Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Prescott Folly?

This is not yet another underhand knocking piece about our former Deputy Prime Minister who I think has been so unfairly pilloried by the press, largely because of his adherence to his working class origins and some habits which are rather too easy to make fun of, not least a complete inability to construct a coherent sentence, always jumping off to another thought before reaching a conclusion. But I really think Prescott deserves praise as the first UK politician in power to take environmental issues at all seriously.

But so far as I know he played no part in the creation of the Prescott Folly, officially known as ‘The Three Mills Lock‘ and a part of the “greenwash” around our 2012 Olympic Games bid. The lock was to enable huge amounts of building materials and waste to be transferred in and out of the Stratford site over the river/canal system already existing there, but previously only navigable by small craft around high tide. Actually even although the new lock will keep up water levels above it, there isn’t a great deal downstream at low tide, so I’m not sure what a great difference there will be.

The Prescott Channel, named after a long-forgotten chair of the Lee Conservancy Board, was constructed in the 1930s as a part of a flood prevention scheme, which also involved the construction of several new locks designed for navigation but which were seldom if ever used.

2010 sees history repeating, as although a barge was loaded with waste in June to take to Rainham for disposal I suspect this was a photo-op rather than the start of real operations and there seems to be little use currently being made of this £19 million lock. The barge for those pictures on the Waterworks River is the 250 tonne Ursula Katherine from Bennett’s Barges. The only pictures of a barge I’ve found elsewhere on the system, apart from a few narrow boats (and they used to occasionally make it before the lock was built) are all of the single barge from the opening event – and I’ve even searched Flickr.

The Olympic Development Authority already claims to be more than meeting its target for movement by rail and water using rail alone. So they don’t need the barges. But it would be nice to see one going through now and then.

But even though it is perhaps unlikely to have much of a role in the concretisation of the area taking place for the Olympics, the lock does have two roles which will be critically important in the aftermath, when property developers will be scrabbling for easy profits. It will enable the flows of sewage that occur into the Lower Lea during storms to be prevented from flowing upstream on the tide into the Olympic area, and will also prevent the flooding that can currently occur on much riverside land.

Which is of course good news for British Waterways as it converts considerable areas of riverside land that they own from open wasteland into highly desirable development opportunities. But had they proposed the plan for this reason it seems unlikely it would ever have been started. Folly is hardly the word to describe it; deception would be more accurate.

I had been hoping to cycle on the footpath along the side of the river along the ‘Long Wall’ from Three Mills to the new lock, and then to continue over the bridge at the lock and on to the Northern Outfall Sewer. Both paths were closed, supposedly for six months, for the construction of the lock. The lock was completed months ago, but the paths remain closed.

You can see more pictures of the lock and the area around on My London Diary.

Kew Bridge Eco Village 8 Months Old

Kew Bridge Eco Village was occupied on the 6 June 2009, and 8 months later it is still there and has expanded considerably since I visited it in the summer (see here and here.)

The occupation was inspired by other similar protests, particularly the 1996 ‘Pure Genius‘ occupation of the Guinness site next to Wandsworth bridge by The Land is Ours, and aims to demonstrate how people can live in harmony with nature, cultivating food and recycling waste. You can see a few of my pictures from ‘Pure Genius’ on My London Diary and I wrote about it her on >Re:PHOTO last year. One of the earliest protests I posted about on the web was the first anniversary of this occupation which I put online in 1997. Both the page design and scan quality of Pure Genius – One Year On leave much to be desired, and are a reminder of how much the web has developed since then. File sizes had to be small when the fastest modems ran at 56 kbps and many of us were on considerably slower lines.

The Kew Bridge site had been empty since the demolition of the Scottish Widows insurance offices in 1992, and has been owned by property developers St George since 2003. In September 2009 their latest plan for the site including 164 flats, offices and a piazza with a riverside pub was attacked by various local community groups and failed to gain any support from councillors, despite being recommended by the council officers, and a decision on it was deferred, at least until March 2010 and quite probably until June. Given the cool reception the plans received it may be that the developers will need to submit revised plans, which could hold up the development for even longer.

There are now around thirty permanent residents, roughly as many as the site will accommodate, along with occasional visitors. While I was there a small group was clearing a largish area for planting as a vegetable garden along the side of the site next to Kew Bridge, and there were various cold frames and a polythene growing tunnel elsewhere on the site.

