Category: Political Issues

Pressure is mounting on the UK Government to abandon its ‘reform’ of the National Health Service, which many see as privatisation, and it has become something of a scandal with the revelations of the extent of involvement of a discredited US healthcare company in its planning.

As someone who grew up with our Welfare State, I was with the protesters both physically and in spirit as they held a mock trial of  Andrew Lansley, the minister responsible opposite parliament as the debate continued inside over the Health and Social Care Bill. The trial wasn’t really very visual, though at least in street theatre if no longer in courts judges do come with very splendid wigs.

I’d tried to photograph a group of pensioners in the protest, but hadn’t been very happy with the results, but standing to one side while a colleague went in close and made a portrait of one of them gave me the time to think more about it. After he had finished I moved in and made a few exposures, including one that I was pleased with.

Probably the most news-worthy aspect of the was perhaps rather less interesting, with Diane Abbott MP, Shadow Minister for Public Health coming to support her constituents who had organised the protest. I didn’t manage to find any way more than a workaday image showing her holding the banner with parliament in the  background.

I was on my way to another protest and had stopped to talk with the three people at Brian Haw’s Parliament Square Peace Campaign, still keeping up a 24/7 vigil there – now for 10 years 8 months – despite the police removing Barbara Tucker’s tent, other personal possession and anything else that could give her comfort or shelter in mid-January when I saw the NHS protest was continuing and dashed across the rather busy road to photograph a small group now touring around Parliament Square.

There were six of them, equipped with placards ‘Save Our NHS’, ”No US Style Healthcare Here’, the four letters ‘S’, ‘T’, ‘O’ and ‘P’ (which they sometimes got in correct order) and a bedpan with its own placard ‘There’s Nothing Wrong With The Health Bill Except It’s Full of S**t’.

I didn’t have long to work, as they only stopped on the crossings while the green man was showing and were being urged to move along by a couple of police.

This was perhaps the best frame, as not only are all the placards more or less readable, but I liked the woman with the bedpan and placard apparently doing a little dance on one foot in front of Big Ben.

More at Stop NHS Privatisation – Kill Lansley’s Bill.

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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.

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Anonymous: Obama Bin Lying!

I was happily photographing a group in ‘Anonymous‘ masks holding a banner ‘Obama Bin Lying!’ in the garden of Grosvenor Square in front of the US Embassy, and was taking a few rather closer images of the masked figures when I realised there was a lot of noise coming from the No War In Iran & Syria protest on the other side of the hedge closer to the Embassy.

Looking over the hedge it was clear there was some kind of disturbance, and so I ran towards the gate in the corner of the gardens (it isn’t the kine of hedge you can get over or through) and started to make my way through the crowd to where things were happening. But the crowd was too dense to get through at any speed, even with the kind of experience and facility at doing so that comes with years of experience, and I soon gave up, retraced my steps and went round the other side, where a long packed line of photographers was standing on the edge  of a raised flower bed looking down from a few feet on the rally.

Abbas Edalat speaking –  and the Free Iran protesters wanted to put their view too

A noisy argument with some pushing and shoving in the crowd

I managed to squeeze a lens through between two of them and see where things were happening and took a couple of pictures, but I wasn’t going to get the kind of pictures I wanted from there. So I apologised to the two photographers on each side and went between them and lowered myself down the three or four feet from the wall (rather carefully, as my knee was still painful from a fall a week earlier) and through a very thin hedge and around some metal barriers into the crowd.

Once down in among them, it was hard to see what was happening, and probably the best guide was the noise, and I squeezed through to find a shouted confrontation taking place between a man who I later found was from the Free Iran Green Movement and the Stop the War Stewards. Things were so noisy it was hard to hear what they were shouting about, with almost everyone around except me and a couple of other photographers joining in. I was getting pushed around a lot and it was hard to keep in positions where I could see to take pictures – and a few times I had to lift the camera up above my head or push it out in front of me and hope, but mostly I was still working with the camera to my eye. As the people were getting pushed back, I had to move around in front of the way they were going and find new positions from which to photograph, and much of the time my view was blocked by what seemed rather randomly moving bodies.

