A strange town rises from the marshes outside Gravesend. Its buildings are constructed largely of grey breezeblocks. It has neat terraced houses with doors painted in primary colours, a Tube station and an Indian restaurant, but these hold no residents, passengers or diners. To approach many of its structures from an angle is to realise their facades are two dimensional, with nothing behind them but grey sky.
This north Kent settlement is a mundane kind of British dystopia. Here, the state can still deploy its coercive powers, but everything else is crumbling: red phone boxes are burnt out; massed ranks of officers march through quiet streets; simmering ethnic and political tensions erupt daily into violence.
The site is the heart of Metropolitan Police’s Specialist Training Centre, a fake town built for public order education where officers practise standing in the rain while an angry crowd hurls bricks at their heads. Built in 2003 with £50 million of PFI investment, it spreads out over 9,000 square metres of land between the Thames and a dry mortar plant.
Despite, or perhaps because of, its significance, the Met has remained secretive about this place since its creation. Other than a visit by the Sun’s crime editor last year (in which he observed firearms training and failed a video exercise by executing a child) few outsiders have been given access. One exception, in 2013, was photographer James Rawlings, whose shots of discarded shields and mannequins capture something of the place’s eerie unreality.
Last week, however, a delegation from the National Union of Journalists was invited past the barbed perimeter fence. We were driven from Gravesend station in the back of a police van, led through buildings that resembled a comprehensive school and fed a stodgy canteen breakfast underneath prints of burning officers. Then we were taken into the town itself.
After reporting on the disorder across the country this summer, I was keen to understand how the Met are preparing for further unrest. In Epping, I had watched as a crowd of young men surged forward and around police lines outside the town’s asylum hotel, shrugging off a cloud of pepper spray to break past the cops and attack left-wing counter-protesters. In Parliament Square, I had spoken to pensioners attempting to overwhelm police resources and render the proscription of Palestine Action meaningless. I wondered how the state was preparing to tackle what some fear may be far greater violence to come. In the last year we have heard more about the chaos that Britain threatens to break into; if order is kept, it will be imposed by methods learned at Gravesend.
Inside the training centre, we were taken to a viewing platform above a replica Tube platform opposite Pizzaland, 18 High Street. Soon, the first rioters began to appear. They jogged casually away from several dozen officers who had turned the corner behind them. Then, outside the Post Office, the police formed into lines. The mob started to throw wooden bricks at them with real speed. They smacked off shields and helmets and shot up into the air at wild angles. “I think some of my colleagues are frustrated NFL quarterbacks,” said Constable Tom Wright, an affable training officer who had spent five years playing a hooligan himself, as he watched from above.
Men in black facemasks and protective gear pushed forward a shopping trolley that rattled and clinked as it edged towards the police lines. A stocky man in a yellow t-shirt stepped forward, set fire to one of the Molotov cocktails the trolley carried, and lobbed the bomb at a group of officers with studied ease. Upon impact, flames shot up beyond their heads. The suits worn by riot police will resist an explosion’s initial flash, but do not provide protection from an ongoing blaze. When hit with petrol bombs, therefore, cops will shimmy from one foot to another, dancing a little jig until the flames that might have engulfed them pour off their body like water.
The scenarios used for training here do not directly reference the real world, but they are not exactly unrelated either. In the exercise I watched, the police scrambled to defend a school from protesters convinced it was a factory manufacturing drones used to commit human rights abuses in a foreign war. To protect the imaginary children inside, officers with small, round shields rushed forward to drive away the crowd. Then, conscious of their vulnerability, they retreated behind colleagues with tall shields that provided superior protection from flying debris.
Directing this performance was the unit’s bronze commander, responsible for leading operations on the ground. When one rioter spotted their distinctively coloured helmet, he began lobbing bricks high in the air towards them. “You can run, yellow head, but you can’t hide,” he shouted several times. This, Constable Wright told us, was an accurate performance. The Met had seen protesters identify and target commanding officers during real demonstrations in order to disorientate the policing operation.
If protests become more violent, the force has other options. In one building here, police train with baton guns: a “less lethal” weapon that is designed to injure a target, but which can kill if it strikes the head. Though they have been fired in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and authorised for use at Notting Hill Carnival and Black Lives Matter protests, they have never been used to maintain public order on the British mainland.
