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 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.

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Persons: Edge Hill Locations: Liverpool, Edge, Overbury, Southport, Britain