The night of 21 April 2011 witnessed a first in the history of Britain's biggest supermarket chain. Tesco, the corporation that had grown from humble barrow-boy beginnings in London's East End 92 years earlier to control almost one third of the UK's grocery market and billions of pounds of household spending, was attacked by rioters in Bristol.

Eight police officers were injured in the disturbances in Stokes Croft, a neighbourhood just north of the city centre popular with artists and students. Several hundred people joined battles with the police after a heavy-handed raid on a squat known as Telepathic Heights. National media immediately labelled it the ‘Tesco riot’, linking the troubles with a vociferous local campaign against the company's decision to open a Tesco Express convenience store in the busy Cheltenham Road.

Four weeks later Prime Minister David Cameron announced a review of the state of England's high streets, fronted by the retail guru and TV presenter Mary Portas. Whether or not the so-called Tesco riot had influenced his thinking when the review was announced, a wave of rioting across England later that summer inextricably entwined the mayhem of street violence with the state of the nation's traditional shopping streets. Suddenly the high street was not just ailing, but dangerous. The boundaries between shopping and looting seemed to vanish in five days of madness in early August.

During those feverish summer nights nearly 15,000 people were caught up in a surge of disorder, starting in London's suburbs and spreading rapidly to Birmingham, Manchester and smaller towns. Five people died. Many more lost their businesses. Hundreds were fined or jailed as a result of the estimated 5,000 crimes committed that week.

What connects high streets and riots? At their heart, both are about the future of the places we live in, and where we base our everyday lives. The decline of the shopping street and the rioters’ willingness to trash their hometowns both illustrate and expose the disturbed and often dysfunctional relationships people in 21st-century Western societies have with the places they call home.

The August riots began, as many English riots have done, with a protest against the police. A young black man, Mark Duggan, had been shot by officers in Tottenham while they were attempting to arrest him.