Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Naked Cyclists

It was quite by coincidence that I returned to London from my holiday in Devon with friends the afternoon before the London World Naked Bike Ride was taking place. But it did give me something to look forward too on my return to work.

There is something rather entertaining about the sight of hundreds of naked or near naked people on bikes going past the sights of London, and it certainly entertains the thousands of tourists who stop to gaze at them in astonished and bewildered delight. Of course there are a few people who are upset and perhaps offended or feel somehow threatened by this display of public nudity, though I might be more impressed if more of them turned their faces away rather than continuing to witness the sinful activity.

Of course it is a rather unusual event, with people taking part for various reasons, including simply having a little fun as well as those with a strong commitment to environmental issues and others more concerned with naturism (and of course these are in no way exclusive.) But as I’ve commented before, there isn’t a clear message coming across. One of the things I try and do in photographing the event is to concentrate on those riders with messages on their bodies and the few placards or flags.

There are always considerably more men than women taking part, and for various reasons most people taking pictures who are mostly men concentrate on the less covered up women riders. At the start where crowds gather it often got hard to take photographs of the women as there were too many others trying to do so – and pushing in front of others to do so. The crowds made it very difficult to start the event, and those of us who tried to move back when requested by the stewards or police simply found that we were at the back of a crowd.

This year the problems at the start were particularly bad because there was time for the crowd to build up in a relatively small area, and the start took place into a busy roundabout with traffic flowing normally around it, creating dangerous conditions for the cyclists. Why on earth didn’t the police stop the traffic for a few minutes to allow a safer start? It would have also have got the event started in a fraction of the time and caused far less traffic chaos.

Female nudity is generally more acceptable for publication than male, and of course ‘topless’ images are a staple of parts of the popular daily press. Photographing men is I think trickier, and for many publications full frontal images present a problem. Although it doesn’t worry me, I do try to make sure that at least in some images for publication there are carefully positioned handlebars or flags or legs etc which make the images more widely publishable.

Most of the rides I’ve photographed in the several years I’ve covered this annual event there have been people that I’ve known taking part, and they have been among the keenest to see my pictures, which have also been commented on favourably by some of those concerned with organising the event.

Almost all of the pictures were taken with the D700, as I still haven’t repaired or replaced the D300 with the mirror that keeps sticking. Although a few – including the top one here – were with the 16-35mm Nikon, I soon changed to the Sigma 28-300 for the remainder of the event. It isn’t a lens I like much; it could be sharper (particularly at the long end) and focus sometimes seems just a little slow, but is considerably smaller, lighter and cheaper than the Nikon alternative, and it did the job adequately. The Nikon 28-300mm isn’t one of their better performers in any case, and such superzoom lenses are always a compromise.

The 18-105mm Nikkor would possibly have been a better choice (equivalent to 27-155mm) but used on the FX body the files it gives are only 2784×1848 px, around 5Mp compared to the normal FX size of 4256×2832 px. I’d need to get Lightroom to upsize them a little before filing, but I suspect the quality would be superior even so, as this lens is a much better performer despite being so cheap. I also very much like being able to see outside the red framing rectangle in the viewfinder, rather like you can on a rangefinder camera, which makes covering action so much easier. Exactly why I’m considering buying a D800 (or more likely the 800E) mainly to use as a DX camera.

Don’t visit Naked Cyclists Ride Against Oil on My London Diary if nudity will offend you. Otherwise I hope you enjoy it. For some reason the pages on the World Naked Bike Ride usually seem to be among the most popular on the site!

________________________________________________________

My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

May Ends at Sainsbury’s

I have to admit that we shop at Sainsbury’s though I can’t remember when I last actually went there. But the stuff we eat that you can’t buy from Tradecraft (my wife sells their stuff on a weekly stall), our superb local butcher (just a shame the fishmonger was forced out of business by our local council) and the local market and a few little things from Waitrose (Sainsbury’s doesn’t have a decent mature cheddar) we get the rest mainly from Sainsbury’s mainly because it is the most convenient local supermarket – ten minutes away on a bike, and Linda fills her panniers there once a week. Though they won’t get that rich on the little we spend.

So I was just a little disturbed to find myself photographing a protest outside a Sainsbury’s Localjust off Holborn Circus as the launch event of a new national campaign, Pay Up!, aimed at making poverty a political issue. Before I’ve photographed protests at Tescos, at Marks and Spencer’s and even at Waitrose, but this was a first for Sainsbury’s.

