Re-photo

Cycling is an inherently safe and healthy mode of transport; what makes it dangerous in some places are massive chunks of metal moving at high speeds, often with poor awareness of the surroundings and occasionally driven without proper care. Bad road design, badly designed vehicles and a few bad drivers.

Getting more people cycling would make an important contribution to our national well-being, cutting the huge amount of air pollution caused by traffic, particularly in cities such as London, where air pollution causes almost 10,000 early deaths each year with a much greater number suffereing from pollution-related health problems. It would cut the admissions to hospitals, reducing the pressure on the NHS.

For those who cycle, the healthy exercise involved gives even greater health benefits – though these are somewhat reduced by the filthy air in our cities. It also has financial benefits, providing by far the cheapest form of transport other than walking. And for many journeys of short to moderate length it can be the fastest way to go, particularly as there are few problems with parking a bike.

Even more important for many is the reliablity. When I cycled to work I could rely with almost certainty in getting there in somewhere between 12 and 15 minutes; colleagues driving a similar journey might occasionally do it a minute or two faster, but at least once a week would be delayed  by traffic and take twice as long as me or more.

Once in 20 years I did get delayed, when hit by a car coming out from a side road who failed to see me, and a handfull of times by punctures and mechanical faults, though I think these happened less often than with most drivers. And there were a few days when heavy snow made both cycling and driving impossible and I and drivers had to walk (though they often gave up and stayed home.)

The major reason people give for not cycling is that they don’t think it is safe. Even many people in cities who have bikes only use them recreationally, perhaps on footpaths or towpaths, some taking them by car to places where they can cycle away from traffic.

The widespread use of cycle helmets has added to people’s fears about safety, while also making cycling rather less convenient. They may marginally improve a cyclist’s chance of avoiding head injuries in some collisions (the evidence isn’t entirely clear and is certainly disputed) but provide little real protection.  They are certainly not an answer to the problem we have of safety, and most cyclists who are killed or badly injured were wearing helmets.

On busy routes we need far more provision of high-quality cycle routes protected from traffic. Much of what we already have – virtually all in my local area – is so badly designed that few cyclists use it, with ‘give way’ signs every few yards making it impracticable. Simply having marked cycle lanes also seldom works as too many vehicles park in them.

‘Stop Killing Cyclists’ calls for a large investment in  safer facilities for cyclists, but it would be an investment that would bring dividends both financially and in terms of well-being, particularly for those new cyclists it would bring onto our streets but also for the rest of us, pedestrians, cyclists and drivers.

Of course there are other things that are also needed to improve safety for all road users, but particularly for pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists who do not have a large metal box to keep them safe.  Better road design with safety rather than vehicle speed at its heart, better vehicle design, particularly in terms of all-round visibility, lower (and enforced) speed limits particularly on minor roads and backstreets…

And education and some changes in the laws. We have a Highway Code – and it is being revised, hopefully to make it safer for pedestrians and cyclists, but there are many areas that are either widely unknown or widely ignored by many drivers (and of course by some cyclists.)

Getting more people to use bikes would hopefully improve driver attitudes to cyclists, who too many drivers seem to see as obstacles to overcome rather than fellow road users with the same right to be on the highway as they have. Too many drivers pass cyclists where there is not safe room to do so:

(Rule 163: give motorcyclists, cyclists and horse riders at least as much room as you would when overtaking a car)

Many speed past me only a few inches away, often breaking the speed limit to do so, only to have to brake a few yards on when they catch up with other cars or to turn left ahead of me, slowing so I have to brake. Of course this kind of competitive attitude to driving also extends to their behaviour to other drivers, encouraged by advertising, car magazines and petrolhead TV programmes. Somehow we need to move away from a steering wheel inspiring too many to think they are Lewis Hamilton.

Oh yes, the protest.  The ‘National Funeral for the Unknown Cyclist’ organised by Stop Killing Cyclists started its procession in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, marching behind a very smart horse-drawn hearse to a die-in in front of the Houses of Parliament.

It had to change its planned route to Parliament as right-wing ‘football lads’ were holding a rally in Whitehall supporting ‘Tommy Robinson’ over his contempt of court which could have led to a trial of pedophiles being abandoned, and there was also a protest against them, so Whitehall was blocked. These rival protests meant  the ‘funeral’ it was seen by far fewer people and greatly diminished its chances of any coverage in the media. And it also meant that I left it before the rally in Smith Square.

