Re-photo

Last Friday lunchtime I was photographing a demonstration in the City of London, in front of a large modern office building close to Liverpool St station.  The building houses UBS, a Swiss-based company formed by the 1998  merger of the Union Bank of Switzerland and the Swiss Bank Corporation, the second-largest manager of private wealth assets in the world and the second largest bank in Europe according to Wikipedia.

It’s also a company that is trying to bolster its reputation following a continuing investigation into dodgy off-shore accounts designed to fool the US tax authorities, and last month it issued a new code of conduct and business ethics which all employees are required to sign. Apparently the new interest in ethical conduct doesn’t apply to its own relations with cleaners, and it handed over the cleaning contract to a new company, Lancaster, on Feb 1. They immediately cut the cleaners hours – and thus their pay – and sacked the union shop steward, Alberto Durango.

The UBS offices have a wide pavement area in front of them, generally walked across by the public but actually owned by UBS – the kind of privately owned public space that makes up large areas of our cities now. UBS is on the southern edge of the large Broadgate estate which is one such area, developed on the former site of Broad St station (which was of course part of the publicly owned British Rail before it was sold off.) The public are freely allowed onto such areas as consumers to visit and consume the services of the various companies that occupy them, but we are not allowed the freedoms that we normally enjoy on the public highway – such as free speech and taking photographs.

To me this is reflects a deficiency in our planning processes – which should insist on such pavements being a part of the public highway as a condition of planning consent and also possibly of our laws about what is and is not public space. Photographers recently demonstrated at Canary Wharf against the restrictions on photographing there – another large private estate on formerly public owned land.

So I wasn’t at all surprised after I took this picture

that the security guard at the left – his boss is the guy with the umbrella talking to some of the demonstrators telling them they can’t demonstrate there – came up and told me I was not allowed to take photographs.  And of course when I asked him why this was, his reply was totally predictable. “Security, this is a bank” he told me. “But I’m pointing my camera away from the bank” I replied, “so how is security involved?”  His answer was to tell me that if I continued to take pictures there he would call the police and ask them to remove me, although he did also tell me that I could photograph from the pavement by the side of the road – which would of course mean that I was actually photographing the bank. Somehow that wasn’t a problem.

Of course it isn’t really about security at all. It’s about asserting the rights of the property owner, and also on this occasion about the embarrassment of the company at having a demonstration about the truly abysmal way they are treating their cleaning staff.

What I think is more serious about this is that within a few minutes the police did arrive, not to deal with me, though several times officers did politely tell me to move back onto the public pavement when I strayed on to the private forecourt, but to force the protesters to move off of private land.  I fail to see that a peaceful protest on private land that is causing no damage, is of limited duration and no threat to public order should be of any concern to the police. It seems to me to be essentially a civil matter rather than a criminal one, and that the police force have rather more important things that should occupy them.

I’d  be very much happier with a police force that acted to protect the rights of workers.

More pictures from the event on My London Diary.

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 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.