The residents of the southeast Liverpool neighborhood of Edge Hill had spent Wednesday preparing for trouble.
Parents were called to pick up children early from nursery school. Shop owners pulled their shutters down over glass storefronts. And in the semidetached brick houses on and around Overbury Street, where generations of the same families have lived alongside newer arrivals, locals pulled their curtains as evening approached.
What they feared was another night of the anti-immigrant violence that had rocked the country in the week since a deadly stabbing attack nearby in Southport that was falsely rumored as being carried out by a migrant.
What they got, instead, was a night of near celebration by people opposed to the racism and anti-immigrant sentiments that drove the week of rioting in cities and towns across Britain.
People in Liverpool had been especially unnerved since an online list of what were said to be new far-right targets for protests included a local charity that works with asylum seekers. Neighbors texted neighbors to head to the streets to counter any racist rioters. Local unions and leaders of neighborhood mosques also put out the word, as did a nationwide collective called “Stand Up to Racism.”
So as helicopters circled overhead on Wednesday night, and police officers on horseback patrolled the streets, young women handed out snacks and water bottles in front of the boarded-up windows of the targeted charity. Another group set up a makeshift first aid area across the street in case of emergency, given the unbridled violence of the past riots. And a white-haired man with a long beard propped a megaphone next to a speaker on his metal walker and played peace songs.
People carried signs reading “Not in our city,” and “Will trade racists for refugees.”
“They all had one thing in mind; it was to not let this hate get a foothold,” said Ewan Roberts, who manages Asylum Link Merseyside, the charity that was on the target list.
And then, the far right was a no-show.
In some ways, the gathering of hundreds of antiracism demonstrators was not unexpected in Liverpool, a multicultural city with proud working-class roots.
But similar protests were staged in cities across England on Wednesday night as thousands of people angered by the earlier violence decided to make their voices heard. That violence had included rioters trying to set fire to a hotel in the city of Rotherham while asylum seekers and other guests were inside. Some rioters pummeled police officers so hard they had to go to the hospital. A fire was set in a community library on the northern outskirts of Liverpool over the weekend.
Some of the Liverpool residents who turned out in force Wednesday were especially angry that what set off the spasm of violence was a lie about the deadly knife attack that was promoted again and again online.
The teenager accused of killing three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class was not — as online agitators claimed — a migrant straight off one of the small boats that bring impoverished people across the English Channel to Britain’s shores. The suspect was born in Wales, to parents who the BBC says came from Rwanda, and the police have not disclosed a motive.
“They are using a tragedy to promote this hate,” said Jasmine Galanakis, 27, who put her young daughter to bed in their home up the street and then joined the crowd on Wednesday evening. “So many people in this community come from different backgrounds, and it’s ignorance driving this. It’s just an excuse for hate, and we won’t stand for it.”
Liverpool, in England’s north, has long been a stronghold of the Labour Party and has a proud working-class tradition. The city’s dock workers have a history of organized action, and particularly after World War II, diversity flourished, making the city among the country’s most multicultural.
The threats in this sliver of Liverpool had been made against Asylum Link Merseyside, the charity that Mr. Roberts manages. He and the staff decided to shut its doors temporarily at the start of the week and bring in carpenters to board up the windows and doors to minimize damage if the building was attacked.
As he watched people gather peacefully in the streets, he said he was moved by the diversity of those who came out to express their support for asylum seekers.
It was especially affirming after years of railing by the former Conservative government against the number of asylum seekers — and its attempt to deport them to Rwanda despite a Supreme Court ruling that the policy was illegal.
Nazehar Benamar, 42, and her cousin Wafa Hizam, 22, who grew up in Liverpool, both said they felt it was important to be there. But they also said they were angry about the violence that erupted in the city center a few days earlier.
“Liverpool is a very multicultural city, but as a person of color, you are always aware of racism and prejudice,” said Ms. Benamar, who is Muslim and wears a hijab. She recalled how as the only nonwhite child in her class, she had been subjected to racial slurs. She said she was saddened that racism and Islamophobia were still so potent so many years later.
“People are being terrorized by fear about this violence,” she said. “Today especially, I could feel it.”
Still, on Wednesday night she was reassured to see members of her local mosque standing alongside university students and retirees. The people of Liverpool had come together to show “what we are made of here,” she said.
What united many of them was the feeling that working-class people are in life’s struggles together. As the evening light turned golden and night slowly set in, one young woman raised a sign that read, “The Enemy of the Working Class Travels By Private Jet Not Migrant Dinghy,” to applause from many standing nearby.
Matty Delaney, 33, who lives just outside Liverpool, said he had heard on Instagram about the demonstration against racism and thought it was important to deliver a clear message to those who had rioted, particularly as a young, white, working-class man.
“We’ve got more in common with an Indian nurse, with a Black bricklayer than we do with the Elon Musks, the Nigel Farages, the Tommy Robinsons, of the world — all these people who are stoking violence,” Mr. Delaney said.
Mr. Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media platform X — where disinformation about the initial attack had been allowed to swirl — threw himself into the fray this week by saying, “Civil war is inevitable” and accusing the prime minister, Keir Starmer, of not protecting “all communities” in Britain.
Mr. Farage, the leader of the populist anti-immigration Reform U.K. party, initially stoked conspiracy theories that drove the riots, before coming out against the violence. And Mr. Robinson, an anti-Islam agitator who founded the English Defense League — originally a street movement, which now spreads Islamophobic and xenophobic views mostly online — was among the far-right figures who pushed for their supporters to take to the streets after the stabbing attack.
By Thursday morning, the rhythm of daily life had returned to Overbury Street. At St. Anne’s Church, next door to the charity for asylum seekers, a local family gathered for a funeral. Discarded placards from the night before lay on the ground nearby.
The staff of the charity was also regrouping, and Mr. Roberts said they were trying to figure out when to reopen. While he said he felt an overwhelming sense of relief that the center had not faced violence, it was difficult to know what would come next.
Speaking of the rioters, he said, “They are trying to damage trust between the community and new arrivals, more than the buildings or infrastructure.” But, he added, “What last night told me was we are a greater value in the community, more than we actually understood, and it was wonderful to see that.”
For now, his staff planned to send a letter of thanks to the community. But they also planned to reinforce the wooden boards that protect the center’s windows, just in case.
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