After the riot had finished, we walked through the town to Thames Estate Agents, 20 High Street. Behind its door, however, was not an office but a football stand in which officers can train for disorder at sports matches. Standing in neat rows beside its tiered seats were six SandCats: dark, hulking 4x4s with armour plating and bulletproof glass that would loom over the tallest protester. Built by Plasan, an Israeli firm, and used by the IDF for raids on West Bank villages. To my mind they are much more intimidating than the Jankel, the vehicle they have replaced, which was deployed in the 2011 London riots.
Fears that Britain is due for a bout of mass violence on such a scale – or greater – have metastasised through the body politic in recent months. Speaking to the New Statesman earlier this year, Lisa Nandy said she believed that northern England was so tense it could “go up in flames” at any time. Dominic Cummings has claimed the intelligence services are discussing the potential for “racial/ethnic/mob/gang violence”. David Betz, a professor at the King’s College Department of War Studies, has gone further still and won much attention for predicting that Britain is sliding towards civil war.
According to Betz’s argument, governments such as our own can no longer peacefully manage multicultural societies fractured by ethnic grievance. We can therefore expect cities such as London to become “feral” with no-go zones spreading as the state’s authority dims. If civic conflict does break out, one side will push the metropolis into crisis by cutting off power and supplies, he argues. Such a scenario would leave the Met officers trained in Gravesend fighting to avert anarchy.
For some, the training itself is proof that the state is readying its forces for civil war. When an image of one of its rioters wearing a t-shirt with a Union Jack on the sleeve went viral earlier this year, it sparked outrage from those convinced the Met were preparing to repress British patriots. Many remained unconvinced by a statement from the force in which it claimed the iconography was merely coincidental. “We all know that the police’s priorities have a laser-like focus on the ‘far right’ over the actual threats we face today,” GB News presenter-cum-Reform councillor Darren Grimes wrote online.
Whether any of this is true or not, that such premonitions of crisis have spread suggests a country ill-at-ease with itself. Speaking to the NUJ delegation, a Met silver commander who declined to give his name said that while demonstrations had not become more aggressive in the last few years, they were certainly growing more vitriolic.
“I think what we’ve seen is that protest has become more contentious,” he said. “It’s become more voluminous. The number of protests that we’re dealing with I would say has increased.” People kept asking him if he wanted to be promoted to become a gold commander, responsible for the strategic planning of public order events, he said. He insisted he did not.
Balancing the demands of different groups – left-wing, right-wing, pro-Palestine, pro-Israel – was simply too great a headache. The ability of people to behave in a crowd, meanwhile, had declined after the Covid lockdowns. “It’s almost as if certain elements of society forgot how to behave,” he added wistfully.
In the wake of the 7 October attacks, Southport and Epping, the rate and size of protests has grown. In a review of the response to last year’s race riots, Sir Andy Cooke, the chief inspector of constabulary, found that disorder had been neither premeditated nor co-ordinated by any specific group but driven instead by an amorphous crowd of influencers and agitators such as Lucy Connolly, who was jailed after writing online that people could set fire to asylum hotels “for all I care”. The police had simply failed to keep pace with digital communications, Sir Andy’s report concluded. They were left unable to understand or react to public sentiment.
At Gravesend, training officers repeatedly expressed their concern that viral lies might incite fresh violence. “We’re now looking to make sure we’re preventing that serious disorder in the first instance by stopping that misinformation or stopping the void from being filled by bad faith actors,” said Constable Wright as he stood next to an immobile Tube carriage and reflected on the last year of public order policing. They would now name the ethnicity and religion of suspects in high-profile cases for a start, he added, as they had done when a white English man drove his car into Liverpool’s title celebrations. For the British police to preserve order by controlling discourse online, though, felt a little as if the RNLI were trying to stop drownings by halting the tide.
One year after the riots that followed Southport, it is hard to believe that any of the social tensions that caused them have lessened. Almost 15 years on, it is hard to believe any of the social tensions that caused London’s 2011 riots have been solved either. A report published in July by Sir Sajid Javid and Jon Cruddas found that Britain remains a “powder keg” ready to blow. With its simulation of a decaying public realm wracked by communal violence, the Met’s Potemkin village seemed to serve as both a mirror of the nation and a premonition of its near future.
A large part of the point of hurling bricks and petrol bombs at trainees, Constable Wright had told us, was to ensure they were psychologically prepared for the worst they might face. As police officers leave the fake town in the marshes and return to the real world, they will be hoping that day never comes.
[Further reading: Tommy Robinson’s day of rage]
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