Shops and businesses start the clean-up after May Day
Clean-up work was getting under way in London’s Tottenham Court Road, where shops and businesses were damaged by May Day protesters who went on the rampage last night.
Demonstrators had targeted a string of banks and photographic and furniture shops in the road.
The windows of the Habitat store were boarded up today after large sections of the shop front were smashed in.
The nearby Heal’s furniture shop had also been forced to put up boarding after a large pane of glass was smashed.
Boarding had also been put over smashed windows and frontages at branches of Lloyds, Barclays, the Royal Banks of Scotland and the Abbey National.
Employees of one of the worst affected banks, the HSBC, were using their mobile phones to make inquiries today when they arrived at work to find large sections of the branch boarded up.
Homeless Craig Brealey, 20, said he saw protesters smashing up the HSBC yesterday.
‘‘I saw a group - mostly men - using poles to do this damage,’’ he said. ‘‘They were shouting and they ran off, it took them a couple of minutes to do it.’’
The protesters had waited in a side street until police had gone before emerging to go on the rampage.
Groups had been coming from both the south and the north ends of Tottenham Court Road.
Newsagent Pardyuman Patel said shops on the west side of the road mostly escaped the damage.
‘‘They superglued one of my locks but that didn’t cause too much of a problem,’’ he added.
Electrical stores at the south end of Tottenham Court Road appeared to have largely escaped the damage.
Many had placed thick brown paper over their windows in order to shield the goods inside from view, and many of the shops closed early or did not open at all yesterday.