But it turns out that they are a low pay employer, actually paying 50p and hour less to its lowest paid staff than Tesco, and certainly not enough to live on in London.

I reached the store with the leading protesters, and wondered whether to follow them in. The police weren’t far behind and I decided to stop and photograph them blocking the entrance to the mass of the protesters instead.

The pictures – more of course on My London Diary in Pay Up! Launches At Sainsbury’s

– weren’t great, but probably more interesting than what was happening inside, and I was able to go along the the exit and photograph the half a dozen or so who had got inside as they were fairly politely ushered out by the shop staff and police.

Of course I had to make sure that at least some of the pictures explained what the protest was about, and the banner outside the shop was an easy way to show this, with its use of their advertising slogan ‘Try Something New Today?’ and the protesters’ suggestion ‘Pay A Living Wage.’ You’ll see on My London Diary that I took a few more pictures making use of these slogans.

After a while when the protest moved around the corner to the Sainsbury’s offices on Holborn Circus I got another of my favourite images from the day, although this time the banner was held with its message away from me. It was certainly better to work from the side with the bodies of the people holding it visible, and the text would have perhaps taken something from the visual impact of the image.

The lighting was quite tricky during the protest, with low evening sun and some areas in pretty deep gloom. Much of the time the fill from the SB800 was needed and did a good job, but there were just a couple of pictures where something went wrong. Here’s one of them, with perhaps a couple of stops more flash than I wanted (I had it set for -2/3 stop.)

It needed a little flash (I took a couple of frames without) but this was way too much, and the fingers of that hand close to the lens were completely burnt out. Even with a lot of work in Lightroom I couldn’t quite rescue the image. Of course I am too close to her – the minimum distance shown on the back of the flash is I think 1.2metres, and had I been thinking I would have tried to cut down the flash in some way, but there wasn’t time to do much. I did see the problem and tried to take a couple of images with the flash off, but it did need some extra light.

1.2 metres (at ISO 1600) does seem rather a long way and the minimum distance increases as you put up the ISO. It’s something that makes flash a lot harder for me to use in low light where I want high ISO to avoid excessively dark backgrounds. Perhaps Nikon could improve the flash circuitry in some way to make life easier?

Partying in Putney

Protests sometimes involve an element of secrecy with their locations being kept secret until the last minute, or being restricted to perhaps a single photographer who is invited to cover them. I’ve had quite a few such invitations, but mostly these have been for events early in the morning so that pictures can reach the newspapers by around 11am, when many of the stories for the next day’s paper – apart from really important breaking news – are finalised.

Living as I do on the fringe of London, covering early morning events in London means getting up very early and paying extortionate fares to travel in. It’s too expensive to do often on spec as a freelance, and actual commissions are rare, so mainly I cover events later in the day.

On Saturday there are cheaper fares all day, and in any case the Great British Street Party at a mystery location organised by UK Uncut and DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) was starting from 4 locations in London at the very reasonable time of 11am, and I didn’t even need to rush my breakfast.

Although I couldn’t have know it, I could have enjoyed another hour in bed, because it turned out that Waterloo station was the gathering point on which people from the other three locations would converge, while those of us who had started there were simply waiting for them.

I think the four groups all finally arrived and we made our way on a train going back in the same direction I had come into Waterloo. As the train pulled into Putney (which I had gone through almost two hours earlier – and I could have saved half my fare) two of the four blocks got the order to alight, while the other two were told to stay on the train.

Should I get off or stay on? Most of the photographers I could see were getting off, so I decided to stay on, hoping to get some different and perhaps better pictures. I still am not sure if it was the better choice and from the pictures I’ve seen both groups actually missed perhaps the most interesting part of the protest as it began in the short street where Deputy PM Nick Clegg lives – though he and his family were known to be away for the weekend.

Had I known in advance where we were going I would have chosen Putney, and then made sure I was on the spot when things started. But had the organisers told me and the other photographers, then the police too would have probably got to know and prevented the protesters reaching there.

According to the press release after the event, the street was secured at both ends by protesters in wheelchairs chaining themselves across it, but by the time I arrived, the police were holding back the other group of protesters at the far end of the street and at our end there was just one person in a wheelchair and a small handful of people holding a banner waiting for us. If the wheelchair users did chain themselves across the road I don’t think the press got there in time to take photos.

