If the Streets Were on Fire
A new documentary tells the story of how a community of young men stood up against violence in London by riding their bikes. I spoke to director Alice Russell about the six-year journey of making it
In July 2021, British GQ published my long read about Bike Life: the adrenaline-charged youth subculture of mass bicycle ride-outs that has swept across London and the UK over the last decade.
Ostensibly, it was a story about why crowds of teenagers have started pulling wheelies, filming their accomplishments and sharing them on social media. But peeling back the layers of rebellion, cheek and danger — as I discovered across my two-year investigation — revealed that Bike Life arose to provide community, safety and belonging to young people in a context of rising street violence.
A new film called If the Streets Were on Fire — which is available to watch now as a Storyville documentary on BBC iPlayer — shows the rise of Bike Life on screen. It follows tireless community leader Mac, bike enthusiast Miles and a community of boys and young men whizzing past the camera lens as they fight for the right to ride en masse through the streets of London.
Riders face resistance from police, frustration from members of the public and demonisation in the news media. But the documentary intimately and persuasively makes the case for how Bike Life arose as a grassroots lifeline for a forgotten generation during an era of government austerity, cuts to youth services and rampant territorial violence. It was a youth-led solution to social isolation and exclusion.
As Mac poses in the film’s opening sequence, in which he attends a community mobilisation following a tragic murder:
“For me to translate it so the majority of people could understand where we’re coming from: imagine the streets being on fire. But if you’re not from that world, you wouldn’t be able to see the flames.”
Filmmaker Alice Russell met Mac in August 2017. If the Streets Were on Fire took six years of daring ride-outs, candid interviews and meticulous edits to make. As I type, despite its shoestring budget, it is disrupting the documentary film world.
Its world premiere was held at London Film Festival in 2022. It was subsequently aired on BBC One in October 2023 and screened in Parliament in December. Over the same few weeks it was nominated for four British Independent Film Awards (BIFAs), winning two of them, including Best Feature Documentary. At the start of 2024 it was long listed for a BAFTA (Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director of Producer).
I caught up with Alice about bringing the film into existence, the social problems and vibrant activism it explores, and the impact that she wants it to have.
Ciaran Thapar. Hi Alice. Your film took six years to make. How does it feel to have it out in the world?
Alice Russell: It’s an incredible thing. Because the film nearly died so many times. Independent filmmaking is the longest journey and the hardest graft. When we got accepted into London film festival in 2022, it looked like we might have ran out of avenues to complete the film, funding-wise. We’d got into the festival, but we didn’t have any way of completing it. We did a desperate last-minute measure two months before the world premiere to fundraise by launching an Indiegogo campaign and it raised £20k from the public to keep it alive. This was my first film and I didn’t think about what happens after you finish making it, because that’s actually stage two. How do you get people to watch it and distribute it? I wasn’t thinking about that. At the premiere, we had a 300-seat cinema in the Mayfair Curzon. Loads of the kids involved came down with their families, my mates came down. The energy in the audience was completely electric. We had an eight-minute standing ovation, and when I was on stage I turned to look at Miles, and his face was all wet with tears, and then I started balling my eyes out. Talking to so many of the kids I’d met over the years, they were like, thanks for asking, because nobody ever asks, nobody cares. That’s one of the things in the film. Them being like, don’t leave us behind. Seeing their eyes lighting up and this community that was getting nothing other than bad press come together to celebrate was amazing and has been amazing since then. So much love has come in for the film. We all feel really proud.
How did the film come about?