Others were painting posters in preparation for the Kew Bridge Eco Village’s ‘Seedy Sunday‘, Brentford’s First Annual Seed Swap next week, on St Valentine’s Day, Sunday 14 Feb, from 11am to 3pm. If you haven’t any flower or vegetable seeds of your own to swap, seeds will be available for a small donation, and there will also be information, gardening related stalls, refreshments and, from 12.30-1.00pm, storytelling for children.

The seed swap is one of a number of similar events taking place at various locations around the UK mainly during February and early March, the largest of which is held in Brighton and Hove. ‘Seedy Sunday’ is also “a campaign to a campaign to protect biodiversity and protest against the increasing control of the seed supply by a handful of large companies.”

There are a few more pictures from my short visit on My London Diary.

London Photographers Branch

If you work as a photojournalist or editorial photographer in London for at least part of the time, I’d urge you to join the newly formed London Photographers’ Branch of the National Union of Journalists. I was at the inaugural meeting last night at the union headquarters although I kept my head pretty low, there were others who volunteered to join the committee, and I left feeling fairly confident that they had a wide range of experience between them and would do a good job.

Although the start of this group has been attended by a similar “reds under the beds” scare as marred lost year’s NUJ election for the editor of ‘The Journalist’, members at the meeting last night showed little appetite to continue this divisive bickering, though it is a shame that it has meant that a couple of the strongest advocates of a photographers’ branch in London have decided not to join the committee.

NUJ Left is an important and influential force in the union, and although I’ve never felt it necessary to join it, I do occasionally read the web site and have belonged to the Facebook group. It’s an open group that anyone in or employed by the union can join and its aims seem to me to be to promote the kind of active trade unionism that I’ve always felt was necessary for the union to be successful.

So it doesn’t worry me that some of the people on the committee (though not all) are in NUJ Left. I don’t think they have made any secret of it and we talk enough about politics when we meet on the job or in the pub for me to be aware of their views and for me to trust them to work through the branch for photographers and photographers rights.

To run an effective union branch you need activists willing to give up their time to work for the union. If there is some kind of association for activists in the union they are quite likely to belong to it. So what’s the problem? And if anyone does think it is a problem, then surely the best response is to take a part in the running of the branch yourself.

You can find more details about joining the NUJ on their web site. If you work in the UK and make more than 50% of your income from photography/journalism it is in your interest to join the union and an appropriate branch. If you are a photographer working in London and already an NUJ member, I understand that members can belong to both a chapel and a branch, but not to two branches and it tells you here how to transfer to the new branch (of course you will have missed the deadline for the meeting on the 26th – and one day the NUJ will update its web site.) The London Photographers Branch will shortly launch its own web site and branch meetings will be held monthly on the last Tuesday of each month at 6.00pm at Headland House. The next meeting is on Tuesday 23 Feb 2010, which I see is also Shrove Tuesday, so if I can get time off from tossing pancakes I’ll be there.

Photographers are only too aware of the growing problems we face, particularly over matters such as jobs, contracts, copyright and licences and new technology, relations with the police and more. Being a union member won’t solve all your problems but it does provide some very much needed advice and support.

Life’s Too Short

The second demonstration I photographed last Saturday was much smaller than the 1500 or so photographers in Trafalgar Square, and I could actually count the number taking part. So when I wrote in my account that “more than 150 people” were in the march from St Pancras to Piccadilly Circus there isn’t much room for argument. Of course, it’s still deliberately a little vague, both because the actual number isn’t of any interest and that it is pretty well impossible to get an exact count.

In some ways it’s much easier to cover small events – and not a great deal is likely to happen without you noticing it, whereas your view of a large event can be quite different to that of someone working on the far side away from you.

NoBorders, whose London group organised the demonstration, would like people to be allowed to move freely around the world without the kind of border controls that most states now impose. Seeing the problems that the attempts by the UK to restrict migration to this country have caused, with thousands locked up inside our immigration prisons and so many cases of injustice and inhumanity I feel they have a very strong case; whatever problems free movement might cause I think they would be less.

At the very least we should set up a humane system that recognises our historic liabilities and our obligations under international agreements and human rights declarations, and gives those seeking asylum proper access to our legal system with similar rights to our citizens. What we have are prisons run for private profit, hired thugs and fast-track procedures that deny justice. And an immigration minister who thinks it appropriate to say “The UK Border Agency vigorously opposes any appeal against deportation” rather than feeling it is the duty of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal to come to a decision on the facts of the case.

