Ronan Bennett spent two years interviewing gang members in east London for his powerfully personal TV drama, Top Boy. Here he describes their hidden, hopeless world – and the lengths they’ll go to escape from it

Youth worker Emeka Egbuonu’s book has much to teach policymakers following the riots, writes Rachel Williams

“You could see it coming…the kids don’t feel like they’re part of anything, they don’t feel they’re being heard”

Channel 4 video: a local filmmaker talks to two members of a gang about possible reasons for the riot and their relationship with the police

Half the borough’s children live in poverty. Missing, too, are the summer courses that kept minds and hands busy

“These teenagers have got nothing better to do… they think that they’re well hard”

Put the shutters up on the shops, but not in our minds. A punitive and condemning reaction simply mirrors the alienation so many already experience

London’s Tory Mayor has said that the riots’ “background field of causation” is “very, very, various.”

What were the reasons for this week’s violent disturbances in the borough?

Yes, we must regain control of the streets, but loose talk about rubber bullets and water cannon will achieve nothing