver, cowered behind her shield and watched a brick fly through the air, strike the ground and split in two. "It bounced up at such an odd angle," he said. "It just went boof, straight into my face."

He was knocked over but got back to his feet. In his words, adrenaline, stupidity and a desire not to miss out on the action led him to decline treatment for his injured eye and instead plunge back into the chaos.

Nearby, a 33-year-old inspector had just received a call over the radio, saying an 80-year-old woman had been struck by a brick on nearby Clarence Road. He assembled a convoy of three carriers for the rescue. "There were just youths on all sides … smoking barricades and fires," he said. "As we were making our way, I started to think to myself: oh my goodness, we are literally just going to drive straight into the eye of the storm."

He shouted at his driver: "Whatever you do, don't stop. Because I was literally thinking: in this road, if we came up to a barricade and we were forced to stop … I honestly believe they would have turned [the van] over. They would have managed to get the door out and, I honestly believe, got us out, one by one, and – I'm not exaggerating – I think they might have killed us."

Around that time, the special constable on his first day in uniform was taking a petrol can off a man and pouring the fuel down the drain. He got a phone call from his girlfriend. She was in tears, watching the disorder live on television. "Just don't die, please don't die," she told him.

Soon he found himself stationed alone outside a looted branch of JD Sports. A crowd gathered round, goading him and taking photos of his eye. Unsure how to respond, he wrapped his arm around one of his tormenters and posed for photographs. "You think: I'm going to use any tactic I know to try and win these people over. I was stood there, quite naive in a sense, just thinking: if these people decide to go at me, they could kill me."

By now, tens of thousands of people were out on English streets to riot and loot – most of them in London. Police deployed in the capital that night would use words like "outnumbered", "frustrated", "scared" and "overwhelmed" to describe what happened.

10pm Monday

Around the time rioters were taking over parts of London, others were having less success in Liverpool. Despite repeated attempts over 48 hours, they never got into the city centre. Police put that down to disciplined lines that contained gangs of rioters in areas around Toxteth.

But the violence towards police was just as intense. "The instruction came to put your visors down, and everyone's shields come up then," said a 35-year-old sergeant. "It was like a scene from [the film] Zulu – you know that scene when they all come over the hill? Three hundred people literally came round the corner into the side street and started attacking us … Because I had my visor down, it was like watching a TV screen."

He added: "They started pushing a burning car towards us and we were told to stand fast by the inspector. Some of my officers were saying: 'Sarge, they're pushing a car towards us here.' And I said: 'Yeah, I'm aware of that.' Luckily it fell short and hit the curb and just caught fire – and then they all ran off."

How did it feel? "Truthfully? Excitement! There was not one point [where I felt] scared or anything. My adrenaline was pumping."

Police were attacked with golf clubs and petrol bombs. A female mounted officer saw rioters pull estate agent signs out of the ground and use the sharpened posts as a stake to attack horses. Another constable said he was horrified when a rioter approached the line of police and began masturbating. Many described a visceral anti-police sentiment.

"They hate us, with a vengeance," said another Liverpool officer, adding that the rioters were not dissimilar to the officer's son, who had "fallen by the wayside" ... "He's grown up in a hard area, you know. [He wears] the black trackies, the black trainers, the hoodies. The way that they are, if one person hates [the police], they all club together. There is a gang element; it's like a wolf pack."

11pm Monday

While police in Liverpool fought to keep rioters out of the city centre, in Birmingham officers accepted the battle was already lost. Not only had large parts of the city centre been attacked by looters, a police station in Handsworth had been broken into, ransacked and set on fire.

A 31-year-old sergeant from a specialist riot unit was ordered to secure the police station and escort firefighters. "All you could see in front of you were cars overturned on fire. The petrol tanks and the tyres were obviously burning to the point of exploding."

The burning debris in the road forced their convoy of vans down a single, narrow route. "They funnelled us into a small gap where we were ambushed," he said. "They bricked all of our windows as we were driving through – there wasn't one van window that was kept intact, including the driver's, who had to drive with his head out of the window."

He added: "[They] tried to lure us into alleyways and then set fire to the alleyway. They set fire to vehicles in front of us, trying to lure us into them, so when the fuel tank exploded the vehicle exploded."

The battles would last almost until daybreak. "They were aiming shotguns at us from a distance and waving them in the air, which meant we had to slow our progress." The firearms were not just a threat: the following night close friends of the sergeant were lured into another ambush, outside a pub that had been set on fire. Twelve bullets were fired at police who attended the scene, peppering a wall just above their heads.

