Category: Political Issues

I’ve been a cyclist for over 65 years, getting my first two-wheeler (a very secondhand small bike cleaned up and repainted by my dad) on my sixth birthday. And by the end of that day I was able to ride it without someone with a hand on the saddle as I went along the pavement outside my home. A couple of years later I had a larger bike handed down to me, and was riding on the roads in traffic. And despite what people think, there was plenty of traffic back in the 1950s on some of the roads in outer London where I lived, before any motorways took it away, though there were differences. Traffic speeds were generally much lower, as most cars had very poor acceleration and there were far fewer parked cars on the roads.

There have been many improvements in the design of cars and of roads since then, all of which seem to have concentrated on making cars go faster, with very little thought about other road users. I remember going in my teens on a visit to the Road Research Laboratory (then not far from where I lived at Harmondsworth) where we saw films and presentations about making dummies inside cars safer in crashes (doubtless an inspiration for J G Ballard) and also designing roads so that cars could go faster around corners and roundabouts. I asked what research they were doing about cyclists and I think the answer was that there was no economic benefit from cycle journeys; certainly they had nothing to show, and their answer to my suggestion that changing corners to make them so cars could go round them faster made them more dangerous for pedestrians was to show me their plans to make pedestrians walk down the street some distance to a crossing point. Pedestrian time had zero value too.

Since my visit in the 1950s, the RRL, now the TRL, has changed a little, and they and others have looked at cycling, though perhaps the best study of cycle-friendly road design has come from Sustrans, for example in their chapter on junctions and crossings.

It was interesting on a visit to Brussels a few years ago to hear the squeal of brakes as motorists stopped to allow pedestrians to cross the road they wanted to turn down. Here drivers assume they always have right of way unless there is a traffic light or marked pedestrian crossing, and the Highway Code, which is fairly clear:

• watch out for cyclists, motorcyclists, powered wheelchairs/mobility scooters and pedestrians as they are not always easy to see. Be aware that they may not have seen or heard you if you are approaching from behind
• watch out for pedestrians crossing a road into which you are turning. If they have started to cross they have priority, so give way

is almost always ignored.

The most common cause of cyclist deaths is lorries and other large vehicles turning left and crushing them. Poor vehicle design means that drivers often cannot see cyclists (and pedestrians) and I cannot understand why this has been allowed to continue. It would be a relatively simple matter to fit glass panels and appropriate mirrors, and now more high-tech solutions are obviously available. There is really no reason why any vehicle with such restricted visibility should be allowed on the road.

Of course cyclists, particularly inexperienced cyclists, squeeze up on the left side of vehicles waiting at crossings, and the use of Advanced Stop Lines at junctions makes this a more safe manoeuvre – but only if drivers recognise that their left turn is a turn across a cycle lane and should require them to ensure it is clear.  There also seems to be an increasing trend for motorists to ignore the need to signal for left turns – something of great importance to both cyclists and pedestrians.

Campaign group Stop Killing Cyclists organised a vigil and die-in on the Camden Rd in the London Borough of Islington following the death of Ardian Zagani who suffered fatal injuries when he was struck by a Ford Transit van just after 6am while cycling to work as a caretaker at a local college on August 29th, 2017. Police originally arrested the driver on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving, but she was later de-arrested and interviewed under caution. One of the passengers in the van attempted first aid on the victim but A scheme to put a protected cycle lane along this busy road was put forward in 2014, but was not acted on, and campaigners say that it was dropped because TfL (Transport for London) prioritise bus timetables over cycle safety. There have been a number of deaths on this stretch of road in both Islington and Camden and it has been labelled ‘death mile’.

After the speeches, police stopped the traffic for police to go onto the road, where they lay down for 10 minutes to block traffic. Those at the end of the protest, closest to the motorists who were forced to wait were shocked to hear some complaints and comments about cyclists from a few who were suffering this minor delay in memory of the man who died here.

Die-in for cyclist Ardian Zagani

Continue reading Stop Killing Cyclists

Back from Holiday my work kicked off the following day with two protests, the 2017 Official Animal Rights March which started from Hyde Park and later the McStrike rally at McDonalds HQ in East Finchley.