A few yards up the road were half a dozen police who stopped us as we walked up the road, but not for long. When a couple of protesters tried to push through the police turned to grab them and the rest of us simply ran (or walked, as I did) past their line.And I think we walked straight past Nick Clegg’s house because nobody knew where the party was meant to be, rushing up to join the other half of the protest.

For a while the police too seemed to have no idea what to do, and the party-goers found themselves in the middle of two disorganised groups of officers, one trying to push them one way and the second pushing them back. Eventually they got themselves sorted out and formed a line several officers deep blocking off the northern part of the road we had come down – and which presumably included the Deputy PM’s house.

This left a nice space on the road for the party to take place, and there was truly a party atmosphere, with live music and free food. Some of the press talked about the neighbours being frightened and harassed but there was no cause for it and they would have been welcomed had they come and joined in.

I left early but the party continued for another four or five hours before those remaining left together for Putney station. On there way they were attacked by police, presumably frustrated by standing around doing nothing very much all through a hot Saturday afternoon. It was probably the only time in the day that anyone in Putney should have been much disturbed by what was going on.

More pictures: UK Uncut Great British Street Party

________________________________________________________

My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

Hospital Visit

Sometimes there are pictures which appeal to me but which are unlikely to be used and I think the above image is one of them. Although I like it as an image, I think it doesn’t really tell the story. Looking at it there are clues about the event, but nothing that makes it clear.

I think this is probably the one I chose as the lead image for the story, because the text on the banner makes it clear what the protest – by cleaners at one of London’s leading hospitals – was about. Or perhaps I might have chosen something like this one:

It felt strange to be back at St George’s Hospital, where nine years ago I spent some time in a bed waiting for an operation which finally put me back on my feet again, although the actual building I was in – typically Victorian with the kind of long wards where Florence Nightingale would not have looked out of place – was due for demolition a few weeks after I left, and not before time.

One thing that impressed me in 2003 about St George’s was the quality of the cleaning. It was the third hospital I’d been in; the first with cleaning out to a contract was largely filthy, and in one of the wards I found discarded needles and dressings under my bed, though the intensive care ward I’d gone in to on entry was well looked after. But basically whenever the nursing staff wanted the place cleaning there were no cleaners to be found. The second hospital was so crowded with beds I don’t think you could see under them.

At St George’s the ward staff made sure the cleaners did a good job, and although the plumbing was falling to bits and parts of the walls were crumbling the floor shone. I don’t know how well the place is cleaned under Ocean who now employ the cleaners, but if as they are trying to they manage to cut the hours the cleaners are given, standards will suffer, both because the staff have less time to clean, but also because of the loss of morale that a cut in their overall pay will undoubtedly bring.

The dispute at St George’s is also about union recognition. The cleaners – all except one – belong to the IWW which now has many of London’s cleaners in its branch here. They have lost faith in unions such as Unite who they feel have failed to press their demands with management, neglecting them in order to get a better deal for more highly paid members. But the management recognise Unite but not the IWW, perhaps because they know they will not be pressed as hard. There were plenty of opportunities to show the IWW was fighting for the cleaners, and those red flags are IWW flags, but in other pictures I tried hard to make their involvement more obvious.

Although I think I did a decent job overall – and you can judge for yourselves at Hospital Cleaners Protest on My London Diary – and certainly the cleaners were pleased with the pictures and article published on Demotix, I wasn’t entirely happy, as there was no single picture in which I really managed to put all the elements together. Some days it’s really difficult to find what you want.
________________________________________________________

My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

Afghan Photographers

Last week I read an interesting Aljazeera feature Afghan photographers shoot to glory, which as well as starting me on a search to see more of the work of the Afghan photographers featured, also sent me looking at the work of Reza who toegether with his brother Manoocher Deghati founded the Aina (mirror in Farsi) media and photography school, where most of these photographers studied, in Kabul in 2001.

Reza is well known for his work around the world for the National Geographic Magazine, which is perhaps why I’ve not really looked much at his work before. There is something about the whole NatGeo look and approach – at least in modern times – that I often find too slick and glossy – and I rather like photographs that are a rather more down and dirty – perhaps rather more like the world itself. NatGeo tends to be a little too American and too coffee-table for my taste, though of course that is being unfair on photographers such as Reza, born in Iran and, like his brother, an Iranian-French photojournalist. He’s won major awards in photography for his work and been honoured by France and UNICEF, and looking at his work you can see why.