11.45pm Monday

In London, more and more people were exploiting the chaos. A convoy of three police vans drafted in from Surrey snaked past a retail park in Lewisham that had been overrun by 300 looters. A 41-year-old constable inside a van was struck by how relaxed and calm the crowd looked.

"The people were trying on shoes and hats and T-shirts, and passing stuff around to each other; it was really surreal. There didn't seem to be any concern," he said. There were too many looters and too few police to make any arrests, but they got out of the van and tried to disperse the crowd.

"There was one fella I remember who was really upset because he'd got the one shoe that he wanted, but didn't have the other one. He kept waving his shoe at us, saying: 'You know I need to get back in there and get my other shoe.'"

The constable was in a group of four who crawled under the roller shutter of a nearby casino that had been broken into. "It was like a movie – there was slot machines on the ground and they were still playing their music and the lights were flashing … sort of hundreds of pound coins lying all over the floor. Smoke and lights and noise and shouting and all kinds of stuff and it was just … phew, mind-blowing."

Midnight Monday

In the control room in Lambeth, a bank of screens relayed CCTV footage to the chief superintendent in charge of the Met's tactics. Adrian Roberts, silver commander, had decided early on to divide the capital into five areas, allocating a borough commander to each, in the hope of bolstering resources.

There was a constant feed of reports of disorder. Rioters were in Hackney, Enfield, Catford, Queensway, Notting Hill, Kilburn, Barnet, Woolwich, Barking, Balham, Southwark and Camden. Two people, in Croydon and Ealing, had been killed.

Commanders were calling Roberts on his mobile phone, pleading for help. "But you get to the point [when] there is nothing left in the pot. It was extremely frustrating. We didn't have enough people, we ran out of people very quickly … We were overwhelmed – no one has ever denied that."

Lynne Owens, then an assistant commissioner at the Met, was in the same command room. She said: "You can come up with different theories – and yes, there's an issue with engagement, an issue with social media – but the bottom line is: there were lots of criminals on the streets of London over the four nights and, certainly on the first night, we just didn't have enough officers to stop it happening."

The Met blames a failure of intelligence for its delay in getting larger numbers of officers on to the streets. By the third night, there were 6,000 deployed. Twenty-four hours later, 16,000 police were on London's streets – an immense show of force that many police believe helped bring the disorder to an end.

In the meantime, Roberts, 46, was having "soul-destroying" radio conversations with officers on the ground, the most difficult of which was with a commander in Croydon. "I can remember … talking to him on the radio, watching what he's having to deal with – the fire's breaking out and watching the cops being completely outnumbered, and I said to him: 'I know you're feeling really vulnerable right now, but I think there could be people trapped in that building. You've just got to go forwards.'"

Roberts added: "It's where I was brought up: I'm a Croydon lad, I was married in Croydon. To watch that happening, knowing I'm not there, and knowing I'm that borough commander, was really, really hard."

He had a similar conversation with the fire brigade commander standing next to him in the control room. "They have a policy where [firefighters] have to be escorted, and quite rightly so, because they were under attack, but it got to a point where I had to say: 'I haven't got anyone left.'"

11am Tuesday

The most intense riots in modern English history had engulfed London, Birmingham and Liverpool, with further outbreaks of disorder in Leicester, Bristol, Leeds, Milton Keynes, Reading, Huddersfield and parts of Kent. England felt on the brink of social collapse.

"I rang my dad and said: 'I don't want to go today, I think something terrible is going to happen,'" said a woman police sergeant. "And he picked me up and said: 'This is what you're supposed to be doing.'"

The sergeant, in her 30s, was deployed to West Bromwich, where police were not expecting disorder. Her team, comprising another sergeant, two constables and two police community support officers (PCSOs), were told to deliver a very specific message to residents: business as usual. "Those are the three words that will stick with me, because there was nothing [further] from the truth," she said. By late morning it was clear something was brewing. A crowd appeared, having learned via social networks there would be riots in the high street at 2pm.

"I could sense the fear in everybody and I thought: OK, this isn't business as usual, and I'm not happy to deliver that message. I really didn't scaremonger, but what I said was: if you feel uncomfortable, then please close down your business."

Eighty young people sitting on empty market stalls began putting on masks and balaclavas. The sergeant realised her role was to "keep up the ridiculous pretence" that she and five untrained officers could stop any disorder. She walked into the group of masked youths and tried talking to them.

"[Then] this mass of people I had just been talking to became a mob, and they just started to smash all the shops. They were smashing the amusement arcade, and I could see inside the shop – I've never been so shocked in all my life that they were doing this in front of us."

When the crowd grew to more than 200 and a car was overturned and set on fire, the sergeant felt "in charge [but] completely alone and isolated". She screamed down the radio for assistance, asked one PCSO to direct the traffic, and ordered the remaining five to take out their batons and form a line to seal off the high street to would-be looters.