I’m  not a Vegan, and find some of their righteous indignation rather trying. Should we eat animals? I look to nature and eating animals seems a very natural thing to do, though I think we should do so in ways that avoid unnecessary suffering.  From our earliest days man hunted animals and ate them, and the whole mesh of nature is one of predators and prey. Why should we believe that people shouldn’t farm and eat cows, pigs and sheep but not equally campaign against lions eating antelopes or other prey? Veganism seems to me to be against nature, and many farmers take great care over the animals who would not have been brought into existence without them.

Of course I’m against the cruelties of some intensive agriculture, and accept the environmental arguments that eating less meat would be good for the planet – and happily often eat meals without meat or fish, and pay more for some foods which are ‘free range’ or ethically produced.  And I’ve no problem if some people decide to forgo meat or even all animal products, but I do object to them claiming some ethical superiority over us omnivores for doing so.

And I’m also unreservedly ‘speciesist’. While I have no problem with ‘animal rights’ I do believe that ‘human rights’ are more important, and it does somewhat grieve me to see large numbers at animal rights protests while rather fewer come out in support of human rights. We need to fight for both.

Farm animals are an important part of our country and its landscape, much of which has been formed by and for them. If we were all vegan there would be no cows, no sheep, no pigs, no chickens or goats, other than perhaps a very few kept by a few wealthy as curiosities from a bygone age or in green museums. Fields kept open by grazing would soon be full of thickets and the whole nature of the countryside would change. Some might be ploughed to grow crops, but others are too marginal to be useful

So I marched only partly with the marchers, and only along a part of the route as far as Green Park station, where I joined the underground for the journey to East Finchley.

McDonald’s UK HQ is conveniently right next door to the station, and I particularly liked the Fast Food rights placard which gave a great summary of what the strike was about. I’m not a fan of McD’s, and had a particularly unfortunate experience after visiting one in Germany in the 1980s, largely because I knew that despite my poor German I could get a burger without difficulty there. It probably wasn’t the meal I had there that led to an uncomfortable few days in hospital after I returned home, but I wasn’t impressed with the quality of the food or beer (of course it was beer in Germany) either.

Since then I’ve hardly been in a McD’s, dragged in occasionally by others, when I’ve limited myself to the coffee, which is only averagely poor. Photographers sometimes use these places for the free wifi to file their work, but I’ve always preferred to do this from home or my hotel.  I’ve often wondered how it succeeded when it was so clearly worse than some other chains that went down.  I suppose it’s driven by kids with no taste.

The protest was led by the Bakers union, BWAFU, and its General Secretary Ian Hodson was there, and they had brought a table, inviting McD’s to sit down and talk, as they had refused to do so. The BWAFU is one of the few TUC affiliated traditional unions in the UK that currently seems to be sticking up actively for low paid workers and against zero hours contracts, though in New Zealand it was their Unite that took on McD’s and won, and Joe Carolan from Unite union New Zealand was there to tell us how they did it.

Also present were several people from the United Voices of the World, a grass roots union that has taken on many large companies in London on behalf of their cleaners, with some notable victories. Claudia holds a poster ‘No One Should Be Working Poor’ as she speaks while Victor, whose speech in Spanish she is interpreting hugs a poster ‘Kickin’ Ass for the Working Class’. Again the words in the image tell the story.

McStrike rally at McDonalds HQ
Vegans call for Animal Rights

Continue reading Vegans and McStrike

Carlton House Terrace. The ICA entrance is at a lower level on the Mall

I’ve not often been to the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the Mall, though I was briefly a member at some time in the 1960s or 70s. It’s location on The Mall and Carlton House Terrace I find rather off-putting and I’m never entirely at ease in the posher bits of the capital. And I got the impression in my early visits that it was full of cliques to which I did not belong and wasn’t at all welcoming to those of us from poor suburban working-class origins unless we had already achieved some kind of fame. Or perhaps I was just too shy.

I have been in Carlton House Terrace a few times, most notably a long time ago meeting Paul Strand – one of my photographic heroes – and having a short conversation there at his exhibition opening, and more recently being commissioned to photograph an event there, but wandering in from the Mall around lunchtime on a Saturday I really didn’t know what to expect.

