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In July 1981, some of the most violent rioting ever seen in Britain erupted in the Toxteth area of Liverpool. Thirty years on, the local community is still paying the price

After the second night of the fire and the fury, the police burst through the door of the Simon family home in a small terrace along Beaconsfield Street, Liverpool, the 13-year-old grabbed Michael and threw him into a pile of other young body wrapped in the back a van. "I thought I was going to be killed \," recalls Michael. "There were 10 in the van and I was at the beginning -.. Only a small, thin boy, with most beatings They beat me until I could hardly feel it no more and I thought it was \ for me"

Michael was arrested over a nine nights of Wrath of 500 people - three decades ago this weekend - in which 470 policemen were also wounded, a disabled man was killed by a police car and burned 70 buildings. The so-called "Toxteth riots" from July 1981 was the single most virulent insurgency on the British mainland since time immemorial, and were considered the most far-reaching.

"Back" said Michael Simon, "it looked like where you stood. I was 13 years old, and from my perspective it was about the brutality of the police, who were always racist only in hindsight, we recognize that it was on the machine, the system that was all. "Michael in Beaconsfield Street, a six, a father born in Liverpool of West Africa, Antigua and Irish descent and a Scouse-Irish mother. His father worked as an electro-plater for Triumph and Ford, where the chemicals he handled chrome preparation seriously damaged his health. For the boys in the family, says Michael, "was harassment by the police, a daily thing, especially for the older boys when I saw my older brother, our Brian, was for ever to have been beaten by the police. Not even sometimes arrested -. was only beaten once till he was accused of stealing lead from a roof, and my mother had to walk down the street and jump on him so he would not crush 't get arrested and they also got ".

Michael Simon 's mother, Mary, was now a new home in the heart of Toxteth resettled. The farm is all coming and going of a morning, so that Mary 's daughter Karen tea in her hospital personnel tunic before Michael and his brother swing round.

"Even when I was younger and paler skin than Brian," says Michael, "I have not taken up. I remember one time I get on the bus at the Lodge Lane to the school, was with . my brown leather gym bag stolen A car and the police moved into a van, grabbing me from the bus and started on my bag and I thought. "If a car 'robbed s what' s that has to do with my bag? '"After the riots, but" in the period immediately after, we' d raised the fear. We 'd been a no-go area. We were too powerful even for the police. "The insurgency, he says, was broken out of" a new confidence in our identity, we had to apologize to \ nothing. "

The conversation shifts, as it invariably does – and importantly – in Liverpool 8, back to the history of the city and its black community, the key to understanding why Toxteth was the most violent of the insurgencies of 1981, and, over the long term of 30 years, the most thoroughly punished. "I mean, it was obvious, even to me at the age of 13," says Michael, "that if it's all about cohesion and integration, then Liverpool 8 should have been a shining example, par excellence. But it wasn't – the discrimination was worse here than Manchester or anywhere else. Why wasn't it the shining example? Well, it's what [sociologist] Paul Gilroy writes, isn't it? That complex: mixed-race kids remind the greater part of a racist society about the union of black and white, and they just can't handle it."

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"It always amazes me when I look back that more people were not killed on both sides. And look at the one who died, David Moore, disabled and run down – and no justice for that lad."

The official aftershock and aftermath of the riots is well recorded. In London, Lord Scarman would conclude – after the Brixton riots – that moves towards positive discrimination favouring black people in society would be a "price worth paying". Lord Gifford, tasked to report on Liverpool, found that racial discrimination had been "uniquely horrific" in the city. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously dispatched Michael Heseltine to be minister for Merseyside and launch a garden festival site, which is now a wasteland.

Local developers are not available, ready to fight and willing to renovate to maintain the stocks and let people stay on site, and their number does not contain anything other than the Amoo brothers, Eddy and Chris, the Real Thing, Liverpool 8 's famous band and composer of the hit "You are everything to me ',' 't Can Get Without You" and - more importantly - the anthem and the soundtrack, the riots, "Children of the Ghetto" . The brothers and Eddy 's wife, Sylvia, now run a property company called ECAM (the brothers' initials), Eddy Amoo calls the "my retirement plan" together with the proceeds of the countless silver discs up his living room wall. "We want to bring buildings back to what they were," he says. "Of course, it 's got to be done commercially, but we don' t want to crush things. We 're against the hidden agenda to see that Granby will disappear street, or that beautiful church in Princes Street, where someone just waiting until it is so dilapidated it \ re to destroy landmarks 'll fall And we'.. look at the Rialto, where we learned what we know about music, you have seen it? You 've turned it into offices, a piece of junk. "

Liverpool 's fixation with the wrecking ball is not party political - it was on by a Labour Council, passed the Liberal Democrats and now back to work - yet it is unique in Toxteth. Parts of the structurally solid Victorian terraces at Anfield, near Liverpool FC 's ground feel the Toxteth bricked windows "Regeneration" effect, as well Smithdown Road, and - in a current controversy - the flattened Edge Lane and Kensington area to the many people from Toxteth were "resettled ', as the polite phrase it, after the riots.

Again Liverpool 's sage and fool, Jimmy McGovern, the voice of the people (for him, the destruction of Edge Lane, ostensibly for a road-widening a matter of inches, was the last straw). Five years ago I went with McGovern about the "Granby Triangle" riot zone, said he, \ wouldn "I 't visit often as a white working-class boy, unless it was to buy everything what fantastic fruit, mangoes, and things that - if my memory doesn 'play t Tricks - were sold wood drayman' \ s car "McGovern was furious fuming:" If this regeneration, what 's vandalism \.? "he hissed. "If that is the capital of culture, what \ 'Sa Philistines are decent houses, I left my decay, what is their problem, we've been through all this in the 1960s, we know what a disaster?.? - don 't it \ learn "?