Re-photo

Brian Haw – Liberator of Parliament Square  (1949-2011)

I suppose as someone who has long felt that the main qualifications for being a Conservative MP were to be ignorant and opinionated I should have felt vindicated at the tasteless blatherings of one such lunatic on Radio 4 on the morning following the announcement of Brian Haw’s death.

Instead I was sickened, although a contribution from Bruce Kent about Brian did a lot to restore my faith in humanity. But what really got up my nose was the Tory twit going on about how Parliament Square should be for everyone to make use of and not just for one person to make a protest.

I wonder if he had ever actually set foot in Parliament Square or does he arrive at the House of Commons blindfolded in a limousine?  Certainly he had absolutely no grasp of what has been happening on the ground there over the last ten or so years.

Police hand out SOCPA Section 132 Notices to bystanders and press in Parliament Square warning them they are liable to arrest if they remain

One of Brian’s great achievements has been the liberation of Parliament Square. Before his protest started the square was a black hole in the centre of our capital, surrounded on all sides by traffic with no pedestrian crossings from the surrounding streets which were and are still thronged by tourists. Ten years ago it was rare to see anyone at all making there way to what was essentially a large traffic island. Most of the tourists on its periphery probably thought it was a banned area, and the authorities clearly intended it to be what the police like to call a ‘sterile zone‘.

Tourists, already fazed by London’s traffic coming at them on the wrong side of the road, stood little chance of making it to the middle of the square, and even few Londoners chanced the risky and rather unpredictable crossing.

Over the 10 years of his occupation, Brian and his friends and later other protesters have effected a great transformation – one that Ken Livingstone as Mayor failed to do – in opening up the square to people. Many came to see Brian, others to mount their own protests and yet more to sit and picnic on the grass – before Mayor Boris – for reasons political under a minor horticultural smokescreen – fenced it off.

Thanks largely to Brian, we’ve seen a remarkable change in London and a movement of the centre of political protest in the capital, a movement away from Trafalgar Square down Whitehall to Parliament Square, where it is a little harder for it to go unnoticed by both parliament and the media.

Brian and the other protests in the square became a tourist attraction, with group leaders umbrellas raised bringing their charges across the traffic lights and it was very much an advertisement for British democracy – though given the repeated attempts by politicians to get rid of him rather an unmerited one. Truly it was more an index of Brian’s doggedness, as well as the support he received from many, including the occasional judge or magistrate who remembered the freedoms our law is supposed to protect – if unfortunately it seldom does when the obviously more important vested interests of the rich and powerful are involved.

And as for Speaker’s Corner, mentioned by that Tory ignoramus, it was long ago abandoned to religious bigots and eccentrics, a minor tourist attraction rather than a site with any meaningful politics, and a happy hunting ground for photographers of the meaningless gesture.

Barbara Tucker, April 2011

But although Brian’s example may have liberated Parliament Square, the battle is still taking place to take it away from the people and keep it back under tight wraps. We need to support those who are continuing to protest there, in particular Babs, Barbara Tucker, who has been with Brian there for so long and is continuing his battle. Read more on BrianHaw.tv where there is also a link to the “tastless threat” on the Today programme.

Brian Haw: Find Your Courage; Share Your Vision; Change Your World. (T-shirt from Dan Wilkins, The Nth Degree.) Brian and Dan were both very pleased to have copies of the picture.

The news of Brian Haw’s death in a German hospital came as no surprise to me after his long illness, but it still was a shock and a feeling that the nation has lost a figure of importance, a man who almost single-handedly reminded us of the need for a national conscience and who dedicated his life to the cause of peace in ten years of protest in Parliament Square.

I have to admit I was slow to recognise the seriousness of his protest, and although I had photographed him earlier, on black and white film, the earliest picture I posted on My London Diary was only in October 2004, by which time, according to the notice, he had been in place for 1219 days.

At first I’d been put off by his concentration in the early days of his protest on the single issue of the suffering of children due to the sanctions, as well as by his fundamentalist Christian views. But his protest became more general about peace and I got to know him just a little and began to appreciate his sincerity and persistence, becoming a fairly regular visitor to Parliament Square, as well as photographing him in nearby protests.

Police drag demonstrator away as peace protestor Brian Haw holds a placard “War Kills the Innocent” in front of Cenotaph and Code Pink wreath, “How Many Will Die in Iraq Today?”. Whitehall, 7 Nov, 2004.

Serious organised crime and police bill: Haw addresses the Houses of Parliament

I began to drop in for a visit whenever I had a few minutes to spare and was in Central London, only bothering to take pictures if anything special was happening. And although like almost everyone else who visited I occasionally got on the wrong side of Brian’s temper, I kept on going, unlike many others. There were times when I didn’t agree with him, but I still felt it was important to support him and the continuing protest against the war, even or perhaps especially when many former supporters appeared to desert or turn against him. And I feel it was an honour to have known him and perhaps to have captured a little of his spirit in my pictures of him.

Visitors to Brian on the 7th anniversary of his protest.

Brian and some friends, Parliament Sq, 14 May 2006.

Police laughed at Brian Haw as he tried to make a complaint after an officer had pushed his camera into his face making it bleed.

Police arrest Brian and push him into back of a police van – he was released the following day after an extremely brief court appearance – the arrest was simply harassment by the police. 30 Oct 2009

Brian with a t-shirt with the front page of The Independent after the protest at the state opening of Parliament

Brian and Babs on the 9th anniversary of his protest, June 2010

Just after I took the portrait,police arrived to serve a warrant on Babs for using a megaphone – their idea of a 9th anniversary present.