Iranian Greens argue with Stop the War stewards

Iranian Greens stop their ‘Free Iran’ banner being taken away from them

Eventually three rather bemused constables waded into the crowd and tried to sort things out, though like me I think they had great problems knowing what was going on. Eventually they managed to bring the Iran Greens who had been fighting to keep their Free Iran banner out from the protest and let them mount their own in the area usually kept free directly in front of the embassy.

The Met start to get things sorted out

Perhaps those photographers who kept up on the wall got a better overall view, but I doubt if they got much in the way of pictures. It’s often a tricky decision whether to get down and in the middle of things when they get a little heated, and a large DSLR with a flashgun stuck on top is just a little fragile. But despite the anger that some of the protesters were showing towards each other, I didn’t feel any of it was directed towards me, and I felt little danger.

What is always difficult in crowds like this is getting sufficient distance – even with a 16mm – to show enough of the scene. If you try to move back a little, then protesters or other photographers will fill the gap. All of the images I took in the crowd were made with the 16-35mm on the D700, mostly in the 16-24mm range.

I was photographing this incident for around 8 minutes and took around 180 frames, all as single exposures. Had I been using film, I would have had to withdraw from the action a few times to reload, and would have taken considerably fewer images – and probably missed the better moments. Of those 180, almost all are reasonably sharp, thanks both to autofocus and relatively fast shutter speeds as I had the camera at ISO 1000. Exposures varied but were mostly around 1/200 f5.6, but some as low as 1/125. On film I’d have been working at ISO 400, again probably working at f5.6 to give sufficient depth of field even with the wide angle, and the slower speeds would certainly have meant fewer sharp images.

It was a very confusing event, and I think in my initial account on Demotix I got mixed up a little over who was who, certainly in a later part of my account. Stop the War also seem to me to be a little mixed up over the different views in Iran and Syria, and appear to have sided with the ruling regimes there and be opposed to the opposition groups who are also against military intervention.

Both Syria and Iran give financial and political support to Hezbollah which is widely seen as a resistance movement against imperialism across much of the Arab world (and as terrorists by the West), but both regimes also oppress and commit atrocities against their own populations –  news from Syria tells us daily of the protesters killed, and today is the 30th anniversary of the Hama massacre of 1982, which left 100,000 refugees, 60,000 prisoners, 40,000 martyrs, 15,000 missing & 5,000 homeless.

Groups such as the Iranian Green movement are strongly opposed to US attacks on Iran, believing that they would have the effect of strengthening the regime there and keeping it in power for another 50 years. Stop the War appears to have become closely aligned with groups supporting these tyrannical regimes and I think needs as a coalition to walk the more difficult route of uniting all those opposed to the war rather than taking sides.

My London Diary has a longer report on the actual protest, together with more pictures of the event, including more of these scuffles in No War Against Iran & Syria.

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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

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Another image from 1978 which I scanned yesterday, ‘Wet Hole‘ seemed to me then to sum up my feelings about Bracknell, the by then not so New Town where I was working, and where I’d lived for three years earlier in the decade, although by this time I was enjoying a pleasant commute of a dozen miles with a colleague, or occasionally by a convenient train service.

I was finding my teaching job hard work, with long hours needed to make the necessary preparation and marking was a real bind. It was a badly managed school and much of what should have been preparation time was lost to supervise classes for absent colleagues, much of the absence stress-related.

Bracknell was still a large building site, with large new estates being added around its fringes and the centre, where this picture was made, continually being redeveloped.

It wasn’t really a modern town, which much of the housing perhaps tediously old-fashioned domestic, developed with the car in mind and separating traffic from pedestrians, which almost always seemed to mean doubling the distance from A to B on foot – so most of us walked along the edges of the roads, particularly at the more dangerous junctions. The town centre was always just a mess, but what depressed me most about the place was a lack of vision, of style. Being the most boring of the New Towns wouldn’t perhaps have been a bad thing if it worked well, but it didn’t.

Even the train service, one of its best aspects, was ridiculously slow – and got even slower while I was there. 28 miles from London in a direct line, the 32 mile rail journey now takes slightly over an hour, an average speed of 31.5 mph on trains which the operating company laughably calls ‘fast.’