I was looking for Simon Elmer and Geraldine Dening of Architects for Social Housing who were beginning a week’s residency there; I’d been invited to the opening party that evening but couldn’t attend but wanted to see their display, and wandered through the building until I chanced upon a sign pointing to their exhibition.

Social Housing has a long history in London and the UK, with various commercial and philanthropic organisations providing housing for the urban poor in the nineteenth century. Some of these continue (at least in theory) to do so, but from around the start of the 20th century that role was largely taken over by councils who built many large estates, particularly in the interwar years and following the Second World War. London had estates both the the London County Council and the various local councils, providing millions for the first time with a decent standard of housing at an affordable rent.

Many Labour councils back in the 1960s and 1970s took a great pride in providing a high standard of housing, even when working within strict cost limits, and they employed some of the country’s best architects to design estates such as Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, Central Hill near Crystal Palace, the Heygate at the Elephant, Cressingham Gardens in Tulse Hill and many more.

Things changed with the Tory government under Thatcher, who set out to destroy council housing. It may have been making decent housing available to working class people at low cost and actually paying for itself, but it wasn’t making money for private landlords and not enough for building companies etc who where important in the party. It was also a matter of ideology; council housing was social housing, organised by society for the good of society and the Tories saw this as sapping individual responsibility, their idea that people should look after themselves. They wanted a society of home owners, every Englishman securing himself in his castle and pulling up the drawbridge against the rest. And their route to doing this was to compel councils to sell their homes to their tenants at highly discounted rates – and to make sure the councils did not get the money to replace them.

The policy worked in so far as many council tenants did take up the bargain offer, but for many being a householder and repaying even the relatively low purchase costs proved too much. Many had to sell up and move out – and into privately rented properties often far less desirable than their old council homes and at several times the rent. Some will have moved back into former council properties, now owned by landlords, where their rents were now paying the landlord’s mortgage and then some, with a huge growth in ‘buy to let’ properties. You didn’t need money to buy up houses, just the ability to borrow money which your tenants would pay back.

More recently councils have been looking at these well-planned estates from the 31960s and 70s and thinking that the land they occupy – often on very desirable sites – is worth a fortune. If only those council homes weren’t there, they could make millions from private developers eager for land in London. One of the first to go was the Heygate, close to the Elephant & Castle, near to the centre of London, the West End and the City, with good transport links, it was a prime site for development. The only problem was getting rid of the people. The saga of Southwark Council’s long campaign to do so has been told many times, and is a shameful reflection on a Labour council. And while some of those involved have done rather well from it – lavish hospitality, trips to Cannes and well paid jobs when they leave the councils – the council ended up getting short-changed by millions. The residents have been forced to outlying areas, many in high cost private renting, and some of the new blocks remain unoccupied, either unsold or owned simply as investments by overseas buyers.

Social cleansing: RED for Labour, BLUE for Tory and YELLOW for Lib-Dem

Architects for Social Housing have highlighted some of the problems, with well over a hundred estates, some very large either destroyed or earmarked for demolition by Labour Councils across London. Of course Conservative controlled councils are also guilty, but there are fewer of them. The policy under which these crimes are taking place (and they are moral crimes if not always legal crimes) is a Labour policy, introduced under Tony Blair and given the name ‘regeneration’.

Regeneration could be carried out in a way which respected the needs of the existing residents and actually bettered the lot of those in social housing, and ASH has produced alternative plans for a number of estates which show how this could be done. But when these have been presented to councils they have been dismissed with little or no consideration. The problem is perhaps that councils do not have the cash to carry out regeneration without selling off the assets, but more that they see selling off community assets as an easy way to make money.

Recently Jeremy Corbyn has made some promising noises about how regeneration should take place, and there are hopes that the largest scheme of this type, the HDV or Haringey Development Vehicle which would have given away £2 billion of public property, may be stopped. But it remains to be seen if his words can be translated into deeds in the London Labour councils which are all presently dominated by Thatcher-lite right-wing Labour groups. Although the membership of the party has seen a definite shift to the left, there are plenty of dirty tricks the right are using in their fight to remain in power.

At ASH at the ICA you can see some more pictures of their displays at the ICA, which include some related to protest by ASH.

