Hiya nynysuts. Blocks of flats were all usually built by then and it was people in fact being moved out of them to make way for the Kingsway tunnel and inner city ringroads etc - the breaking up of Communities.
Good accounts of the Toxteth riots can be googled. My recollections of it are that Ghost Town by the Specials was eerily at No.1 that summer and living near to St. Anne street police station there were police being coached in from other counties to help deal with it. My mates and I mosied on up towards Toxteth to see what was going on but were stopped by police on Clarence st pfft.
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The stop and search sus law was prevalent and we used to walk through St. John's precint of a night - out of boredom and were forever stopped by the bizzies, one of my mates who was a mod has a fishtail parka with loads of badges on it ala Quadophenia and as a copper grabbed his lapel, so a couple of badges came off and went down a grid - tut tut said the copper, the rest of us grinned.
16 year old were ushered into Maggies new YOP/YTS/WEP schemes, varying each year between being called Youth opportunity programmes, Youth training schemes or Work expreience Programmes. I was first an apprentice mechanic, then a warehouse/storeman, then a jobber working on a site, then an office junior - doing the round with a shipping firm, delivering and collecting Bills of lading. If you were lucky, the boos would keep you on after the 6 months were up but many abused it as cheap labour.
Oh and in 1980 - Gerard celebrated his 30th.
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