I met the guys in 2017 on Critical Mass, which is is a massive bike ride that happens on the last Friday of every month, in London and across the world. It’s decades-old. Me and some mates used to go a lot. I love biking, I’m a biking nut, I cycle everywhere. I love my bike. Why walk when you can ride!? So I started to see more kids wheelieing there, and as a cyclist, I was like, wow, this is so beautiful and exhilarating and wild. The kids had this raw exciting energy. I started to take my camera along and film some of them doing wheelies. It was a long, meandering journey, but I started to meet up with different riders. Initially it didn’t work out for various reasons. Then in August 2017 I met Mac at a now-closed bike shop on Well Street, Hackney, which was like a community meeting point. Kids from different estates would go to get a bike for free, or get their bike fixed. Mac was sat on this stairwell at the back of the shop. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t even put mics on him, so the sound was clattering around. So this beautiful interview I did the first time I met him was unusable because the audio was so bad! But he was in a very reflective, melancholic mood. He was talking about the bikes as these vehicles for getting kids away from their areas, for keeping them occupied, for giving them a sense of family, for bringing them together, for it being this positive vehicle that was helping young people from quite difficult situations. There was this quote where he said something like, ‘in life, you have to put kids on a track, and if you don’t put them on a track, they’re walking on the gravel, and you can’t complain when gravel gets kicked up in your face.’ He had a rebellious spirit but also such insight into what happens when you leave a portion of society and a generation behind. Obviously there is going to be anti-social behaviour. If you haven’t been invited to play the game, why would you play by the rules of the game? So then I just followed Mac around for years and he introduced me to people. Miles was around a lot. We went on a journey together. The process was led by them. The majority of the film is just me going out with them and whatever happens, happens. They were in control of their story.
2017 is when violence affecting young people was soaring in London and across the UK, and filling media headlines. Your film is a document of that time and context. What is it about the past decade that meant Bike Life has become so popular among teenagers?
This might be an over-simplistic reading, but in 2008 we had the financial crash. The government implemented austerity and decimated support services. And when things are being shut down, you don’t feel the impact right away, but five years later, in 2013, we started to see knife crime statistics jump up, and they continued to go up until Covid. My read is that everything got taken away from young people but Bike Life has been this beautiful thing to spring up in the void, when there are no youth services or sources of family support. It is an unofficial family that has banded together. Lots of different people come and ride now, it’s widely popular, but the origins of it really were as the very last safety net. Once you fell off the edge of Bike Life, that’s it, you were either in a gang, or in prison, or dead. It grew in size because young people didn’t have anything else to do. It was exciting because in the world of youth culture there is so much negativity and hyper-masculinity but Bike Life was completely different. There is this clip that I desperately tried to get in the film so many times but I couldn’t fit it in there, of all these kids in hoods looking stereotypically intimidating but they’re all just yelling: “love! love! love! love! love! love! love!” And Mac, the things he was saying to the kids were so unexpected in a world of hardened exteriors. So I think it made young people feel hopeful and like there was a community. It was a way of dealing with mental health; a lot of young people get on their bikes to feel free for a few moments, they can escape whatever is going on at home or in their heads, be around people who understand them and are going through the same things, and that is their way of working through something. That was really appealing, and it gained momentum that way. And now it’s got quite a different feel to it, it appeals to a wider audience. The original hashtag of #knivesdownbikesup has become less of a thing. But that was the origin of it.
Social media is another key ingredient right?
Totally. They are influencers. I wasn’t on Instagram at the start, but they were all doing these videos to follow each other and that was how they mobilised, through Instagram. There were the main riders who would say, ‘there’s a ride-out, let’s go' and everyone would follow.
It’s easy to characterise social media as a negative thing in conversations about violence among teenagers. But in this instance there is clearly so much positive role-modelling going on between riders, particularly from older riders to younger riders. Did you see any of that?