After studying film-making in Rome, Manoocher returned to Iran to photograph the revolution and worked for around ten years for the agency SIPA, founded by the legendary Turkish photojournalist Göksin Sipahioglu (one day I must find and resurrect the article I wrote about him) in 1973 in Iran and later in the USA, then mainly for AFP before going to Kabul to found Aina, and is now Middle East Regional Photo Editor for the Associated Press (AP), based in Cairo.

There are some pictures in the Aljazeera feature, but you can find more of their work on the web. The is a portfolio on AFP for Massoud Hossaini as well as his work at World Press Photo. Farzana Wahidy who is his wife and another fine photographer also appears in a feature
Shooting Stars: Reza presents Farzana Wahidy, where his introduction ends with the words “Farzana is telling the story of Afghanistan from the inside.” This is something that is important and true about all these photographers. Fardin Waezi, has his own blog which makes the same point in its title, Though Afghan Eyes. He learnt his photography starting at the age of 7 in his father’s photography studio in Kabul.

Barat Ali Batoor grew up as an Afghan refugee in Pakistan and going to his country for the first time in 2001, he taught himself photography in 2002 to “draw the world’s attention to the plight of the Afghan people the problems facing the country.” You can see his remarkable and controversal images of dancing boy entertainers on his site.

Finsbury Square Ends

I met a few of the Occupy people from Finsbury Square outside the Royal Courts of Justice yesterday afternoon while the court in closed session was considering if they had grounds to appeal against the eviction order. They seemed to be expecting the case to fail, and when I said to one of them that I hoped the case went the right way was a little surprised when he said it was time for the occupation to end, as it was now just a home for the homeless and vulnerable.

Finsbury Square, occupied on 21 October had become the longest ‘Occupy’ camp anywhere in the world, and had for months organised a programme of events and actions that those concerned can be proud of – but like many organisations had outlived its purpose. Unlike some other city organisations at a similar stage in their life-cycles it had not amassed huge fortunes, and while they can and do sit back comfortably on their assets, OccupyLFS had more or less fallen to pieces and was becoming more and more of a dump. It was still providing a home for a number of people who had been failed by the system, some of whom will now be housed by Islington Council – and their temporary accomodation on site for some months will have saved the council at least some of £60,000 they claim the occupation has cost them.
© 2012, Peter Marshall
There was still a fairly full programme in March

I made only a few visits to Finsbury Square during the occupation, though I met some of the residents at a number of protests elsewhere. Although the camps here and at St Paul’s have both gone, the issues raised by the movement here and world-wide remain.
© 2012, Peter Marshall

The eviction was apparently a fairly quiet affair, taking place as I expected in the middle of the night, with bailiffs arriving around 1am this morning when I was snoring peacefully over 20 miles away. There were relatively few residents present, and the whole thing seems to have happened without any trouble.

Finsbury Square was a little out of my way, but I called in a few times when I was in the City for other things. Most times I took few if any pictures as often there seemed to be very little going on, and put nothing on My London Diary. The last time I was there was for the start of the march from there to support the protest against a large Olympic facility being erected without proper planning permission on Leyton Marsh.

Occupy Finsbury Square – Oct 2011
Bank of Ideas & Finsbury Square – Nov 2011
Leyton Marsh Olympic Protest – Mar 2012

________________________________________________________

My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

Jubilee Traces

There was still a little bunting down our street as we came back home after six days, away, the windswept and bedraggled remnants of a celebration that had largely passed us by. As I’ve said before, I’d rather be a citizen than a subject.

We’d been staying in a moderately remote Devon valley with a group of friends where we had no mobile signal without climbing further up the hill, and not a single union jack was visible. Of course when one of our party made the mistake of turning on the TV, that was all that was on apart from tennis, but I didn’t have to stay and watch it.

I’m not anti-Jubilee. I think it would be a very good thing if we followed the model set down in Leviticus and every 49 (or 50) years returned the land to God, rather than our current ridiculous system of land ownership which entrenches inequality and class differences. Bring it on, let’s have a real Jubilee!

But although in the valley where we were staying there was little actual sight of the recent event – we did glimpse a bonfire on a distant hill-top and we did actually leave the site and make our way to various villages, towns and the city of Exeter, where it was sometimes impossible to avoid the signs of the times.