I’d watched Brian’s health obviously deteriorating over the years, worn out by the continuous strain and hardships of his protest, and in particular by the harassment of the police and others – including at times gangs of army-trained thugs the police were somehow blind to see as they attacked the peace camp in the middle of the night. The pressure and also the periods of boredom in the square also meant that he was smoking heavily. It came as little surprise to find that he had been admitted to hospital in September 2010 with breathing problems and that a tumour had been found. Although he was certainly a man who would put up a hard fight – he’d always lived that way – the years in Parliament Square had taken a heavy toll on his general health. It’s true to say that Brian lived and died for peace.

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The Heygate estate, 2011

London’s Heygate Estate, 25 acres in a prime position next to the Elephant and Castle in Southwark has had a bad press. Completed in the early 1970s and home for years to more than a thousand families it was a brave and far-sighted attempt to provide high quality social housing in a remarkably green development for its time. Given proper management by the council over the years it would now be seen as perhaps the most successful development of its era. Instead it is a rotting, empty ghost city, waiting to be demolished and replaced by lower quality development which will doubtless make millions if not billions for private developers.  The developers certainly got a bargain, paying only £20 million for a site and the advantage of some £1.5 billion of public funds going into the Elephant redevelopment scheme.

The Heygate estate, 2011

It had the disadvantage of being built at a time when architecture was passing through a visually brutal phase, and the vast slab blocks that surrounded it to create an oasis inside were on a massive scale. It didn’t look a friendly place from the outside, and in the early years before the many trees that were planted grew it was a little bleak inside.

The Heygate estate, 2011

Somewhere Southwark Council lost the plot – or perhaps changed to a very different one – and made a concerted and largely successful attempt to change what had been seen as a good place to live into a sink estate, through a lack of maintenance and using it to rehouse “problem families”; coupled with a great deal of bad press and TV documentaries – those walkways made for some great images and it was so handy to get to. The council describe the scheme as ‘failed architecture’ but in reality it was the council that failed it, and the architecture is still in excellent shape – and likely to have been longer-lasting than its proposed replacement.

You can read more of the story of how the Heygate was demonised in the Guardian article from March 2011, The death of a housing ideal and more about its present state at the blog set up by one of the few remaining residents, Adrian Glaspool – a good place to start is here. For more information see the Southwark Notes blog, which has a great deal of information and comment on the council’s actions here and elsewhere in the borough.

A few properties remain  occupied  on the Heygate estate, 2011

After the decision to demolish and sell off the estate was taken, the council started encouraging tenants to move out in 2007, giving them a six month time limit to find replacement homes (they had stopped giving secure tenancies in 2001, meaning that they had no obligation to rehouse the roughly 30% of tenants who had moved in since then.) Tenants were supposed to find properties through the council’s Homesearch scheme, but very few were on offer. Evictions and compulsory purchase, along with less legal measures, were eventually used to more or less clear the estate, with just a handful of residents now remaining. Labour councillors when in opposition accused the council of “strong-arming and intimidating tenants and leaseholders out of their homes on the Heygate” but little seemed to change after they were voted into power in 2010.

Leaseholders on the estate were treated in a particularly shabby fashion as the Council carried out a programme of what was essentially forcible removal from the estate. The leaseholder’s action group site states:

“Leaseholders were left to watch as their neighbours were moved out one-by-one, leaving them all alone in blocks infested with vermin. Vacated properties were not cleared before being sealed up, lifts were turned off, the district heating & hot-water system was turned off, estate lighting was turned off, cleaning services and rubbish collections reduced and postal services dropped.”

Also on their site you can find details of the ridiculous undervaluation of properties made by the council:

“Elderly leaseholders or those with language difficulties came off particularly bad, and the council was able to convince some to accept offers as low as £32,000 for a 1-bed flat and £66,500 for a 3-bed maisonette. “

Similar maisonettes in this area cost around £300-400 a week to rent, and the market price is probably in the range £175-250,000.

The blog quotes environmentalist Donnachadh McCarthy, writing in the ‘Southwark News‘ describing the demolition of the Heygate and Aylesbury estates as ‘one of the biggest carbon crimes of the decade by a local authority.’  It has certainly resulted in an enormous waste of public money, and as well as the carbon waste involved in demolition of usable buildings some 40 years before the end of their lifetime and their replacement by new build, the estate is now a considerable urban forest and most of its trees appear certain to be felled.

Like other buildings of its age the estate contains considerable amounts of asbestos, not a great safety hazard unless disturbed, but making the job of demolition of these structurally sound  buildings difficult. For this reason it will be perhaps another four years before the demolition of the larger blocks actually starts although almost all the tenants and leaseholders have been forced out and the estate allowed to become derelict.

New garden on the Heygate estate, 2011

Recently a fringe area of the estate has been demolished, but work is not timetabled to start on the rest of the estate until late 2014 or early 2015. In April this year, some of the few remaining residents decided to clear the former garden areas and use the space to grow flowers and vegetables, informing the council who at first started legal proceedings for ‘unlawful gardening’ but then entered into talks aimed at authorising and controlling the allotments.

Residents and other interested parties held a day of workshops to try and influence the regeneration of the whole Elephant & Castle area on July 4 which I was unable to attend, but I took these pictures on the following day, along with many more on the Heygate estate, more of which will go on My London Diary shortly.  In particular I made a number of panoramic views of the area which perhaps give a better impression of the estate and in particular its trees, and I’ll post some of these later.