But the picture wasn’t just about my feelings about Bracknell, it was also a comment on the often dreary depths of architectural modernism here in the sixties and seventies. If anything the temporary structures at the bottom of the image are visually more interesting than the buildings behind. Again it perhaps wouldn’t have been too bad a thing if it worked well, but too often it didn’t.

At the time I took this picture, I was working on my first major project on Hull, and in particular the vast redevelopment that was taking place there, much of which is now in my book ‘Still Occupied.’

My work there had partly been spurred on by my experiences in the previous decade as a grass-roots activist on housing and redevelopment issues in Hulme and Moss Side, Manchester. So although I’ve never thought of myself as an architectural photographer I did have a keen interest in urban planning and urban landscape, which more recently was reflected in the Urban Landscapes web site I set up with Mike Seaborne around ten years ago. But in Hull I was largely concerned with what was being lost rather than the new.

Almost 30 years later I got to visit Brasilia, where modernism essentially ended – and incredibly its architect Oscar Niemeyer is still alive at 104. I arrived there the day after his 100th birthday, and was shown around much of the city by the daughter of one of the planning team who worked with Lucio Costa (1902-98 – who incidentally went to secondary school in Newcastle upon Tyne.) It was of course a prestige project and its signature buildings still lift the spirit despite the city’s faults.

On a smaller scale, Costa’s “superquadras“, the neighbourhoods which repeat across the city, seem so much more lively and human than anything our own New Towns have to offer.  Simone de Beauvoir wrote of their “air of elegant monotony”, but perhaps they have matured with age, and certainly some of the elegance is still there, along with a vibrancy we can’t match.

Half-awake in bed this morning I was lifted out of my dreams by an item on the Radio 4 Today programme, about Harmondsworth Great Barn, which has apparently been bought for the nation for a knock-down £20,000. It’s a sum that would hardly buy a garage or a garden shed out here in West London, and the barn is notable among other respects in its size. I think the BBC reporter said it was 20 metres long, which she helpfully added is almost 60 feet. Or as we say in the real world, just over 65 ft. But it was early morning and I could be wrong. On the ground the barn is over 60 metres long – 192 ft – and 11 metres high (37 ft) really giving the impression of a vast wooden cathedral (John Betjeman called it ‘The Cathedral of Middlesex‘, with a central nave and two side aisles giving a total width of around 12 metres (38 ft.) Its 12 bays are supported by giant oak columns, whole trees selected and cut to shape, with a tremendous amount of woodwork, of which over 95% is thought to date from 1426 when the barn was built by Winchester College to house the vast yield of wheat from its lands.

The people give a good indication of the size of the Great Barn

It was a typical BBC report, sprinkled with such inaccuracies – she spent some time telling us we might have flown over it on our way in or out of Heathrow, and about the planes flying overhead. Unless they take a sharp left or right halfway down the runway they don’t – the Great Barn is 1.3 km directly north of the northern runway. You can hear the planes, see them shortly after they leave or reach the ground, but they don’t go overhead either on take-off or landing. That treat is reserved mainly for the residents of Hounslow and London to the east and Poyle and other places to the west.

Splendid oak beams, cut in 1426 support the tiled roof.

In truth English Heritage paid £199,999 more of our money than they needed to, as they were offered the Great Barn for £1 in 2003, but amazingly declined to buy. The Guardian quotes Simon Thurley, chief executive of EH as saying “Harmondsworth Barn is one of the greatest medieval buildings in Britain, built by the same skilled carpenters who worked on our magnificent medieval cathedrals. Its rescue is at the heart of what English Heritage does.” You would have thought it would have been worth a quid – particularly before the recession and the cuts! Three years later the owners were bankrupt and it was bought by a trust who paid a pound for it, and more or less left it to rot, presumably hoping to make money from the sale of the site for the airport extension.

The site, as the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, (better known as SPAB) explains, is both a Grade One listed building and a Scheduled Ancient Monument (SAM). Unfortunately the SAM listing means that enforcement powers which can be used against owners of listed buildings to force repairs do not apply. Bizarrely there are no comparable powers for SAMs, which have to rely on the slow process of English Heritage getting permission from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to get things done. Although it had been well-maintained until around 2003, since then it has been neglected, falling to pieces over the past 8 or 9 years and costing us more to put right.