Continue reading ASH at the ICA

Foil Vedanta holds a protest every year outside the AGM of Vedanta, a FTSE 250 listed British mining company controlled and 69.6% owned by Anil Agarwal and his family through a series of tax havens and holding companies.

They accuse Vedanta of illegal mining in Goa, increasing harassment, torture and false accusations against tribal activists in Nyamgiri, Odisha and eleven years of ruinous and continuing pollution by Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) in Zambia.

As well as holding protests, Foil Vedanta have also exposed illegal activities by the company and its assocaited companies around the world, with a detailed report on their activities in Zambia which showed the company had fraudulently avoided taxes and failed to publish mandatory accounts leading the Zambian government to take action against KCM.

Their protests have usually involved some highly visual stunts, including in the past a giant inflatable Vedanta Monster, a banner drop from a neighbouring roof and a large pool of fake blood. This year there were two men in giant inflatable suits  (reminding me of  Sumo wrestlers), one with the mask of Argawal, and the second with that of CEO Tom Albanese who was stepping down to  “spend more time with his family“, a decision perhaps not entirely unconnected with a charge by the US Securities and Exchange Commission that in his former job as chief executive of Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto he allegedly inflated the value of a Mozambique coal mine the company bought in 2011 for $US3.7 billion; they say Albanese continued to mislead investors as to its true value for some years after the company realised it was worth much less. By the time Rio Tinto sold it for a measly $50 million – around 1/75th of what they paid, Albanese had gone and was CEO of Vedanta.

Albanese was not the only senior executive to leave Vedanta last year.  They also lost former CEO of Anglo American Cynthia Carroll who had joined them to advise them on their aluminium business and decided for reasons unknown not to renew her contract in February.

The two inflated figures came holding bottles of dirty water allegedly from the Kafue River in Zambia which they showed to investors going in to the AGM. Several of the Foil Vedanta supporters have single shares in the company, which entitles them to go in to the annual meeting where they are able to question the company about its activities. After they had gone in and the meeting had begun, one of the other protesters poured the dirty water over the two figures representing Agarwal and Albanese.

The protest continued outside the AGM, and the posters were graphic reminders of the activities of Vedanta, and of the protests which were taking place not just in London but in India today, and of previous protests around the world where they operate, many of which have been very much larger than this, with thousands taking part. Some have been brutally repressed by police, and protesters have been injured and killed. Today’s in London was noisy but peaceful, and police who had earlier tried unsuccessfully to keep the protesters on the opposite side of the road restricted themselves to making sure the pavement and the entrance were kept clear.

Vedanta accused of global crimes

Continue reading Foil Vedanta expose mining giant

It’s shameful to know that almost 8 months after the Grenfell Fire, so few of the survivors have been rehoused. Back in August many felt that the council whose deliberate actions were responsible for what would have been a small, contained fire instead rapidly engulfing the whole block with terrible loss of life were failing to take appropriate action either to care for the survivors or to find them new homes, that they were dragging their feet and failing to cope. But that they still have done so little seems quite unforgivable.

Many local people felt that there should have been some urgent temporary action – such as taking over a number of the large empty properties as a temporary solution to finding decent accommodation. The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea is a wealthy borough with huge reserves. There appears to be no possible excuse for them having families still living in cramped hotel rooms almost 9 months after the disaster.

One empty block of flats was Duke’s Lodge in Holland Park, on of Britain’s wealthiest streets, just 15 minutes walk away. The residents of the 27 private flats there lost a battle to stay after the owners, the Candy brothers decided they could make a killing by knocking it down and putting a few luxury homes in its place. But the council refused them planning permission and the block and its grounds were on sale for £70 million.

It’s difficult to tell how feasible it would have been for the council to refurbish the block and put in people from Grenfell, but it did seem the kind of response that might have been appropriate. The small protest outside by the Peoples Republic Of North Kensington, including former Grenfell Tower resident Ian Bone of Class War along with others from Class War and local residents, was more about raising issues than providing solutions.

The protest became more interesting when a car pulled up in front and a woman got out to talk with the protesters. She was one of the displaced residents, and told them about their fight to stay in Duke’s Lodge, and of the £40,000 she had spent on interior decoration of her flat.

It isn’t just the local council, the RBKC, that have failed in their response. Prime Minister Theresa May was quick to come up with promises, including help for other councils with tall blocks with the same dangerously flammable cladding, never intended for use on high buildings. So far, none of the promises has been kept.