I was without the Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 EX DG MACRO which has become my favourite lens, as I finally had to send it back to Sigma for repair. Something came a little loose inside a few months ago and it has clearly been getting worse. So I was working with my old Sigma 12-24mm EX on the D700 full frame and a Nikon 18-200mm on the DX D300 (equivalent to 27-300mm.)

The 12-24 is a great lens (and the current version is better still), but considerably more useful on the DX format, where it becomes an ’18-36 equivalent’. On full frame it not surprisingly gives some considerable vignetting at the wide end, and 12mm is really just too wide for any rectilinear lens. There is an unavoidable wide-angle distortion – a matter of geometry rather than lens design. On DX format it gives the same view as an 18mm on full frame which is much more usable, and also has better sharpness and less chromatic aberration because it avoids the extreme corners of the lens. At ’18-36′ it covers the whole of the usable rectilinear wide-angle range. Should you need a wider view (and I sometimes do) the answer is a fisheye – such as the 10.5mm Nikon.

On the FX camera, the 12-24 also abandons you at the longer end, bang in the middle of the useful wide-angle range at 24mm. This is a pain if you only have a single camera, but less so if you can simply pick up your second body. The 18-200 on the DX300 starts at a 27mm equivalent, giving you an almost seamless range of focal lengths.

This is a sort of reversal of my normal practice, where I rely on the DX300 for the wider stuff (with both the 10.5 fisheye and either the Sigma 12-24 or the smaller DX format only 10-20mm.) Then the DX700 with the 24-70mm covers the whole of the middle range (and often it is everything I need), switching back to a cheap and light Sigma 55-200 DX lens on the D300 for any long stuff.

If Sigma made a decent full frame 50-200mm I would probably buy one; the old DX version more or less covers full frame – at least after I took a hacksaw to the lenshood – as I mentioned in an earlier post.

The closest match they have in is 70-300mm, with 3 versions available. The extra focal length does make them a little heavier and bulkier than a 50-200 would be. Having the 70-300mm f/4-5.6 DG MACRO, 70-300mm f/4-5.6 APO DG MACRO and the 70-300mm f/4-5.6 DG OS does seem a little overkill. The OS is an optically stabilised lens, but the APO offers better quality if you can hold it still, while the first mentioned is cheaper.

None of these three are in their professional EX range with “superior build and optical quality”, which does offer the large and heavy 70-200mm f/2.8 EX DG MACRO HSM II, doubtless an excellent lens but too large and heavy for me.

Change We See?

The Labour Party has a Flickr pool entitled Change we see, which asks people to share photographs which show the government’s achievements since they came to power.

“Upload a photo of a local hospital we’ve rebuilt, a local Sure Start centre we’ve opened or a local school we’ve invested in and, together, we can show everyone the importance of the Change We See.”

Kate Day in The Daily Telegraph rather gleefully points out that people have been uploading images that were not quite what the party had hoped for, and in particular photographers have been uploading stop and search forms provided for them by the police when they tried to photograph buildings.

When I visited the site a few minutes ago it looked like this:

Flickr

And the third item in the lower row – the long pink form – is Grant Smith‘s Stop and Search form from the City of London Police.

The first item in the top row is a picture of heavily contaminated land on which the government has overruled a local council and given permission for new homes to be built. To the right of Grant’s stop and search is Mark Thomas’s ‘Stop and Search Card‘ and to the right of that, after the couple of ‘Rage Against New Labour‘ posters under ‘Waitrose Essentials’, a spoof of one of the Met’s anti-terrorist and anti-photography posters – the caption under it reads ‘My take on the Met’s misguided, paranoia-inducing “Seems Odd” campaign.’

Perhaps you have some pictures you could upload to the pool?

NOT Terrorists

Trafalgar Square got pretty full of photographers at lunchtime last Saturday, and the event gained a useful amount of publicity, and I hope will have done a little to make it easier for people to use cameras on the street. We need to remember that the law is on our side even if some of the police are not, and to get that over to the general public.