I spent some time waiting for friends on an Exeter Street on a bench I was informed was a favourite haunt of the city’s drug dealers and I photographed the shop more or less opposite, one of many thousands around the country decorated for the Jubilee.

Later that day I walked past the Nobody Inn bus stop, and although there was nobody in (and no buses for four days) it had been decorated for the celebrations, along with a nearby tree.

The following day we visited Topsham, the former port of Exeter and although we had missed the main festivities there, the bunting was still up and there were clearly other celebrations taking place.

On the Salutation Inn there was an enviably catholic selection of flags, including I think an old sun-free Argentine flag which owes its origin to General Belgrano, the Red Banner of the former Soviet Union and a Dutch flag sharing place of honour with the Union Flag and St George’s Cross. It was also good to see yellow and green adding variety to the bunting alongside the red white and blue. Topsham does of course have strong historical links with the Dutch, with many of the bricks in its Dutch style houses having come across as ballast from Holland.

And on the bowling green they were having a Jubilee event.

Deadly Coal & Filthy Lies

Last week was apparently “End Mountaintop Removal Week Washington DC,” a piece of news that probably wouldn’t have made our media even in a week without the wall-to-wall royal sycophancy, and to be honest something that I would not normally have been aware of. Although strip mining in the UK is something I’ve written briefly about and photographed protests against in London, the environmental problems it causes in Appalachia are not a major issue here.

What brought them to my attention was a Facebook post from the The Shpilman Institute for Photography referring me to an LPV Digest post about the misuse by ‘Big Coal’ of child pornography allegations to prevent Maria Gunnoe, described by Rolling Stone in their feature about the incident as “one of the most effective and celebrated mountaintop removal activists in Appalachia” to prevent her using a picture by photographer Katie Falkenberg showing a young girl in a bath full of what Aaron Brady in The New Inquiry describes as “brown, poisonous water” caused by the mining. The photographer’s caption which he quotes states that the water has a high level of arsenic which the family say is a result of the blasting used in mining which has disrupted the water table and cracked the casing of the well which is their only normal source of water. Although the mining company haven’t admitted they caused the problem, the caption stated “they do supply the family with bottled water for drinking and cooking.”

Mother Jones gives more details of how Gunnoe, who had gone to Washington to testify to a committee of Congress, was told before she did so that she must remove the picture from her presentation and that after she had given her presentation was questioned for almost an hour by police over allegations that the image was child pornography.

The image had been taken and used with the permission of the child’s parents and Gunnoe also had their permission to use it, but since the police investigations started it and the caption have been removed from Falkenberg’s web site, replaced by the statement: “The family has declined media request to use this photo; it has therefore been removed from the photo essay to honor their wishes.”

Although some other web sites and blogs have removed the picture at the photographer’s request, it remains fairly widely available on the web. You can find more about the U.S. Representative who appears to have been responsible for the removal of the picture and the porn allegations in the Schmuck of the Week feature Doug Lamborn should be thrown out with the bathwater on Denver Westword, and Gunnoe’s testimony (without the disputed image) is also available online.

The publicity surrounding the case has almost certainly caused problems for the family concerned, and they may well have come under considerable pressure to revoke their permission for the picture to be used. It would be hard to criticise them, and given their request the photographer, for the decision to withdraw the image, but it really it is hardly possible to remove images from the web once they have been released, and it took less than 10 seconds to find a copy.

This perhaps isn’t always a good thing, but when we are talking about censorship by powerful vested interests who are more than prepared to play dirty I think it must be.

Letter To Nikon

I’m now back on an internet link and busy catching up with things – as well as covering four demonstrations yesterday which got me event further behind. I’ve run out of time writing what was intended to be my next post, but have just come across something I’d like to pass on to you before I next fall asleep on the keyboard, something I’ve already managed several times this evening.

In the last sentence of Nikon Bows To Extreme Right about Nikon cancelling the show of work by South Korean photographer Ahn Sehong I wrote:

Nikon should certainly be ashamed of their part in this affair, and I hope the photography community worldwide will make its views clear to them.

I’m very pleased that UK photographer Si Barber has put on line the site ‘I Am Censored‘ with information about the case and an open letter to Mr. Yojiro Yamaguchi, Managing Director of Nikon UK, Nikon Japan and the national and international press, urging Nikon to re-instate Sehong’s funding “and most importantly show his work.”

