Figure 2. Borough level choropleth of rioter residential locations from (a) data and (b) simulated results.

Although the extreme dependence on initial conditions precludes our model from generating an exact replica of the observed incidents, the results show good qualitative agreement, with 26 of the 33 boroughs showing rioter percentages in the same or adjacent bands as the data. The remaining discrepancy may be accounted for by factors specific to the London disorder, such as communication between groups, other activity patterns occurring at the time, or social factors beyond the scope of this work. The labels 1,2,3,4 correspond to retail centres in Brixton, Croydon, Clapham Junction and Ealing respectively, which are considered individually in our later simulations.