It wasn’t exactly by choice that I photographed the event entirely with a 12-24mm lens on the full-frame D700, though a wide angle was a good lens most of the time as things got pretty crowded. I did try to take a few pictures with an 18-200 on my D300 (27-300mm equivalent) but it took me rather a long time to realise I hadn’t put a card in the camera! I always work with the camera on a setting that refuses to let you release the shutter without a card there, but Nikon in their near-infinite stupidity made the default for the Custom Setting that controls this not only to let you release the shutter without a card, but also to display the pictures you haven’t recorded on the back of the camera as usual.

A little while ago I had to perform a full reset on this camera, and I must have forgotten the need to alter this setting. The default does seem crazy to me, and the only possible reason I can think of is that it is for the convenience of dealers when demonstrating the camera before sale. If so it seems a very curious priority for a company making tools for photographers to use.

At times it wasn’t easy taking photographs with so many photographers all trying to do the same thing, but mostly we managed without coming to blows. The only real example of unprofessional behaviour I came across came from BBC TV, whose reporter speaking to camera proved himself to be totally incapable of estimating the size of the crowd, reporting that there were 300 of us. My own rough estimate was at least 1500, while other experienced journalists put it at 2-3000.

It’s often hard to be sure about numbers on demonstrations, but an error of this magnitude suggests an agenda rather than simply incompetence, and the numbers reported by the BBC are often on the very low side.

For events with fewer than around 500 people I have a simple approach – I count them. You can seldom get an exact count, but fairly close, though usually it will be an underestimate as some people leave early and others arrive late. For larger events it is a matter of estimation, though again I’ll often count a section of an event and then try to base an estimate on that.

Sometimes differences in numbers can be because people count at different times. The local paper reporter at the Harrow Mosque demonstration – whose figure was widely quoted by other news media – had clearly made his count fairly early on in the event, and numbers opposing the EDL had roughly doubled by the time I went home. But here there was no such excuse; it was either incompetence or the deliberate misleading of the public.

If I was shooting simply for the web, I wouldn’t have needed a longer lens than 24mm for this demonstration, but could simply crop pictures. After all I’m taking images 4256 pixels wide and web images on this blog have a maximum of 450 pixel width. (Most of them I use are actually 600 pixels wide but scaled down by the browser – and you should be able to see them at full size if you want – in Firefox, simply Right Click, select ‘View Image.’ Probably you can do something similar in other browsers, though perhaps the best advice would be download Firefox.

But virtually everything here (and on My London Diary) is essentially un-cropped, as I like to work with the frame that I can see in the camera. The viewfinder doesn’t quite show the edges of the image and sometimes I’ll remove a thin sliver from two or four edges if it contains anything obtrusive, and I’m using a telephoto zoom designed for the DX format that I know vignettes a little at its shortest focal lengths when used on full-frame and work with a little crop in mind. But I only crop significantly on fairly rare occasions – as even Henri Cartier Bresson did, for example with his jumping man in the Place de l’Europe (though probably the other 49 in this set are not cropped.) In general I hold to the view that cropping encourages sloppy thinking when you are taking pictures, though the master expressed it more philosophically.

It was an event that reminded me once more of my age. The mother of one of the young photographers I photographed in the square was once one of my best students.

More on Haiti

Joerg Colberg at Conscientious has posted a couple of very useful links, to More Perspectives on Haiti and Crisis Journalism by Matt Lutton on dvafoto and Staring at Death: Photographing Haition Pete Brook’s interesting Prison Photography site which has a very lengthy annotated list of links.

Although Brook, “a very amateur photographer” who has decided because of this to “stick to looking and commenting” is based in Seattle, he writes “I have strong political views about prison reform, particularly in the United States, and increasingly moreso as regards Her Majestys Prison Service in the United Kingdom.”

Me too.

Saturday in Tragalgar Square

If you are a photographer – or simply someone who cares about our civil liberties, and can get to London on Saturday then I hope you will join us for the mass photo gathering in defence of street photography organised by Im a Photographer, Not a Terrorist (PHNAT) at 12 noon.

This is one of a series of protests by photographers against harassment by police while taking pictures, and in particular about the use of legislation aimed at preventing terrorism against people exercising their right to take photographs in public places.

Of course it isn’t just police. I think the latest silly incident involved a student taking pictures at Hounslow Central Tube station on a Sunday afternoon. I used to live just down the road, used it often (and probably took pictures there) and can certify that no sane terrorist would ever bother to attack it.