Photographers of all persuasions, pro or amateur are invited to add their signatures to the document which already has the support of at least one Magnum member and “a number of well known veteran photographers.” I’ve just added my own name to the list and urge you to read the letter and do the same.

________________________________________________________

Si Barber was previously so incensed by PM David Cameron’s vapid twittering about ‘The Big Society’ that he published his own book ‘The Big Society – Snapshots of 21st Century Britain‘ as a “visual riposte to Cameron’s imagined nation and a critique of the voodoo economics which took Britain to the edge of moral and financial calamity.” Still available for £12 and you can order on-line using Paypal.

Staines Remains Staines

There is a story I’ve heard several times in Staines that the whole campaign to change the official name of our town started as a drunken bet by a councillor, and it is a story that to me makes more sense than the official story behind the campaign. But then like many who have known Staines for a long time – in my case since I was a child in the 1950s – I don’t have a great deal of respect for Spelthorne Council or many of our councillors.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
The London Stone, an ancient marker (part replica) of the limits of the
City of London’s control over the Thames was ‘unveiled’ close to its
original position in Staines as a more sensible act on the day.

Spelthorne borough isn’t unique in bringing together several very different areas, but its formation in the re-organisation of London government was unusual, the only part of Middlesex not to be included in Greater London. Although Staines and Stanwell in the north of the area were clearly linked to London and were largely working class areas with a good deal of industry on the fringe of Heathrow, the south of the area was wealthy surbubia, much more similar to Surrey across the river. The Conservatives from there revolted at the idea of becoming a part of London and despite an ancient history of transfluvial rivalry opted to become under the administration of Surrey as the borough of Spelthorne.

Surrey for many years often failed to acknowledge Spelthorne’s arrival, and it is only recently that we moved from the protection of the Met to policing by Surrey, although rail travellers have for rather longer been confused by finding their trains going between Feltham, Middlesex and Staines, Middlesex occasionally stop at the curiously named station of Ashford (Surrey), somehow having apparently contrived a lateral jump of several miles across the Thames. Fortunately should they walk out of the station they will soon find very clearly they are back in Ashford, Middlesex. Unless like a few unfortunates, mainly foreigners, they are so confused by the whole affair they end up in Ashford, Kent.

Spelthorne Council, although it has its offices in Staines, has never really understood Staines, and perhaps never really cared for it, with other parts of the borough always uppermost in its thoughts. It doesn’t help when even some Staines councillors seem completely ignorant of the town, as when one laughably went on record recently describing it as “a very genteel place“. Even in the Conservative Club that probably had them falling off their bar-stools. Don’t get me wrong. I like Staines, and we chose to live and buy a house here over 35 years ago and have stayed. If it had been genteel we wouldn’t have felt at home.

But this – and the decision to change the “official” name to Staines-upon-Thames – is all rather parish pump. The main controversy which led to the campaign was around Staines’s best-known ambassador, ‘Ali G’ who has done more to raise the profile of the town than any one else, ever. Most of Staines rather likes the ‘Ali G’ image – the Staines Town football team supporters refer to themselves as ‘The Massive’ and some dress like him to watch their matches. But Spelthorne and the local conservatives that dominate local politics don’t – and some certainly completely fail to understand his brand of humour. So when I heard that there was a chance that several people might attend dressed as ‘Ali G’ what had been a rather missable local event gained rather more interest.

In the end only one ‘Ali G’ turned up, although Drew Cameron was a class act, perhaps rather better than Sacha Baron Cohen himself, and many of those at the event were pleased to come and talk to him and have their pictures taken with him. Soon he had a ‘minder’ from Spelthorne Council following him around and reporting his progress on her handset (and I suspect making sure that the Mayor kept out of his way, a pity as I’d have liked a picture of the two guys together in fancy dress.) After a while a couple of security men pushed a protesting ‘Ali G’ off site, and I fortunately saw it happening and rushed across to take a few pictures.

A few minutes later he came back into the car park and public grassed area where the event was taking place and I took a few more pictures before going to photograph the official proceedings – and he was apparently thrown out for a second time.

Perhaps surprisingly the main local press hardly reported the story, and failed to make much of the whole event which curiously also got mixed up as some kind of Olympic celebration. One of the more independent local free sheets did use one of my pictures from Demotix and a short note fairly small on the front page. But for a proper report of the whole day, including the ‘Ali G’ incident, people will have to turn to Council Attempts To Rename Staines in My London Diary.

________________________________________________________

My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________