One aspect of the riots in London in August 2011 which made them distinct from previous moments of unrest was how they happened not just in poor inner city neighbourhoods, but also in relatively affluent areas. Enfield, Croydon and Ealing were affected, districts which include well-to-do suburbs that elect Tory MPs.
For Gavin Barwell, the Tory MP for Croydon Central in south London, an arson attack on the Reeves furniture store in his constituency ended up being one of the most iconic images of the riots.
He says the rioting brought into focus how London is changing and the traditional "doughnut" view of a poor centre surrounded by a middle-class outer ring is out of date.
"I know it's a gross generalisation but most reasonable people would accept that there is link between voting behavour and affluence," he says. "A generalisation that more affluent people vote Tory.
"If you go back to the 1950s outer London mostly voted Conservative and inner London almost always voted Labour. Contrast that to Paris where the centre is gentrified and you get deprivation in the suburbs. I would say there is a strong trend of gentrification of inner London and a profound demographic change in the outer London boroughs.
The Reeves furniture shop in Croydon was set alight and became an iconic image of the riots worlwide
"You will now see places like Battersea and Putney going Conservative, Hammersmith is going that way, but seats like Dulwich and West Norwood, which used to be marginal, are now among the safest Labour seats.
"You're seeing this in every outer London borough," says Barwell, who points out that rioting also happened in Enfield in north London, geographically on the other side of the city to Croydon but demographically extremely similar.
Barwell expects the shift of poorer people from inner to outer London will continue, and that policy makers need to wake up to this shift. "Whitehall and City Hall have a view that outer London is affluent. And some of it still conforms to the sterotype but lots of it is now more in character to Streatham and Brixton. Policy makers have been behind the curve on the extent to which it has happened and while I wish last year hadn't happened, one positive thing is that it's woken up policy makers and focused."
For the MP for Ealing Angie Bray - until recently a member of the government who was sacked for rebelling on House of Lords reform - the riots were even more of a surprise. "It struck in a leafy, nice party of Ealing," she says. "Ealing Green is a lovely tranquil part of the borough, nobody could have anticipated that."
Burnt out cars in Ealing Broadway the night after rioting swept through the west London borough
It's interesting that Tories who have seen rioting in their patch are keen to stick up for their seats, even if it means being slightly off-message. "Young people still feel frustrated and excluded, there's a lot of young people feel there should be more to life," says Angie Bray, although she's at pains to stress that many of those who went through the courts for rioting were in their mid or late twenties and who had previous convictions.
Suggesting that some form of national citizenship service "should be a rite of passage for every 16 year-old", Bray also thinks the riots have contributed to a fairly big shift in thinking among Tories in terms of when the state should intervene. "One family with problems can be responsible for an awful lot of social issues for a community," she says, advocating and fully supporting a growing cross-party consensus that early intervention for kids in problem families is the way forward. "There's no doubt that early intervention, and really, really early intervention in some cases, can be a really big turning point. If kids are not being nurtured from a very young age they get jumbled up.
"The government can initiate this," she says. "Conservatives tend to want to be certain that any intervention needs to work and we always question how big the state should be, but I compare early intervention to traffic lights. Can we live without them? Do they make a difference? I think Tories do ask whether government is the best way of doing things, but if there is a time when it's proven the government should use taxpayers money to do something, then we should. And this is one of those times. Only government can bring all the agencies to bear to make sure the kids get every chance."
All MPs who saw rioting in their constituencies worry it will happen again. They don't predict it will, but it's a background concern. Gavin Barwell thinks the police still have a lot of work to do. "There remains a real issue between the relationship between young people and the police, particualrly young black men and the police," he says. "If you want to stop this thing happening again you need good intelligence and that comes from good comunity relations."
So what's still going wrong? "I don't have a problem with stop and search, but it's how you do it, it's how you treat people," concludes Barwell. "When I passed my driving test at 17, pretty much every time I went out at night driving I was stopped and made to prove I owned my car. I got sick of it. If you're a young black man in Croydon, similar things will happen to you.
"Most times when they go out in the town centre they get stopped, sometimes more than one time a night. It's not surprising people get irritated by that. We have to ask what the grounds are for the police to do this, and when they do it, why they do it and whether it's done with respect."