On the following Saturday, Focus E15 Mothers led a march from Ferrier Point in Canning Town to a rally at Tanner Point in Plaistow, two Newham Council tower blocks with the same cladding. Without a proper expert inspection it is hard to know whether they face the same risk as Grenfell, where the failure to have proper gaps, unsafe gas installion and other defects in the work carried out on a previously essentially safe building as well as lack of proper maintenance and limiting the emergency access made Grenfell a death trap.

Obviously the residents of these towers are worried about their safety, and Newham Council also seems to be dragging their feet over the issue. Newham has for years been run by Mayor Robin Wales, and is essentially a one-party state, which has often seemed to care little about the housing needs of its local residents, while encouraging many new blocks of high cost housing to attract a wealthier population.

One of several great scandals of Newham Council over the period of Wales as Mayor has been the Carpenter’s estate, a popular council estate close to Stratford Station. Newham saw its potential for development and around 2004 began forcing tenants to move out. It met with rather more resistance than it had bargained for with many people not wanting to lose their homes or to be relocated in the distant reaches of the borough or further still out of London.

Various schemes fell through, with protests at University College London helping to persuade UCL to drop its plans for a campus there. In September 2015 Focus E15 Mums celebrated the first anniversary of their fight against LB Newham’s failure to provide local housing for local people and opened and occupied one of many shamefully long empty council properties on the Carpenters Estate in Stratford. It gained national publicity, stimulating a great deal of discussion about the housing crisis, putting the issue firmly on the national agenda. Under pressure the council made a number of promises about using some of the empty housing stock on the estate, which they have largely failed to keep.

Focus E15 – who hold a weekly protest on Stratford Broadway and also support people in their fight to get rehoused by Newham Council and fight evictions – have since visited the Carpenters estate a number of times, and it was there the march ended there with a picnic with other housing campaigners.

There is now some hope that Wales’s feudal reign in Newham may come to an end. Last year he managed to engineer a vote that would have seen him as the unopposed Labour candidate by using the votes of a number of affiliate organisations (some of which have almost no membership in the borough) to outvote the various membership branches who wanted an election, but things have moved on and with greater opposition from members there is a real chance that a new candidate will be selected, and council policies will change to better serve the people of Newham.

Fire Risk Tower Blocks
Duke’s Lodge for Grenfell
Continue reading Grenfell ripples

Rev Nagase from the Battersea pagoda

I was only a few weeks old when the nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but was one of a generation that grew up very much in their shadow.  Both my brothers marched to Aldermaston in 1958, and my eldest brother sat down at the Ministry of Defence  in Whitehall in 1961 with the Committee of 100, though he wasn’t one of the original signatories. We all held our breath during the 13 days of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, but fortunately both Khrushchev and Kennedy came to their senses and came to a secret agreement. Both men realised that actually using nuclear weapons would be catastrophic not just for their nations but for the world; the US agreed secretly to withdraw missiles from Turkey and Southern Italy if Kruschev would publicly withdraw his from Cuba.

So the USA remains the only country ever to have used nuclear weapons in war, and it was able to do so only because it knew it could not face nuclear retaliation. By the time of Cuba the use of them had become unthinkable; only a crazed lunatic would press the button.

More recently our worries have begun to rise again. Could a man who so carelessly vents on Twitter decide early one morning that it would be a good thing to nuke those bad guys in Russia? We can only hope that there are people in the USA who have decided for safety reasons to undo one of the wires.

More recently I’ve taken part in protests and been to Aldermaston myself, walking much of the way there in 2004, and cycling to photograph to photograph the ‘Wool Against Weapons‘ 7 mile scarf from the atomic weapons factory at Burghfield to Aldermaston in 2014, as well as many other CND events. After Cuba, after the end of the Cold War it has simply become impossible to produce any military argument for the retention of a UK nuclear capability – as even many in the military now agree.

Rev Nagase pays his respects to Gandhi

Nuclear arms are useless, their use totally immoral and maintaining them a terrible waste of money that could be spent far better on health, on education and other social benefits. Their use against Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime – as was our firestorm bombing of Dresden together with the USAF which killed around 25,000 civilians including some refugees. But the effects of radiation made the linger on for much longer.