Absolutely. There was one kid, a tiny little kid, 14-years-old, on tag for being involved in a string of robberies. And when I spoke to him, he said, ‘if I’d known about Bike Life earlier, I never would have got into the trouble that I got into.’ I went to his sentencing in court and heard everything that he’d been through in his life. So much trauma. He didn’t stand a chance. All the odds were stacked against him from the beginning of his life, and he made some bad decisions, but you can understand them. He was one of those kids who, when he first started riding, would be kicking car doors and wing mirrors. But the boys would be like, ‘no bruv, that’s not what we do here.’ And really quickly he changed his behaviour, he got in line. There was lots of that. That’s Miles’s thing. Kids in his area bring him bikes, he gets kids out to ride, he’s always talking kids down from difficult situations. Same for Mac. At one point during the making of the film, someone got stabbed, and it seemed like there was going to be a retaliation, but Mac spent the evening going round to peoples’ houses talking them down. There is so much of that in the community going on all the time. Positive role-modelling. It’s a really inspiring community and that’s why I loved hanging out with them so much. The first time I went to Bikestormz there were 600 boys in a park, and I’d never, ever been to anything like that. I arrived with my camera, and it was intimidating. But the moment I walked through, snaking between all the kids, they’d be like, ‘sorry miss! Am I in your way!?’ It was a joy to be able to spend that much time with them and see a different side to how media headlines portray this group of people.
The battles between riders and police is a core theme of the film. What were some of the challenges you saw?
The thing that became pretty apparent quite early on, when I’d only been hanging out with them for a couple of months, was this idea of a hierarchy of needs. The police are policing kids who are cycling dangerously or on the pavement, or doing graffiti. To the citizens of central London, these are very significant things. But they’re not if you contextualise it all in an environment of harm, where young people are trying to escape cycles of violence and are exposed to so much violence where they live. The day I first met Miles was at a balloon release for the murder of one of his friends. I spent the afternoon on the street corner with him and a few other kids, and they all had the maddest stories: being chased with a gun, being stabbed, seeing other people being stabbed, being shot at. They were talking about it so casually, as if it was about going to get a slice of pizza. And that was the thing I realised. The police did not understand where these kids were coming from. They had no concept of the world they lived in. Mac is from this world of violence, he sees the violence, these flames all around the city, and he calls the young people out on their bikes and says, ‘hey, get out of that danger zone, that fire, and ride your bikes.’ But the police can’t see the fire. It’s this weird disjuncture about what some people can see and other people can’t.
I love the title. If the Streets Were on Fire. It captures such a powerful idea.
If the streets were on fire, would people pay attention? It’s this insidious, creeping thing that affects a certain section of society who politicians have deemed not worthy of investment and support, for whatever reason that is. When are we going to sit up and pay attention to this thing that is decimating the lives of young people in our country? If it’s a white woman or a middle class kid who dies, then the media are very interested in the story, but if it’s not…politicians care about some sections of society but they do not care about other sections, and that’s really sad.
What has changed in the Bike Life world since you started making the film?
The main thing is that Mac has handed control over to the young people. This year in August was the first year where they were organising it themselves, and hopefully that will continue moving forward. And it’s so big now compared to what it used to be. It was much more grassroots and spontaneous and would go wherever it wanted to. Now the police are involved and there is a route, and there are good and bad things to that. More people get involved because they understand and feel safe, but at the same time the spirit of freedom and the wildness of it is diluted somewhat, and for many kids, that’s why they loved it.
What impact do you want the film to have?
I hope that it changes stereotypes of young people because I think the main way that this community have been portrayed in the past is: kids in hoods, senseless violence. And actually, these kids have seen more chaos than most adults ever will. Some of them have made bad decisions because they live in hostile environments. Most people would make a bad decision if they found themselves in the same situation. This is a community who doesn’t get much airtime and these images of young people in hoods…hopefully viewers fall in love with them in the film and see that they are just like any other young person but with amazing spirit of resilience in spite of difficult situations. I hope it creates empathy and understanding, and that next time people see a group of kids on bikes they know what it’s about and they will beep their horn with affection, not aggression and annoyance. I hope it’s an introduction to a world that people don’t know much about.
You can follow Alice on Instagram and watch If the Streets Were on Fire on BBC iPlayer.
Interview by Ciaran Thapar