Gordon Thompson, 34, has been jailed for eleven and a half years for starting a fire in a Croydon furniture shop during last year's riots.
The fire, which cost the owners of the family-run business their livelihood as well as making nearby residents homeless, was started by Thompson after he joined other looters in the shop. The widely-used pictures of the blaze became symbolic of the devastation caused last August when riots started across London following the police shooting of Mark Duggan.
The high-profile number of convictions and unusually harsh sentencing is just part of the legacy of the riots — a survey earlier this year suggested that some residents did not feel safe in their neighbourhood as a result.
Photo by McTumshie in the Londonist Flickr pool