Cllr Jenny Headlam-Wells, Camden Deputy Mayor lays a wreath

The ceremony in Tavistock Square takes place every year on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, August 6th, and if I’m in London I go, and I take photographs. In 2017 there was perhaps a slightly smaller crowd than in previous years, and certainly rather fewer photographers than in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn who had often chaired the event in the past was the main speaker.

Hiroshima Day 72 Years on

Continue reading Remember Hiroshima

Canal warehouses at Brentford Lock, 1977

When I was young one of our family treats on Bank Holidays and the like was a trip to Kew Gardens. My father was a keen gardener and always had a pair of scissors in his pocket to take the odd cutting, and even we could afford the entrance fee of one old penny. But the highlight for me was never the plants or the picnic on the grass, but the bus journey there from Hounslow, crawling through the busy High St, then through Isleworth to the highlight of Brentford.

We always sat on the top deck, glued to the windows, and chose the right hand side which gave us glimpses of the Thames, but most importantly the gas works. You could smell it long before you reached it, pervading the long and narrow Brentford High St which began at the canal bridge. Then you were in the middle of an industrial landscape, full of odd structures and workers, always stuck in a slow moving traffic jam to give you plenty of time to admire. And if you were fortunate to be in the right place at the right time there was the spectacle of a glowing wall of coke falling to the ground as an oven door was opened. Getting off the bus at Kew Bridge to walk across was always something of an anti-climax.

The gas works was demolished while at I was up north at university, and it was a shock to return a few years later and see the gap where it had been. When I went back in 1977 to photograph, Old Brentford (the eastern parish of the town) was just a different place. Since then Brentford has changed even more, its canal and riverside location which once was industrial becoming a prime location for gentrification, flats with a waterside view attracting a significant premium, though enough remains to make it an interesting area to explore, and a little of the new also has some attraction.

The latest chapter in gentrification is Watermans Park, which I got to know well back in the 1980s and 1990s for the Watermans Arts Centre at its western end, where I helped organise and took part in a number of exhibitions with the photographic group Framework that Terry King and I ran, as well as going to several other shows there.  The Arts centre is to be demolished and together with an adjacent office block replaced by expensive riverside flats, while the arts are relocated to a site in the middle of the town where a new 13 storey police station was built in 1966 but vacated  by them in 2013, at the Half Acre, where the trolley buses from Hounslow used to turn around and go back.

Town Meadow and Brentford High St, 1977

The police station was Brentford’s third. The first was on the corner of Town Meadow in a building already around a 100 years old and still standing, but a new police station was built in 1869 a little further east on the High St. This rather imposing building was knocked down to build an office block in 1969 , threeyears after the police left for their new site.

Lighters moored alongside the former gas works site on Brentford High St

The gas works was demolished around 1964 and the area became public open space, Watermans Park. Hounslow Council had for some years been attempting to evict the 25 boats moored there – some since the 1960s – to build a £5.4 million marina to gentrify the area and won their legal case last November, with the eight remaining boat owners having to pay over £300,000 in legal costs and given 21 days to move.

The Thames Steam Tug and Lighterage Company was taken established in 1856 it set up a yard on Lots Ait a few yards upstream from here in 1904 which repaired and built barges and tugs for use on the Thames. At that time the company owned 340 barges and five tugs. At its peak the Lots Ait yard employed around 150 men and 2 women.

In 1961 although business was beginning to fall the company still employed over 400 lightermen when it was taken over by the Transport Development Group, and later amalgamated with he General Lighterage Company in the 1960s to form the Thames and General Lighterage Company. Around 1979 this was bought by William Cory Ltd, who moved away from coal and oil transport to waste disposal.

Lighters like this were made from 10mm thick steel, and slowly rust both from the outside and often from the inside, eventually becoming unusable as the steel remaining gets too thin. But there are still quite a few around as this may take a couple of hundred years – and small areas that get too thin can be repaired.

