A text message went from phone to phone on Sunday afternoon, inviting “all the brehs in north” to rally at Enfield station at 4pm. “Whatever ends your from put your ballys on link up and cause havoc, just rob everything,” it read. A community leader sent it on to me, and also to the police.

Then on Twitter on Tuesday, a flurry of spontaneous cleaning parties formed, fixing rendezvous and reminding each other to “bring gloves, sacks, brooms and brushes”. So this is the social upshot of the riots. The youth – the brehs – lay aside their turf wars, and coalesce; and the middle classes, so snooty about it before, suddenly form the Big Society.

It is possible to be facile (the tweet of the week, from Monday night: “all quiet in Primrose Hill, though I did see two reflexologists tut at each other outside the patisserie”). But in exposing the depths for a moment, a convulsion like this brings some sharp realisations about London in 2011. First, it shows you cannot love and spend your way to civil peace. Ken Livingstone and Polly Toynbee, tribunes of the old left, have been blaming the riots on “the cuts”, which have not even properly hit yet. The young people at the social project I run have been in “youth work” programmes all their lives; every one, to a boy and girl, will surely have been out and about these past few nights, whether as spectators or participants. In their shoes, wouldn’t you be?