"THIS will not stop until someone dies – and perhaps not even then," Bilam Fares predicted as he sat outside the wreckage of his organic food store in Ealing, west London.

"The police can do nothing – we need the army on the street and we need to ban these hoodies, now," he said.

His Farm W5 store was just one of dozens attacked as more than 200 masked youths tore through the leafy suburb, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.

By morning almost every pane of glass was broken or smashed on two of Ealing's main streets after rioters targeted shops, cafes, restaurants, chemists and even an Oxfam bookshop.

Parts of the area were still an official crime scene, but business owners did their best to repair the damage against a backdrop of constant police sirens and fears of more violence to come.

Just yards from Mr Fares's store, the local Broadway shopping centre had shut all of its 81 shops by lunchtime.

"The rumour is that they are on their way back to Ealing", said one young man as he closed the centre's JJB sports shop, one of the looters' top targets in recent nights. It was a sight mirrored in businesses across the capital.

Mr Fares was pessimistic about the chances that the unrest would ease.

"We have had buildings burned with tenants upstairs. They just don't care", he said, hours before police confirmed the first death in connection with the riots, a 26-year-old man shot in Croydon.

Next door to his shop, Liz Pilgrim described the youths who had looted her children's clothes store as "feral rats".

On the other side of a police cordon, hundreds of spectators gathered throughout the day to gawp at the damage done and the assembled TV news crews.

It had been the same overnight as rioters struck a couple of miles away in Clapham Junction, eyewitnesses said.

"There were riot tourists," Ben Contreras, who lives in the affluent neighbourhood, popular with 20-something young professionals, where firefighters were still dowsing a burnt out building yesterday.

Early in the morning, he and hundreds of other locals had armed themselves with newly purchased brooms and dustpans following a plea for a 'mass clean-up' on the social networking site Twitter.

Sabrina Gill, 27, who also answered the call, said she had been trying to get home at about 10.30pm as youths looted a local Debenhams with almost military precision.

"There were just a few people causing trouble last night, but lots standing watching, and no police to be seen anywhere," she said.

Those who tried to stop them were threatened.

One young man who asked not to be named described lines of cars pulling up with their boots open.

"They would drive off full of stuff and then come back again half an hour later to pick up more," he said. "My neighbour photographed the licence plates on her phone, but they ran after her into our street shouting, 'What have you done? What have you done?'

"Later they told me to tell her that she better not come out to go to work for the next month as they were waiting night and day to get her."

Her flat was above a row of shops, he said, some of which already had windows broken, "so it would have been really easy for them to put a petrol bomb in".

"I had all my flatmates on red alert to get out if I saw anything like that," he added.

He too had arrived to help with the clean-up yesterday, but the crowds were held back for hours by another police cordon. Officers said the local council was unhappy about members of the public sweeping the streets.

That message did not seem to bother most of those gathered, who said it was still important they had sent a message that they did not want violence in their area.

On the police operation, however, views were more mixed.

The sight of two police cars speeding past triggered a spontaneous round of a applause from the crowd.

But when London mayor Boris Johnson arrived to survey the damage for himself mid-afternoon he faced angry residents complaining over the lack of police presence. Grabbing a broom, Mr Johnson did raise a cheer when he told those who had turned out that they were the "true spirit" of the city.

But just seconds later he was booed when he lectured them that the country needed to hear less about the "socio-economic" justifications behind what he said was just "wanton" criminality.

Despite anger at the police and politicians, most fury was reserved for the rioters.

"I was driving home at around 11.30pm and saw them pushing roll cages, those 6ft cages that supermarkets use to put out stock," said Simon Marriott, 30, a teacher who lives in Clapham. "This is just opportunistic greed, nothing else. I also heard people were going from Debenhams, up to their cars in the Asda car park, and then back again to keep looting."

Some of those worst affected were the most sanguine about the effects of the violence.

Michael Eglinton, 37, was evacuated from his flat in Clapham Junction when the party shop was set ablaze.

By afternoon he had still been unable to get back inside the police cordon, to see how much damage had been done.

"But my wife and I are lucky," he said. "We are still alive. Stuff can always be replaced."