You can see more pictures and text at
National Funeral for the Unknown Cyclist

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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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Various groups of women protesting over changes in the UK pension system came together in Hyde Park to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ and to go from there to lobby their MPs at Parliament. The event included many dressed as suffragettes to mark the 100th anniversary of some British women getting the vote.

The 1995 Conservative Government’s Pension Act, worsened by the 2011 Pension Acts, affects some 3.8 million women who have lost up to six years State Pension – for many over £40,000. They complain that the changes were brought in with little or no personal notice and faster than initially promised.

The first UK state pension introduced on Jan 1st 1909 was for men and women with low incomes from the age of 70, and was replaced in 1925 by a pension payable from age 65 dependent on contributions paid by workers and their employers. The higher married couples allowance was only paid when both of the couple were 65; because most men married younger women this created problems, so in 1940 the qualifying age for women was lowered to 60, which also applied to those who were in work and thus qualified for their own state pension. Women seldom continued in paid employment after marriage at the time.

Changes were made to the scheme in 1948, but the different ages remained in place until European equality rules forced the 1995 Tory government to bring about equalisation of pension age; they put this as far ahead as possible, with a slow rise of the retirement age for women to take place starting in April 2010 and reaching 65 in April 2020.

In 2007, Labour legislated for further increases in pension age for both men and women starting in 2024 and reaching 68 in 2044-46. The Coalition government accelerated the rise in pension age, and both men and women had the same retirement age of 65 by November 2018.

A person aged 60 now will have to work until he or she is 66, while someone aged 55 will need to work until they are 67 and someone aged 40 until they are 68.

Of course, future changes will almost certainly make those current figures incorrect which is what these women have found, and the figures from the government for their retirement age on which they planned their financial futures have been made incorrect by later changes. They feel – and it is hard not to sympathise with them – that the scheme under which they were making their National Insurance contributions should have informed them how these changes would affect them. It also appears to be the case that many were given incorrect information, with those working for the DWP failing to be aware of or understand the forthcoming changes.

Behind the increasing pension age is the more welcome trend of increasing life expectancy. Since 1948, when the NHS began this has increased by around 10-11 years for both men and women who at age 65 can now expect to live on average to 83.5 and almost 86 respectively.

After a number of speeches from representatives of the varous groups who share the anger over their pensions but have some differences in their aims the protest came to an end. I’d expected them to march to Parliament for their lobby and further rally there, but they simply told people to make their own way there.

I did wonder whether this was because the Metropolitan Police had refused to facilitate a march, telling them as they did another group of protesters that they would have to employ private contractors to ‘police’ the event. When the protesters found this would cost them around £40,000, they got Liberty to take the matter up – and the police quickly backed down and did their job. I think other marches in a similar position have simply called the Met’s bluff and gone ahead telling them they were not needed – but the police have turned up in any case. Autonomous groups have of course ignored the legal requirement to inform the police and simply marched.

More about the protest and many more pictures at: Women against Pension Theft

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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The campaign group Foil Vedanta has been campaigning for some years to get mining company Vedanta de-listed from the London Stock Exchange, and on the morning of its AGM in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the company de-listed itself. Not only activists such as Foil Vedanta, but politicians were calling for its delisting following May’s Thoothukudi massacre in Tamil Naduin which 13 protesters were killed and dozens injured, and the success of grassroots activism which has shut down Vedanta’s operations in Goa, Tuticorin and Niyamgiri.

Vedanta AGM protest 2012

The delisting also followed, as I wrote on My London Diary, the publication of Vedanta’s damning “report ‘Vedanta’s Billions: Regulatory failure, environment and human rights’ with a comprehensive account of the company’s crimes in all of its operations, and of the City of London’s total failure to regulate Vedanta, or any other criminal mining company and revealing the vast scale of tax evasion and money laundering.”

Vedanta AGM protest 2010

Although the company will continue, and doubtless continue to cheat and pollute, the de-listing will at least deprive it of some of it’s respectabilityand perhaps curtail some of its more damaging activities. Presumably the de-listing will mean no more AGMs in London, and I will miss the annual protests that I’ve attended most years since 2010, though I’m sure that so long as Vedanta continue their crimes anywhere around the world, Foil Vedanta will find some opportunity to protest them here.