Grand Union Canal, Brentford, 1977

Brentford was where traffic on the canals met the river Thames, with goods being transhipped between large barges like these and narrow boats. The company operated Brentford Dock together with the Great Western Railway, with a line from the main line at Southall which brought Welsh coal, and for some time also had a passenger service with a station on the London Road in New Brentford where you can still see the remains of the bridge which took the line across, and a part of the line further south is now Augustus Close, leading to the private Brentford Dock housing estate with its notices ‘Private Property Residents Only No Public Right of Way’.

As with the railways, it was Dr Beeching, a man deeply in thrall to the road lobby, that did for the river traffic and canals, and in 1963 he recommended that waterborne traffic be moved to the roads; the the Lots Ait yard closed in 1980.

In 2005 the Ait was sold to investors and a retired solicitor, John Watson, decided he could open a new yard there. A new footbridge to the island was built and John’s Boat Works opened there in 2012. Occasionally the island is opened for conducted tours, though I’ve never managed to go on one.

The new Marina will provide moorings for roughly the same number of boats as were alongside the former park, and will be something of an eyesore, with decreased access to the riverside and obscuring the views to Brentford Ait. But while the former moorings paid no fees, the new development will attract a rather wealthier class of boat owners though with significantly less interesting vessels, and will make money for whoever is managing it. A rather better solution, but forward by the boat owners, would have been for Hounslow Council to legalise the moorings, make some improvements and collect sensible fees.

Brentford was another place we sometimes took photography students, and if the tide was right many of them would wade onto the mud bank opposite Lots Ait and sometimes most of the way across. I don’t recall seeing any great pictures that they took, but they seemed to enjoy getting covered in mud.

You can see the pictures here and a few more of Brentford as well as other places in the 1977 section of my London Photographs site, which so far contains pictures from 1974-80.

For a more recent view of Brentford see Riverside Brentford Panoramas and Riverside Brentford, taken in March 2016.
Continue reading Old and New Brentford

Shops including this one were built at ground level after the riots and demolition of the decks

People met at Broadwater Farm for the march and rally to remember Mark Duggan and others, nearly all young Black men, killed by police in London. There was a slightly uneasy atmosphere, not because we were at Broadwater Farm, but because the media haven’t generally given Black communities fair treatment over contentious issues – such as the killing of Mark Duggan, though the bias that there clearly is often comes from those who sit in offices and studios rather than people who actually report in person.  It’s something I probably feel less than most, as there were quite a few people there that know me from other places and protests, such as the annual march by the United Families and Friends Campaign calling for justice for  deaths in police, prison and psychiatric custody.

Mark Duggan’s daughter speaks at the police station, wearing a t-shirt ‘REST IN PARADISE “DAD”‘

Mark Duggan grew up on ‘The Farm’ and was known by many there, and many regard his shooting by police in 2011 as an extra-judicial killing, a state-condoned execution, a belief that was for them confirmed by the inquest  verdict that he was lawfully killed. The only civilian witness stated he was unarmed and surrendering when killed.

Jermaine Baker’s mother – he was shot, allegedly sleeping in a car, in Wood Green in 2015

But Duggan was only one of those who have died at the hands of the police in Tottenham, which includes  Cynthia Jarrett, Joy Gardner, Roger Sylvester and Jermaine Baker as well as many more in London and across the country and the recent murders of Rashan Charles, Darren Cumberbatch and Edson Da Costa.  There have been literally thousands of deaths in custody since the last even partly successful prosecution of police officers over a black death in custody in 1971 when two were acquitted on charges of manslaughter and perjury but convicted of assault after David Oluwale was found drowned in the River Aire in Leeds.

The march sets off from Broadwater Farm on its way to Tottenham Police Station

The march left rather later than expected, and there were perhaps rather fewer than last year taking part, but more joined them at Tottenham Police Station, which had been locked up for the day. Family members of those killed gathered on the steps and around, with a crowd in front spilling onto the pavement. And on the other side of the wide road another crowd assembled, mostly of young black men.

Mark Duggan’s mother Pamela Duggan (centre) with family and friends

There was poetry and a silence and speeches by some relatives of those killed and local activists as well as a few invited visitors including Becky Shah from the Hillsborough campaign and a speaker from the Justice for Grenfell campaign. Leading the rally was the prominent anti-racist campaigner Stafford Scott, who had been co-founder of the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign in 1985, and had known Mark Duggan well.

More pictures: Tottenham remembers Mark Duggan
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