Karen vividly remembers the day she picked up a brick and became a rioter.

“I went out and attacked the police. We were fed up. Things had to change,” she said.

It was 1981 and Liverpool was burning. A series of riots has been sparked in part by long-standing tensions between the local police and the black community. Karen was just 16 years old.

All these years later, she has turned out to face off a wave of planned protests by largely far-right groups who want to target places linked to immigration.

“What we did back then was different. You can’t compare the riots back then with the mindless thugs who want to wreck our communities now.”

I meet Karen outside Liverpool’s Asylum Centre, which has appeared on a list of intended locations the far right want to demonstrate outside. It’s part of a nationwide series of protests that has Britain braced for trouble.

Karen fears that these groups just want to cause damage. And she’s not going to let it happen on her doorstep.

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“These people can try to cause trouble here but we will send them straight back,” she said.

“We’re aren’t having it. We are a proud and diverse community, and we will protect this building.”

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It is mid-afternoon and everyone is nervous.. The asylum centre is in a former church and helps refugees and asylum seekers to apply to live in the UK, usually because they have fled violence or persecution in their own country.

The windows have been boarded up and the doors locked. If trouble does break out, centre manager Ewan Roberts fears the worst.

“My fear is that things will get broken that we cannot repair. That could be trust, or it could be a crucial part of the building. We cannot afford to lose either.

“We have worked hard for years to build this charity into something that genuinely helps people. And some people want to come here and take it all away.”

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As the afternoon gives way to early evening, a police presence slowly increases.

A couple of police vans block off either end of the road and around 50 officers dressed in riot gear stand in line watching as the crowd slowly begins to gather.

But something unexpected happens. The feared arrival of the far right does not materialise.

Instead the road is filled with residents, church groups and other volunteers. Their banners read “refugees are welcome here” and “grandmas against racism”.

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Laila, a 28-year-old woman dressed in hijab and a beige mac stops to talk to me.

“A lot of people in the community feel a lot of anger, a lot of fear,” she says.

“The sense in the community is they’ve had enough. That’s why a lot of them have come out.”

And they came out in their hundreds.

They had braced themselves for night of trouble but in the end it was a largely peaceful evening.

An asylum centre surrounded not by those who might have wished it harm, but by those determined to protect it.

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