Found guilty, he has begun an 18-month jail sentence."I've been called everything by the press - millionaire yob, small-time crook, violent, toe-rag Ryan, rogue, scumbag I'm just a normal scumbag like everybody else I'm not going to deny I've nicked cars in the past. We talk about the plans for a new sports centre on the other side of the tracks I ask him what difference this will make to North Meadowell. You do some little thing and they'll harass you, throw bricks through your window, frighten the children All over nothing. But nobody dares report what goes on."The shopkeeper wears a Nike T-shirt. They pick up cans of drink in silence, and pay for them without saying a word.) "At night there's no one to stop them No police And it's not kids You try calling them kids They're 19-, 20-year-olds It's got worse because so many people have moved away. "But they're frightened if I am away for only two hours." (Both the customers who come in while I am talking to him look ominous in the extreme. He would leave if he could."You've got to be here at night," he says, "to see what it's like." Relatives come out from Newcastle to help him.

The street is littered with broken glass and discarded wrappings. One of the few shops now open is the Avon Discount Store and Off-Licence The owner moved in after the riots He thought it was a good business opportunity But thieves have now cleared him out three times. "Lisa had sex with Ian," the scrawl on one wall says, with the careful date 3/9/95 "Lisa is age 9. Ian is age 16." A child had been run over by a joy rider the weekend before my visit.The Marina fish and chip shop on Avon Avenue (formerly run by Ashtak Ahmed) is still bricked up. But you are conscious of boarded-up windows, of burnt-out frontages, of doorsteps with mothers clutching grubby children while a slightly older brother plays with a piece of old piping - the very opposite of the model nursery. The original inhabitants were moved here from the slum-clearance harbour-side streets of North Shields.

As work collapsed, crime became a major local occupation.Since the riots, some houses have been demolished - but this leaves ominous gaps Workmen are busy revamping some of the streets. As Norman Dennis observes, they had large gardens because it was thought that this would give workers an occupation when work was short, and a way to grow their own food. They are crescents and closes of brick houses, built in a pre-war council version of the Garden City style. Even in the Fifties and Sixties, when most migrants arrived, it wasn't a good place to look for work.The houses aren't intrinsically bad.

One of the first buildings burnt down was the local youth centre. Much of the aggression was directed at the local shopkeepers, who were mostly Asian. The North-East, it is worth remembering, is white man's England Few immigrant families have settled here. In a public statement after the inquest, the father of 17-year-old Dale Robson was anxious to make it clear that young Dale had been a serious person: "he was not a joy rider"; he was "a professional" - a car thief. The riots were sparked off by the deaths of two young men who crashed in a stolen red Renault turbo while the police were chasing them.