ABSTRACT
Agents of government and/or administration who hold both real and symbolic power in the nation carry with them an embodied, ideological landscape that stems, at least in part, from a militarized history of wider, diverse British and European fascists that have done much to shape the character of relationships between government policy, policing, youth, race and racialization. While the provisional causes of the three historical moments of London riots are important, these events also need to be considered as a ‘hermeneutics of action’ – that is, as an interpretive event that led to embodied interpretations of the riots contingent upon a series of political actions. As Pilkington suggests, urban spaces and young people’s political actions operate as ‘sites of cultural memory’ that have the potential for representing experiences of oppression, repression and also possibility. The fashion consumed by Teddy boys reflected disparate class references.