Vedanta AGM protest 2013

Vedanta, owned largely by a billionaire Indian industrialist and his family, is the kind of company that has no place in a civilised world, with a long history of crimes in India, Zambia and elsewhere, attempting to mine sacred lands, dispossesing many, polluting air and water, evading taxes, lying to governments and courts, bribery and corruption, beating and shooting protesters, killing workers with a disregard for safety and more.

Vedanta AGM protest 2016

Its activities have been met by protests where it operates around the world, particularly in India, and in London where the company was based to get support from the British Government – with David Cameron pleading their case with the Indian Prime Minister and British taxpayers supporting its nefarous activities through our government agencies. Its crimes have been exposed by groups including Foil Vedanta, with detailed research summarised in the latest and earlier reports.

The report, Vedanta’s Billions:  Regulatory failure, environment and human rights can be downloaded here.  The de-listing, with a Bahamas based family trust buying back the 33% of shares not already owned by majority shareholder Anil Agarwal means that the company will now be much less open to public scrutiny. Though the financial authorities, as the report’s title suggests have failed in their duty over this, as a listed company Vedanta had to publish annual reports and individuals supporting Foil Vedanta were able to buy a single share to attend and ask questions at its AGMs. So while the de-listing was a victory for campaigners, it also presents a challenge, making their campaign more difficult.

Vedanta’s Final AGM

I can’t remember when I first went to Deptford, though it was possibly in 1982, the date of my earliest pictures in my ‘Deptford to Woolwich‘.  I’d certainly been to neighbouring Greenwich much earlier in my life, first on the only school trip from my primary school back in the mid 1950’s, when I will have seen its industrial shoreline from the river, but then few of us could have afforded a pencil, let alone a camera, and any impressions were solely on our young minds.

After my walk in 1982, I returned in 1984 to take  more pictures, again on my own, but in 1985 went on a group outing led by members of the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society, GLIAS, to which I still belong. I had come across GLIAS in 1977 on a family outing to the Kew Bridge Engines, and immediately joined up – and many of my pictures reflect an interest in the area, though I’ve done very little actual detailed recording work.

With GLIAS we went into Convoys Wharf, walking through their listed Olympia sheds to the riverside and on to the jetty where giant paper rolls were being unloaded from the ship for the Murdoch press, as well as into the rum cellars of the former Royal Navy Victualling Yard. The wharf has now been derelict for around 18 years, a huge 18.5 hectare site in the middle of London’s housing crisis, one of London’s many housing scandals down to private developers. Outline planning permission for around 3500 homes was rushed through around five years ago by Boris Johnson against the wishes of the local council but the first more detailed plan for a small part of the area was only put in six months ago.

Of course I’ve returned numerous times since then, more recently walking along the Thames path and visiting the lively Deptford High St, photographing along the DLR and the river Ravensbourne and more recently to Deptford Cinema on Deptford Broadway, and it was time for me to go again. And I wrote a post here in 2012, Views of Deptford.

I’d been aware of the fight by local residents to save the Old Tidemill Garden and neighbouring council at Reginald House, and of the occupation of the garden which had begun on August 29th, but partly because I’d been away on holiday hadn’t found the time to visit. So I was keen to go on the Deptford Art & Gentrification Walk organised by Tidemill occupiers during the Deptford X Festival – I’d missed a first such walk earlier in the year as I was busy photographing elsewhere. The route had been published and I could see there were some places I’d like ot photograph it would not go to, so I arrived a couple of hours earlier for my own walk beforehand.

On My London Diary you can see pictures from my own walk and the organised walk, as well as a set of panoramic images made during both of these. As usual these images have a horizontal angle of view of around 147 degrees (some needed to be slightly croppped.)

Deptford Walk
Deptford Art & Gentrification Walk
Deptford Panoramas

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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Of course I’m in favour of nature, and appalled at the incredible loss of species cuased by various human activities around the world, including the destruction of forests, pollution of the seas, rivers, air and land and the changes to climate caused by increasing levels of carbon dioxide making the world warmer.

So it was good to see people coming out to protest, even about the losses of some of the less fluffy of species like earwigs, but with a few exceptions there did seem to be a lack of the politics that is vital to actually do anything about the situation.

The event was planned to launch a new ‘People’s Manifesto for Wildlife’ drawn up by Packham with the aid of 17 independent experts and scientists aimed at halting the drastic decline in British wildlife. I have to admit not having studied this; perhaps it does call for the massive political change that would be needed to implement it, and perhaps it does (as did quite a few actually at the protest) see the UK’s problem as a relatively small part of a global problem.

