Holiday Inn Express, Manvers: I was looking forward to meeting Bill Bailey, then I ended up stuck in a riot
One year on and the devastation caused in Manvers has shown how truly lonely people are.
On Sunday August 4, 2024, I met one of the nation's top comedians - Bill Bailey.
He was attending the Underneath the Stars Festival in Cawthorne, Barnsley, and I’d planned on interviewing him prior to his set.
I’m happy to say that he was charming and lovely, a gentleman who gave his time to a bumbling 20-something-year-old reporter and backstage spoke to all the rising indie stars to encourage their performances.
Yet, only a handful of hours prior to this, I was having insults hurled at me outside the Holiday Inn Express in Manvers.
I’d agreed to attend and report on what, at the time, was believed to be a small protest against the housing of asylum seekers at the hotel.
It wasn’t the first of its kind, as more than a year prior, in February 2023, police attended the scene of a protest under similar circumstances.
Locally, the site had been contentious for years, with those fleeing violence being housed in the hotel - which is located within a residential district and just a stone’s throw away from a small retail park - since 2021.
And so my understanding of events while driving to the now infamous location was that it would be similar to before - a small gathering of protesters and counter protesters chanting at one another with little threat.
For a while, this was the case.
Counter protesters stood in an area in front of the hotel doors, with a handful of officers and a plastic barricade separating them from the anti-asylum protesters on the other side of the street.
Who I now know to be Peter Lynch, a grandfather who died while serving a prison sentence for his role in the events, arrived during this time carrying a large placard with a list of people he believed to be corrupt written across it.
That list included MPs, judges and the ‘deep state’.
Even at the time, when no one knew how tragic things would turn out for him and his family, he drew attention, standing towards the front of the crowd with his sign bobbing overhead as he yelled across the street at those he opposed.
More and more people began to show up, and as they did it was clear that the counter protestors were vastly outnumbered and the police’s tactics would have to evolve.
Increasingly aggressive protestors swarmed the area, circling those in support of the accommodation who were chanting ‘refugees are welcome here’ against the growing tides.
Police responded, huddling this group - along with myself and a few other reporters who’d shown up early - down the street to safety.
By this point I thought we’d seen the worst of it - how wrong I was.
While heading back towards the hotel, police were beginning to become the victims of abuse and before long fires were taking hold of the grassy areas as people on quad and dirt bikes mounted the pavements.
Reinforcements came to support South Yorkshire Police officers already in attendance, though they had difficulty reclaiming any semblance of control at first.
Protestors circled the hotel, with rocks being hurled at windows and police as riot units mobilised.
This is where the widely-shared footage comes from, as hundreds packed into the hotel’s car park, draped in coloured smoke from flares while chanting ‘Yorkshire’ over and over again.
It’s also when burning blockades were placed against fire exits, and people began to smash in glass planes on the ground floor to enter the building.
The subsequent events have been repeated in great detail by both the courts and media. At this point, national broadcasters had arrived and the devastation was being streamed to televisions across the country.
What’s rarely been spoken about though are the regular moments of calm.
Violence came in waves, and for a good 20 minutes to half-an-hour you’d catch people idly mingling, handing out cans of beer and acting like it was nothing more than a sunny weekend picnic.
Then, almost in unison, people lapsed into episodes of aggression, targeting anything within their sights.
At some point they would calm down again, with everyone regrouping ahead of the next inevitable onslaught.
Journalists mostly avoided the brunt of this, though one person did continually follow myself and another reporter, shouting insults and in the worst moment threatening to set a dog on us.
From what he was saying, as well as what could be gathered from placards and overheard conversations, people believed that reporters were a faceless group, united in some vague agenda to support an all powerful deep state.
It didn’t matter whether we were local - a born-and-bred Rotherhamer like myself , freelance, or indeed national - we were simply a unified force sent to take the rioters down by filming and recording their own actions...well, that’s what they believed.
In the end, I didn’t end up mentioning the riots to Bill Bailey. In fact, no one at the festival seemed to be aware of what had gone down at the other side of town.
People were too busy; worrying about their performance, working to keep festivalgoers fed and watered, or simply enjoying themselves before returning to another week of work.
While at Manvers, amidst the chaotic scenes, it felt like the rest of the world didn’t exist - but it did, people were just busy living their lives.
Despite how many people attended on that awful day, everyone there was alone, separated by their own prejudices, misconceptions and hatred, guided by a pigeonholed view of the world.
Maybe it was a disastrous mix of lingering struggles from the Covid lockdowns and years of increasingly divisive rhetoric on social media, maybe it was an inevitability from a subset of the community, and undoubtedly some there were simply living out some chaotic fantasy devoid of reason.
Of course it wasn't the only case, as scenes of violent disorder riddled the country that summer as the horrific crimes of one individual in Stockport supercharged pre-existing beliefs.
And let's not forget social media's role, a place that has become the junk draw of society.
You open it up, knowing that a wire you need is in there somewhere, but while you've not been looking everything's tangled in on itself and morphed - even tracking one cable from beginning to end is impossible as they wrap themselves around a roll of masking tape, forgotten tools, and the 30 other wires you kept ‘just in case’.
It’s a side of the world built off so many layers of messaging and half forgotten ideas that understanding how any of these beliefs began is impossible.
The Times reported that when Afghan asylum seekers first moved into the Holiday Inn Express they were welcomed by the community, as people donated toys and clothing while the nearby Aldi gave away food.
There are discussions that should be had about the housing of refugees and there is nothing wrong with peaceful protest, but what occurred was not that. It was unfiltered rage.
Nothing that happened as a result of that day, the injuries, prison sentences, and countless hours of investigative and legal work, needed to.
People would still be walking free if, even for a moment, they thought of the world beyond themselves.
All we can do now is try and make a better future, where open communication replaces violent misinformation.
“People say ‘Bill, are you an optimist?’ And I say, ‘I hope so’.” - Bill Bailey