About 15 years ago, I set up a club with some friends called the Wetherspoons Underground SykoGeosofy Club devoted to exploring and researching hidden aspects of London. One day in August 2011, I was on the bus back from one of our walks, during which we’d been following the path of the underground River Effra, and as we passed through Brixton I became aware of a commotion. That was my first inkling of the riots that had started to kick off in response to Mark Duggan being killed by police. I think it may have been the next day that I wandered up to Hackney, where the Carhartt shop was being looted and things were being set on fire. I remember standing around with a crowd waiting to see if a burning car outside the store was going to blow up. Drifting northward, I found what seemed to be a frontline, with the police on the south side of Clarence Road and the north occupied by a mix of rioters and locals. As I navigated the sidestreets I was approached by a guy who said: “You’d better put your cameras away – you’re going to get hit if you take them in there.” So I stuck them all in my bag apart from my little Powershot, and wandered around “the mob” for a bit before crossing back to where all the police were, along with the press pack. The man with the scarf over his face was some kind of anarchist activist, I think. He walked into the road, past a bunch of skips and bins that rioters had been dragging over and setting alight. The broken rocking horse was lying in front of one of the bins and he picked it up as he approached. Then he delivered a long spiel: I can’t remember for the life of me what he said, and I’ve no idea why he chose to make the speech while holding the horse. But it made for an arresting scene and, as the kid in the background ran diagonally across the frame, I took the picture. That shape behind him that looks like it could be a burning piano is actually a pushed-over wheelie bin. I’ve always been interested in counterculture and the underground. I squatted throughout the early 1990s, having arrived in London from my native New Zealand a few weeks after the Poll Tax riots, thus missing one of the biggest social protests of the period. The riots of 2011 seem to have been largely an emotional reaction against alienation and discrimination; a wide-reaching expression of class war. Those youths were perhaps trying to reclaim their community. For me, the broken toy kind of symbolised everything else that was broken. Who knows, one of the kids involved in the rioting might once have owned that horse. This image was included with others in a series I called King Mob after a piece of graffiti left on the wall of Newgate Gaol after the 18th-century Gordon Rioters gutted it: “His Majesty King Mob.” In recent years, I’ve become increasingly drawn to the folk revival, which has taken on some interesting political aspects. Of late, for example, I’ve been attending and photographing Right to Roam protests and trespass events, which have included a lot of people in traditional costume, including hobby horses. I see parallels between the subterranean rivers we were following on the day the rioting began, which have been culverted and driven underground, and these countercultural currents. Attempts to tame and control them are at best temporary as they continue to flow, sometimes bubbling to the surface, breaking their imposed barriers and demanding attention and autonomy. Max Reeves’s CV Born: Papakura, New Zealand, 1966. Trained: Self-taught. Influences: Robert Frank, Don McCullin, Ezra Pound, William Blake. High point: “Joining the Serious Road Trip in 1993 and travelling with them to many troubled places to try to help people, particularly kids.” Low point: “The endless failures and self-sabotaging due to mental health.” Top tip: “Don’t wash mushrooms in the washing machine.”