It’s just after 3.30am in Islington, on a Thursday morning in May. A man wearing a canvas backpack, a black hooded jacket and a bucket hat is loitering next to a shop window, watching cars and buses pass. In a gloved hand, he’s holding a red vape which he takes a long drag of. The smoke has barely billowed away when he produces a small orange emergency hammer from his pocket and smashes all of the shop’s windows in four methodical blows.
Fifteen minutes later, he is wheeling a bicycle further down the road. He carefully places it on the side of a wall, checks to his left and right, and smashes the windows of a second shop before stowing the hammer in his jacket and cycling off down the pavement.
