Hello and thank you for downloading Witness on the BBC World Service with me Claire Bowes.

Today we're going back 35 years to July 1981

when a race riot involving hundreds of young men broke out in Liverpool.

It was the first time that British police used CS gas to control civil unrest in mainland

Britain.

I've been speaking to a man who took part in the riot.

Here comes some of the cars out now. They're about three or four of them driving fast up the road.

Liverpool 8 or Toxsteth as it came to be known in the media, a rundown part of

Liverpool with a mixed-race community, poor housing and few jobs.

A lot of black smoke coming from one of the places down.

In July 1981, it turned into a battlefield.

The Grove Street area of Parliament Street, they're actually a

police in a rank there with their riot shields. The older residents of the area

didn't understand why.

Did you believe it would happen?

No, no, no, no, I would understand if they had some kind of

row with the police. But the younger people knew. Jimmy Jagni was 17 when the

riots broke out and he and his friends were afraid of the police.

When he was just 12 and a keen student, he'd been stopped by police on his way home from school.

And he asked me to kind of gruff voice,

you know, where I was going.

I explained to him that I'd just come from school

...