Protesters march from Harlington to a rally at Harmondsworth in 2003

The most significant omission from the BBC report was any mention of the fight to stop the third runway at Heathrow – its western end would have been just a few metres from the barn and the church a few yards away. As well as the runway, the plans also included the building of a new and busy road past the site. At the moment it’s just off a quiet (apart from the planes three-quarters of a mile away) triangular village green with pub, church and cottages on a road that leads to nowhere – on a bike you can continue to Harmondsworth Moor and walk or ride along by the River Colne or the Wraysbury River, an area of grass and woodland away from anywhere except aurally, with the noise of the planes largely drowned by the continual rumble of the M25 and M4!

I visited the barn and took pictures inside it on the day of the first large protest march against the third runway. We held the rally on the green outside the pub, and there was a specially brewed beer for the campaign. Despite the closeness of the airport, the area retains something of the character of the Middlesex villages I rode through on my bike as a boy in the 1950s.

The rally on Harmondsworth’s village green, outside the Five Bells – the barn is just a few yards down past the right of the pub

Even in the fifties, we knew that Heathrow Airport was in the wrong place for London’s major airport as the planes thundered over shaking our Hounslow house just two and a half miles from touchdown. The aviation industry who planned it in the 1940s knew that they could only get it there by stealth, under the pretence it was needed for military purposes, a deliberate deception which has since been acknowledged. By the 1980s and 90s the need to build a new airport was so clear that it seems criminal that successive governments ignored it. Then as now, the obvious site was not ‘Boris island‘ but somewhere to the north-west of London, close to the M1 and the west coast mainline, perhaps in an area already despoiled by abandoned brick workings, and with flight paths that avoid our major centres of population.  But government after government fudged the issue and instead gave way to pressure from the aviation industry to expand Heathrow, terminal by terminal, each one promised to be the final expansion. It’s long past time we got a vision for the future of Heathrow that looks at the site as an opportunity for a future new town rather than as an airport.

Climate Rush scrumping at the nearby Heathrow Airplot, September 2009

The Great Barn has for some years only been open on special occasions – mainly the annual Open House Day. According to The Guardian report cited above, it will be open two Sundays a month from April, free to the public, thanks to volunteers from the local Friends of Harmondsworth Barn, and it is well worth a visit, though I hope there will not be too many cars blocking the local lane’. There is a car park for the Colne Valley park a fairly short walk away which I hope visitors will be encouraged to use. I hope too you will be able to enjoy fruit from the adjoining orchard, seldom harvested in recent years, which Grow Heathrow paid a visit last October. Before the airport, this was an area famed for its market gardens and orchards, one of the agriculturally most productive areas of the country (and the home of the ultimate apple, Cox’s Orange Pippin – and Richard Cox was buried in the churchyard) – which is why Winchester needed such a huge barn.

One of this morning’s news headlines was that the Royal College of Nursing, the professional body that represents qualified nurses, along with the Royal College of Midwives, have finally joined all the other professional healthcare organisations representing doctors, physiotherapists etc and come out against the government’s Health Care Bill.

Two days ago, I was photographing an event opposite the Houses of Parliament against another controversial government bill which the House of Lords were to be debating later that afternoon, the Welfare Reform Bill, which will remove funding and support from many of the disabled and least well off, adversely affecting, among others, many with terminal cancer.

It wasn’t a large protest, but had representatives of single mothers, disabled activists and others including the Rev Paul Nicolson, chairman of the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, a London-based charity which addresses poverty issues caused by unfairness in the law, legal and benefits system, which had organised the event together with Single Mothers Self-Defence and WinVisible, a grassroots group for women with visible as well as invisible disabilities. At the front of the group of protesters was a woman holding a placard ‘Nurses vs Welfare Reform Bill!‘ being photographed for publication in a nursing magazine.

One other and possibly older profession was also mentioned in the placards.

See more at Welfare Reform Bill Lobby at Parliament on My London Diary.

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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

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