I'm a Londoner born and bred, from Lambeth (one of the epicentres of these riots) my Grandad and his family are all from the Borough and Southwark, proper Cockneys all of them. Me and my ancestors are working class through and through.
We lived in Brixton (just off the Brixton road) and I wasn't even 2 years old when the Brixton Riots happened. Then as now the streets were full of violence, cars and buildings were burnt down and looting and chaos took place. The violence and unrest spread all over the country then too.
I was 6 when the Broadwater Farm riots happened in Tottenham a few years later.
People were out on the streets then for all the reasons they're out on the streets now.
As it goes London has always had riots. For centuries (in fact in almost every century of its history) Londoners have expressed their rage on their own streets at a system which excludes them, which forces poverty and disadvantage and social or racial prejudice on them. They've looted and burned and attacked the authorities on occasions too numerous to list, and almost always for the same reasons.
London is burning now for the same reasons it has always burned, because there are large numbers of urban poor people who currently have no hope of a job or a secure future, because the British establishment ignores and sidelines them and then wonders why these people feel no especial connection with a society which deliberately has no place in it for them. The British state is dominated by public school boys, Oxbridge graduates, aristos and royals (FFS!), it has no place in it and no understanding of anyone or anything which does not support, fit into, or conform to this oppressive social hierarchy.
It used to be that Britain's poorest people were white, back before Afro-Caribbean migration from Britain's former colonies replaced the urban white poor with an often even poorer urban black poor. Throw in decades of various forms of institutional and social racial prejudice into the mix and London's rioters have new reasons for their rage and a slightly different appearance, but they're really not any different from their historical predecessors.
If you are born poor in Britain you will die poor, if you are born into wealth you will die wealthy. Whenever you have a society which so effectively enforces socio-economic stratification as effectively as Britain does you will have social conflict. You will see mindless violence on the streets, you will see people looting and burning and tearing the fabric of their already fairly flimsy communities apart. In Britain this invariably tends to happen in conjunction with periods of economic collapse and/or under the leadership of (small c) conservative governments. This is because few other western European countries allow their poorest people to suffer quite so acutely as Britain does when times are bad and Britain's conservative elites (exemplified currently by the Cameron Etonites and their flunkies) have nothing but absolute contempt and disgust for the urban poor.
Young under-class people in London confronted with a society which treats them with contempt and like vermin often even in the best of times feel no connection to and no sentimentality about the scruples of that society. And one has to ask, why should they?
Are wanton acts of violence and destruction and criminality going to improve these young people's lives? No, but then no one was really trying to improve their lives in any case, and no one much cared what happened to them before now, and since there was never much they could do about that many of these young people just feel like they may as well take the opportunity to go and rob an electrical store or Tesco and burn up a car or two.
But like I say, Londoners have always rioted and so long as the system they live under forces an iniquitous social system on them they probably always will.
All this shock, and horror and outrage I see everywhere atm is fatuous and risible. It's not like any of this is really a surprise, it's not like Britain isn't used to having to face the rage of its under-classes every now and then, it accepts it as the price of continuing to operate the system which keeps the well off well off and the poor the poor, the powerful in power and the powerless left to express impotent rage and self destructive criminality which ultimately harms no one more than themselves.