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During the summer of 2024, anti-immigration unrest swept through the UK, placing one of Liverpool’s oldest churches in a precarious position. St Anne’s Church, located in Toxteth and boasting a history spanning 180 years, was among numerous sites across the country featured on a far-right “hitlist” circulated online. One disturbing image depicted the church’s iconic redbrick tower engulfed in flames, accompanied by threatening emojis.
The primary focus of hostility was not the church itself but one of its occupants—Asylum Link Merseyside (ALM), a charity that has spent 25 years assisting individuals fleeing violence and persecution. Ewan Roberts, the former centre manager of ALM, reflected on the palpable danger: “People had been scoping us out, driving past filming, kids on bikes filming. You think: ‘Oh God, is this how it happens?’” This tension was mirrored less than a mile away at the al-Rahma mosque, where Dr Badr Abdullah, chair of the Liverpool Muslim Society, recounted incidents of surveillance and intimidation, including an individual brandishing a machete outside the mosque. “It did feel like civil war … The feeling in the community was: someone is going to be killed, the mosque is going to be burned down,” he said.
The riots themselves were sparked by the horrific murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift holiday club in Southport on 29 July 2024. Following this tragedy, rioters across England and Belfast targeted buildings, attacked mosques, clashed with police, and terrorized minority communities. False claims circulated that the perpetrator, Cardiff-born teenager Axel Rudakubana, was an Islamist terrorist who had entered the country by small boat, intensifying hostility toward immigrant and Muslim populations.
In Merseyside, the unrest was particularly intense, with a subsequent planned rally on 7 August 2024 suspected to be even more volatile, prompting the largest deployment of riot police in England in over a decade. Amid this atmosphere of escalating racial violence, however, community solidarity began to emerge. Roberts described the arrival of “an army of carpenters” who helped barricade the historic windows of St Anne’s Church, a building that had withstood World War II bombings. As the expected date of further unrest neared, police presence intensified with mounted officers and riot vans securing the area. Meanwhile, Father Peter Morgan, the 87-year-old parish priest who had arrived in Toxteth after the 1981 riots, encouraged residents to heed police advice to stay away but himself remained resolutely outside the church, symbolizing steadfastness despite the threats
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