I hope that all those who went on this march were also later in the year out on the streets supporting ‘Extinction Rebellion’, but there were not that many that I recognised, although that movement is based on the same kind of scientific evidence that was behind this event – and more.

It was certainly an event remarkable for the variety and inventiveness of so of the headgear and various giant (and smaller) animals on display, some very finely made and intricate, others rather less so.  Bats seemed to attract a number of the protesters and there are photographs of these along with some very fine owls , rats and birds and some fine placards on My London Diary.

One of the speakers congratulated those present for coming out and taking part, telling the hundreds of anorak-wearers that “we are used to going out in the rain”, that we don’t mind it at all. I have friends who are bird watchers (I think they call themselves ‘birders), and while I have nothing against them, it isn’t an interest I greatly share. But now is a time when they would be better standing on the streets than in the marshes and calling for real change, not just on one day a year but keeping up the pressure. Let’s hope they do – and follow David Attenborough to the barricades.

As a photographer I was pretty annoyed by the rain, though as usual I got on with the job. But I minded very drop that got on my lens and spoilt a picture. When they left Hyde Park to march to Parliament Square, I was pleased to be able to get on the tube at Marble Arch, though not to avoid going with them, but to photograph another protest, which appeared not to be taking place, though I did find another as well as a large orange lion before I returned to meet the wildlife walk as it came up Pall Mall.

My account and more pictures: People’s Walk for Wildlife.

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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We don’t need fracking. It’s dirty energy, causes considerable damage to the environment, endangers water supplies and contributes to global warming. As I write, Quadrilla has had to halt its fracking for investigations after around ten seismic events were recorded this morning, all small but a pointer to the damage that is being caused.  The fracking industry response is to call these minor earthquakes insignificant and is lobbying for the thresholds of at which fracking is temporarily halted to be raised.

The government backs fracking for at least two reasons. The first is short-sighted greedby them and their supporters, but the argument they more openly give is one of energy security, that if we can produce more of our own gas we would not be reliant on Russia, who could threaten to cut our our supplies.

This is perhaps a good argument for cutting our reliance on gas, and the best way to do this is by cutting our energy use, insisting that all new build properties and conversions have high energy efficiency. There needs to be more help for increasing energy efficiency of older buildings and an expansion of varioius government schemes.

Increasingly energy is coming from renewable generation, with both solar and wind playing a large part. Many now benefit from cheap electricity from solar panels, but government cuts in the feed-in tariffs which subsidised solar panels has decimated the solar installation industry.

Solar panels are now much cheaper and battery storage systems now available make more sense than supplying electricity at low cost (and there will be no feed-in tariff for new installations from April 2019) to the grid. Hopefully better (and cheaper) battery systems will make many more homes, especially new energy efficient properties, essentially independent of the grid, at least for much of the year.

The cheapest source of electricity is now onshore wind turbines, and the government should be backing and expansion in these rather than halting them and encouraging fracking. Fortunately there tends to be more wind at times in the year when solar generation is lower and reliance on both, along with other minor renewable sources should leave only a very limited emergency role for gas and other carbon fuels.

So we don’t need fracking, and we certainly don’t want the kind of problems it will cause, and many have been protesting against it at various sites across the country, but particularly in Lancashire, where the fight against the frackers has been led by a number of remarkable women, the Nanas from Nanashire, who have devoted much of their lives to stopping it.

Unfortunately, despite their long and valiant efforts – and Lancashire County Council’s refusal to allow it (also doubtless a result of the campaigns), local democracy was over-ruled by the government, and a couple of months after this protest in London, fracking began at the site near Blackpool.  And so have the earthquakes.

Local opposition across the country to fracking sites continues to grow, and a number of local authorities have come out against it. The response of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has been to propose to change the planning rules to make fracking easier, seen by many as an attack on democracy. Many of those taking part in the protest wore  suffragette costumes to mark the 100th anniversary of women first getting the vote and to challenge Parliament now to make voting actually mean something.

After the rally in Parliament Square, there was a march around the square and then on to the nearby BEIS (Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy )  where campaigners soon moved onto the open area under cover at the front of the building where they could see people working inside the ministry, some of whom closed their blinds. The protesters shouted loudly and sang anti-fracking songs fro some time before leaving.

More on My London Diary:

100Women against fracking
100Women protest at BEIS
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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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