You should see it on a Friday night

What kind of people would you expect to see on a typical street corner of Britain such as this one? Shoppers, schoolchildren and pensioners by day, certainly. But after dark, the pubs empty and then the fighting starts. By Darius Sanai

Havant in Hampshire is a pretty normal place, as far as British towns go. The borough council is run by the Lib Dems. The local MP is David Willetts, the former Conservative paymaster-general. A few hundred yards to the north of the town centre sits Leigh Park, one of Britain's biggest council estates; just to the south is Hayling Island, where new BMWs stand in the drives of sprawling villas on the edge of the Solent.

The town centre itself is compact and pleasantly pedestrianised, with a street market flowing along the main street and past the leafy gardens of St Faith's Church twice a week. Beside the crossroads, the wooden-beamed Bear Hotel has four crowns and a "Commended" award from the English Tourist Board. There's a community college, a branch-line railway station, a leisure centre, a Balti house, a Chinese takeaway, a late-night kebab shop and several pubs. The McDonald's has tables on its outside terrace, and it takes five minutes to walk along the well marked, well lit pedestrian byway across the railway tracks from the old village centre to the new leisure complex.

Everything about Havant is quite normal, even the statistics: unemployment is around 6.5 per cent, compared to the national average of just under 6 per cent. Violent crime is lower than the national average. The population is 47,500, typical of a small town.

At around seven o'clock on Friday evenings, the crowds that occupy the daytime town centre, a mixture of single mothers and their children, of posh schoolgirls shopping for CDs, of retirees and housewives and students and young unemployed people, melts away and, for the next five hours, the town is under siege. "That may sound like a strong way of putting it," a local policeman says, "but it's true. If someone who wasn't used to it came down and looked at Havant after closing time, he'd think he'd arrived in the middle of a riot."

Another officer is even more candid. "If we didn't have reinforcements from the specials (special constables volunteering for duty), we'd be murdered on a Friday night."

In the police control centre, we are sitting in front of a bank of screens. Each screen shows an image from a camera, sweeping the town. One screen, to the side, is more animated than the others: several dozen people are assembled on a street corner, milling threateningly. The police stand in front of them; shouts, orders and exhortations must be rising out of the growing chaos, but the CCTV system records no sound. Just as things seem to be cooling down, the screen goes wild in a riot of blurring streaks of colour, with limbs flying around, bodies falling, people running.

One group pursues a man in a white shirt down a tree-lined street and punches him repeatedly until he falls; they then take turns to stamp on his head. Only because he's on a grass verge, and because his pursuers are wearing soft sports shoes, does his skull not crack.

Someone intervenes and pulls the bloodied young man up to his feet; after a calm conversation, the attackers turn to go and the last of the group executes a perfect, cartoon round-house punch on the dazed young man. He staggers three yards to his left, but, somehow, stays upright, propped against a lamppost. The others laugh and slap each other's backs as they leave the frame; the camera turns to follow them but they are soon out of range.

The rioters caught on CCTV are acting out a normal Friday night, a Friday night like any other, in Havant.

Kenny is 18, and lives on Leigh Park, the massive council estate (the world's largest when it was built in 1950), 20 minutes' walk from the town centre. "We come down Fridays without fail," he says. "Fridays are for drinking with mates, Saturdays you go out with your girlfriend or clubbing down in Portsmouth."

The first stop for Kenny and his friends is the new Wetherspoons pub beside the bus station, where there's not much atmosphere, but beer is just 99p a pint. After getting "tanked up" (at least five pints, he says), "we go down the road to one of the locals, where there's music and you can dance a bit."

"The boys drink pints, the girls drink Hooches or Breezers [alcopops], then we're all chucked out at closing time. And then," says Kenny, who is leaning on his bike on the overpass beside the station, taking a drag of a roll-up, "there's fuck all to do."

Kenny says he tries not to get involved in any violence: "I might lose my job; you know, it's not worth it. But I know loads of people who do. Why not? There's fuck all else."

Two Fridays ago, around a hundred people were involved in what local newspapers reported as "drunken rioting" in the town centre just before midnight. One crowd burst out of a pub and a mass punch-up swept like a wave along the street. Another crowd poured from a train at the station and encountered a large group that had just come out of a pub; a witness, who was trying to reach the Havant cabs office on the station forecourt, described the ensuing melee as "like a war".

"It was quite frightening; it looked like they were out to kill each other. It must have been 50 or 60 at least but it felt like hundreds," he says. A regular at one of Havant's more peaceful and "mature" pubs, he does not want to give his name but says he is determined not to be driven away.

"They're just nasty, vicious, not very intelligent people who think they've got something to prove. What would I do to change the situation? I'd build a big hole and put them all in it and fill it up."

The incident made a few paragraphs in the local press, fewer in the regional papers, and nothing at all on national news bulletins.

The most frightening thing about Havant is not the siege on Friday nights or the helplessness of what is an enlightened and well intentioned but clearly undermanned local community police force. It is the fact that Havant is normal - not just terms of its economic and demographic statistics, but in terms of what occurs every Friday night.

One police officer shows a video of the mayhem outside the kebab shop on a recent evening, when a group of designer-shirted lads, egged on by delighted girls in their best dresses, started pummelling a stranger eating chips.

"It's like that every Friday night," he says, "come rain or whatever." The officer says he used to be stationed in a town in Yorkshire. "It was much worse there," he adds. In general, he says, Havant is pretty normal for small-town England.

Down at the Trax, one of the town's "cleaner" pub-discos, three girls have ordered another Jelly Bean, a jug containing a frothy, sweet mix of vodka, gin, rum, Malibu, peach schnapps and blackcurrant, topped up with lager and cider. This costs pounds 6.

"It's the basic way of life: work five days, get pissed two days. There's nothing here for under-18s," says Paula, a 19-year-old beauty therapist.

"It's no wonder there's so much aggro," says her friend Alan, who moved to Havant from Yorkshire three years ago. "If there's a bloke with a girl and you fancy her, the standard line seems to be to go up to her and say, `Fancy a shag?'"

The publican, Gary Barnard, says that the source of the problem is under- age drinkers. "They get out of control and pretend to be really big," he explains.

Different people have differing thoughts on how the chaos could be contained; most striking is the lack of coherence about a solution. Police officers disagree with each other on whether late-night licensing would help or exacerbate the situation. The causes - young people, too much booze, drugs, nothing else to do, are the buzzwords - seem clear enough. But whether the solution is to clamp down or to liberalise is beyond most of us.

Havant, and its CCTV images of wanton destruction and bloodshed, is not only closer to home than the nearest war; it is home, the town in which we all live. While the Prime Minister tells the country about his vision of zero tolerance, the young people who appear on the streets on Friday nights, drugged up and tanked up and spitting at each other, psyched up for a fight and a kebab, are the New Britain.

"Course we're out to have a laugh," says Peter, a 17-year-old labourer who is standing outside the Malt and Hops pub. "If you want to call it a riot, you can do."