The paranoia doesn’t just affect photographers of course. Eighteen months ago, just a hundred yards from where I live, a young student decided to hold a one-person peace protest, holding a placard Stop training murderers outside the building used by the Army Cadet Force (not as the paper says “an army base”.)

Eight police, including armed officers and dogs, swooped on his house to arrest him, while a helicopter hovered overhead. They arrested him under the Terrorism Act, took his books and computer and kept him in jail overnight. In the morning he was charged under the Public Order Act, and on the advice of the duty solicitor, accepted a police caution.

He has now realised how misguided this was (and that solicitor should be struck off) and is trying to have the caution rescinded.

It comes shortly after a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that Section 44 stop and searches are illegal (the UK government has announced it intends to appeal.)

I’ll be there (and so too will Jess Hurd, back from Haiti and one of those involved in setting upPHNAT) and over 1400 people have signed up for the event already on Facebook.

I hope to see you there!

Haiti – Man-Made Disaster

I’ve been wondering for a few days whether or not to write anything about Haiti. The plight of the people there has surely touched us all, and many of us have contributed towards helping them. Giving money may not be much, but for the moment it is what most of us can do, and people there need a lot of help.

Information from there of course flows across the web; in the first hours most of the first-hand broadcast reports relied on people using Skype as mobile services were down. And days later, much of the real information is coming from the web, with broadcasts lagging behind on picking up the stories about the kind of US military takeover which is holding up supplies getting to the people who need them.

The first reports came from journalists and photographers in Haiti when the quake happened, but many Haitian journalists were unable to work because of their own personal devastation – the subject of an appeal by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

After the quake, photographers flooded in to Haiti by various routes and we’ve seen many pictures – for example on the NPR site, in the Guardian (by David Levene) and the New York Times. And you can also look at work from agencies such as Panos and VII.

Magnum in contrast have a set of pictures from their files on Slate, the majority of which show it as an island paradise – especially for tourists – or take a rather romantic view of voodoo. Reality does creep in through some of the more recent work.

London-based photographer Jess Hurd decided to go because of her anger “as a human being and a journalist that this level of avoidable devastation [was] caused by an earthquake.” As she goes on to explain on her blog, Haiti has been impoverished by decades of corrupt and incompetent rule, supported by the USA and policies which have prevented positive development of the country for the people.

The earthquake was a natural event, but the disaster that it caused is largely man-made, a consequence of colonial policies that have impoverished the country and the people.

Report after report (especially outside the mass media) is telling us how the US Military insistence on taking military control of areas before food distribution occurs is stopping the supplies – which many of us have contributed to – to reaching the aid organisations and the people who so desperately need them.

Hurd describes her trip to Haiti as “the most harrowing story I have ever covered” and her pictures which are linked from her blog carry the disclaimer: Please view with caution, these images graphically depict the aftermath including decomposing bodies and a harrowing hospital operation. You can see more of her work from this and other stories at Report Digital.

Brighton Bash

Monday I took the train to Brighton, sometimes described as “London by the sea” which is pretty ludicrous as it has a very different feel to the capital. I did just glimpse the sea as the train rolled into the station – around a 45 minute journey from Clapham Junction, but that was it, as I was headed up into the hills to the north-east, a short bus ride away to Moulsecoomb Wild Park, an area of downland preserved as a park when it was bought by the Brighton and Hove Council in 1925.

I was there to photograph a protest against a weapons factory on an estate hidden behind the trees on the edge of a railway cutting. Parts from the factory there ended up in the bombs that were used in Operation Cast Lead. the 22 day Israeli attack on Gaza that killed 1417 Palestinians and had ended exactly a year earlier. This demonstration was the latest in a whole series of protests against the arms manufacturer EDO MBM/ITT organised by the Brighton-based Smash Edo campaign over around the past five years, including the Carnival Against the Arms Trade I photographed in June 2008.

What was extremely civilised was that the meeting point for the demonstration was a café, and I walked in and ordered a mug of tea to find it full of photographers. We could have had a union meeting on the spot.

Those years of demonstration have also been years of confrontation and harassment by the police although during Monday’s demonstration the police did appear to be trying to adopt a less confrontational approach in some ways – and during the several hours I was taking pictures they clearly did not want to make any arrests – though they did make five after I left.

