If 1991’s Tyneside riots were to make headlines around the world, it was The Chronicle which led the way in reporting those events.
Our front pages from early September 1991 show how the story developed on a daily basis as the rioting spread across Tyneside, before an uneasy peace was finally established days later.
Go here for more stories about Meadow Well 30 years on
On the 7th we told on our front page of the deaths of two youths who died after their stolen car crashed then exploded into flames during a police chase in North Tyneside.
And by the 9th their grieving families were calling for a police inquiry. Serious trouble erupted that night on North Shields’s Meadow Well estate.
We reported how rampaging youths were setting fire to buildings and stoning police office and firefighters under the memorable headline ‘Meadow Hell’.
Our team of reporters and photographers were quickly on the scene when copycat rioting broke out in the West End of Newcastle.
Under the headline ‘Blazing lunacy’ and a picture of the burnt-out firebomb-hit Dodds Arms pub on Elswick Road, we told how petrol bombs had been thrown at homes, while schools and shops had been looted, and the area had become a no-go area as masked joyriders took control of the glass-strewn streets.
By the 13th, the parents of the dead driver were calling for the violence to stop. Finally, on the 14th, we reported how “peace and sanity returned to the streets of Tyneside today as the public delivered a message to the rioters: ‘We’ve had enough.’”
It was one of the most dramatic weeks in Tyneside’s history – and it was all captured on the pages of the Chronicle.
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