Then a group of bare-chested men came up to the line and one stepped forward to attack her. "I really growled, and I didn't get into a debate with him about who was the biggest," she said. "I was like [the cartoon heroine] She-Ra. I was going: 'Raaaa!' And everybody was going: 'Get back!' We made ourselves so much bigger than we were."

5pm Tuesday

By the time police regained control of West Bromwich, disorder was returning to Birmingham, where three people would be killed. There would also be a second night of disorder in Liverpool, Gloucester and Nottingham. In Manchester, most police saw riots on their patch as inevitable.

"As a police officer, you develop this sixth sense," said a 39-year-old constable. "Everybody knew something was going to happen." The challenge was working out where the disorder would begin. Initially, most resources were deployed in Manchester city centre. The level of unrest in Salford was underestimated. The constable was in a group of 25 officers who were first on the scene. "Five-, six-hundred people stood around this roundabout, vehicles parked everywhere … people piling up ammunition at the sides of the road, helicopters up. Some [people] were laughing, you could see the anger in the faces, and you're thinking: it's only a matter of time."

There was silence in the van. "It was very, very quiet – almost eerie, like when you jump into a swimming pool and you can't hear anything." Then the crowd began hurling blocks of concrete at the vans. "We were shouting at each other: 'Get your shields up – the window's gonna go in!'" They fled, took stock, and returned on foot to disperse the crowds. The Greater Manchester police Twitter account announced: "Reports of 'stand off' between gangs and police in Salford exaggerated. 20 or so youths dispersed by police – one brick thrown, no injuries."

On the ground, the constable saw things differently. "You could see this crowd of about 1,200-1,300 people stood there shouting, some with balaclavas on, some with bandanas covering their faces, people dressed in shorts and T-shirts, some dressed in all black; different ages, men, women, kids, launching things at us," he said. "The sky just went black due to the sheer number of missiles up in the air."

One of the missiles – a breezeblock – struck him on the head. "I've dropped to the floor, my shield is on the floor. For that period of, like, five to 10 seconds, I just took blows all over the body … After I'd been hit in the head and [got] back up on my feet, somebody was shouting: 'Kill the fucking pigs!' That's when I almost felt a shiver through my spine."

The bronze commander who issued the order to withdraw from Salford – "van up and get out!" – was a 45-year-old superintendant. He likened what happened in Salford to the movie Black Hawk Down, the 2001 war film about disastrous operation by US armed forces in Somalia.

His officers had become the focal point of violence, were seriously outnumbered and were "just making it worse", he said. The superintendent clambered on to one of the departing vans. Sat in the same vehicle was a 35-year-old constable, who described his boss as looking dishevelled. "He had no shield," he said. "We just got absolutely annihilated and battered."

11 months on

At the height of the chaos, the riots may have felt like defeat to the police. But after months of reflection, the widespread view among officers appears rather different. They admit there were times they lost control, but ultimately, officers point out, they regained order – with fewer injuries and deaths than might have been expected.

Many police believe they averted civil unrest on a grander scale: the disorder in 2011 was, at times, more intense than the riots of the 1980s, but it lasted four days rather than several months. Others say the criminal investigations into the riots, which relied heavily on CCTV evidence, have been a big success, with more than 4,000 people arrested in London alone.

Despite the public criticism, there remains a deep sense of pride among police deployed during the riots, who feel they fulfilled their duty to protect the public and helped bring the country back from the brink. As a Met chief inspector deployed on the first night put it: "Those officers that were with me on the night did everything that they possibly could. They pushed the boundaries in terms of safety in order to make sure that we saved lives … There wasn't a single officer that said: 'No, we're not going any further.'"

But what of the impact on those officers who went beyond the call of duty? For most who participated in this study, the interviews represented a rare opportunity to take stock and reflect. Several said the memories seemed so unreal that it felt as though the riots had never actually happened. For a few, the psychological imprint is only now beginning to appear.

The constable with the iPhone, who was almost dragged off a shopping trolley in Tottenham into a mob of rioters, only realised the full impact of that night when he went to see a counsellor. Asked to fill out an "anxiety indicator" questionnaire, he was told: "You know, we start to get concerned when people score about 20 or more. You've scored 86."

The constable wrote out his experiences on a piece of paper, and reflected: "I genuinely thought there was a chance I was going to die when I got stuck on those trolleys."

He added: "I've dealt with all sorts of horrendous things at work and you're fine – you have a laugh with your colleagues, get it all out, feel fine. So the idea that [the incident on the trolley] had bothered me that much never really occurred to me. But yeah: that little incident will stay with me forever."