But they were clearly also not prepared to let the protesters get the the factory to demonstrate their, blocking off the road leading to it. And although the protesters more or less surrounded the factory estate during the protest they did not manage to break through the police protecting it.

This was an event when neither the police nor many of the protesters really want to be photographed – although the organisers of the protest do want press coverage and send out press releases. The organisers suggested that those taking part wear masks as both police and press would be taking photographs, and we were, in our rather different ways. At least one police officer was using a long telephoto on a Nikon DLSR to record pictures of individuals taking part, while others were using Sony camcorders to make a record of the action.

The march stopped on the main road where the demonstrators could see a strong police road block on the road leading up to the factory. I’d gone ahead at this point intending to photograph both the police block and then the marchers coming up towards it, and had climbed up about 20 feet on the roadside bank to get a good view. Unfortunately, at this point at least three quarters of the marchers decided to try to find another route, running up the hillside a few hundred yards behind me into the woods.

So I had to run up the hill too, and it was a pretty steep climb, and I began to feel my age. There were a couple of younger photographers with me but I soon decided to take my own time rather than try and keep up with them as we climbed perhaps a hundred feet. Then I was on my own in the middle of the wood and having to choose paths, trying to work out a likely route that would intercept the way the protesters would go. Not too easy as I’d never been here before, but I decided that since there were around 250 of them that they would get pretty spread out – mostly the paths were only wide enough for a single file – and I would be bound to come across them.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
The front of the long column marching through the woods
Eventually, about seven minutes later I did, and I think I’d found a more direct route as I saw the head of the long and spread out column coming towards me. For the next ten minutes or so we wandered single file through the woods, passing quietly behind one group of police horses waiting on the edge but then we were seen by a group of police with dogs in the wood in front of us. They shouted from around 50 yards away and told us to go back or we would get bitten, and although they were too far away behind trees and bushes to get a picture I didn’t feel inclined to go closer. Although police recognise and sometimes respect a press card, police dogs don’t.

The protesters were even less keen to continue than me, and took a path away from dogs and out of the wood on the other side, where more police were waiting. For the next half hour or so, police and protesters seemed to be playing a game of some sort, with the police letting protesters through then chasing them back and finally stopping them on a path close to the factory. A couple of times the police brought in their horses to disperse the demonstrators, and the dogs were used again to threaten demonstrators who had entered a factory site next to the arms factory under a fence. There were a couple of major scrimmages, and police armed with riots shield also lent a hand. One protester was injured slightly by a baton to the head, but otherwise it was mainly a matter of pushing and shoving. Really the only thing missing was a ball.

And of course I and all the other photographers were trying to take photographs. At times there was rather a crush of photographers on some narrow paths, and tree branches really did get in the way of pictures. I did get pushed rather a lot by police, although I took care as always to keep out of the way. But a few police do sometimes seem to have a mindset that says that anyone with a camera is by definition in the way. And couple of times a police photographer gave me a fairly hefty shove so he could get a shot – where normally photographers would have respected that I was there first!

Eventually the demonstrators tired and decided it was time to go back to meet up with the rest of the protesters, and we walked back through the woods, this time accompanied by a few police officers, and down the hill to the road into Brighton.

By this time I was rather tired, and my feet were hurting. I hadn’t bargained for all the hill-climbing and off-road walking and so hadn’t worn suitable footwear. So I wasn’t pleased to find that the protesters were setting off to march back the couple of miles into Brighton, and nor were the police. A quarter of a mile down the road they tried to block the road, but chose a bad place as many of the marchers simply walked through a car park and around the block. Their second attempt wasn’t a great deal better either, and it wasn’t until the march was almost in the town centre that they did manage to stop it fairly effectively.

However it was obviously too late. The march could hardly be kept where it was blocking a major road, and once let to go on it could not be controlled in the open space of The Level and the city streets leading away from it. Issuing a Section 14 order stating it could not proceed into the city centre was surely a waste of time. As the police withdrew and came to a wider space officers rather stupidly grabbed the odd protester and others simply walked past – and eventually all had to be allowed to proceed.

I’d had enough by this time and went to the station for a train back to London and home. I think it had been an effective demonstration, getting considerable publicity in the local paper and another step in the fight to close down the arms factory. Pictures and stories – including mine front-paged on Demotix – published elsewhere helped to raise the profile of the campaign outside tle local area. You can see the pictures from the day on My London Diary.