After photographing some of the marchers as they left Clerkenwell Green I rushed ahead and photographed the whole march as it came up to Farringdon Road and continued on its way towards Trafalgar Square.
I tried hard to photograph all of the banners that were being carried, and have put most of these pictures on My London Diary. I think I missed a few, particularly where some of the large trade union banners obscured others, and there were a few pictures I rejected for technical or aesthetic reasons. But it is a measure of the rather smaller scale of this year’s march that I was able to record almost all of it in a little over 40 images.
Sri Lanka People’s Liberation FrontTurkish MLKP bannerKashmir JK NAP UK Day-Mer Women OrganisationEnglish Collective of Prostitutes and Women Against RapeCommunist Party of Greece
When the end of the march had passed me, I walked down to the tube. I had decided against going to the rally in Trafalgar Square, and I suspect that as in previous years most of the marchers would quickly melt away after they had reached the destination. There would still be an audience, though not a huge one and made up more of British trade unionists and socialists than the march.
In previous years the rally has largely failed to represent the cosmopolitan nature of the march, and I had no reason to feel this year would be any different. I went to celebrate May Day with a group of friends in a pub in Wapping, intending to return in the evening for another event in central London. But our celebrations went well and somehow I missed it.
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.
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, please share on social media. And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
There has been a march in London on May Day, May 1st, for many years now, and since I went freelance I think I’ve attended it most or all years. Before when I was working as a full-time teacher, I was usually working on the actual May Day and unable to celebrate it, though back in the 70s I would turn up to work with a sprig of Lily of the Valley in my lapel, provided by a left-wing colleague, with French connections – there they have a public holiday to celebrate La Fête du Travail which is also know as La Fête du Muguet .
Back in 1978, the then Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan lost his nerve in creating a May bank holiday, and instead of declaring May Day as a holiday we got the rather ridiculous first Monday in May. Despite it not being May Day it remains contentious, with the Tory right Little Englanders wanting to replace it with a nationalistic UK Day ‘Best of Britain’ celebration in Ocotober. Next year it is to be moved to Friday May 8th to celebrate the 75th anniversary of VE Day.
Without London’s ethnic communities, I think the London march would have died years ago, with Kurds and Turkish communist groups really keeping the event alive and many other nationalities taking part. There is a small hard-core of left wing trade unionists and British communists, as well as various issue groups also.
This year Clerkenwell Green seemed very empty when I arrived at the time marchers were supposed to gather from noon, though more came later, knowing it would only start around 1pm.
But there were a few speeches in front of the Marx Library, notably from an man from the Indian Workers Association about the 100th anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and their demand for a formal apology from Britain and the Venezuelan ambassador who spoke in support of their government against media lies used to promote the US-inspired and supported right-wing coup
Two unwelcome marchers held a banner with an anti-trans message woman an adult human female. Later following complaints they were challenged by march stewards and forced to leave the march. There is little support for this ‘Terf’ bigotry on the left which almost universally supports LGBTQ+ rights as an important area of human rights.
My next post will look at some of the banners on the May Day March
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.
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, please share on social media. And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
I do like to get my money’s worth from a Travelcard. Because of some Tory gerrymandering in the 1960s the area where I live was the only part of Middlesex not to become a London borough, which means that despite my age I don’t qualify for a ‘Freedom Pass’ but am still paying for rail and underground travel.
I do of course get a national bus pass, which does save me a great deal, and a Senior Rail Card gets me a third off my rail fares except during the morning peak – and is a bargain at £70 for 3 years. But still the travel to and around London working costs me around £1500 a year – yet another reason to curse the Tories.
The Freedom Pass was introduced by a Labour GLC in 1973, largely pushed through by the effort’s of Ken Livinstone’s Deputy Illtyd Harrington. Welcome though it was for pensioners, transport in London remained a difficult and expensive business for those of us younger at the time, with journeys generally requiring the purchase of a separate ticket for each stage in any journey.
Again it was under a Labour GLC that the Travelcard was introduced in 1983-4 (the later year for the one-day version) although its use was restricted until the Capitalcard in 1985 added rail travel to Underground and buses. This was replaced by a revised Travelcard in 1989 which included rail and DLR services, which despite changes in London’s governance and travel systems remains in use with only minor changes today.
The Travelcard made my extensive photography of Greater London from 1986-2000 possible, or at least greatly simplified the logistics, particularly in removing the need to queue at tube and rail stations to buy a ticket for each stage of the journey. Improvements in providing information about services, and latterly the online Journey Planner and Googlehave also greatly simplified the process, which previously had meant much tedious work with paper timetables and tube and bus maps as well as the London A-Z. Though with a little intelligence it often remains possible to find faster routes than those suggested online, which occasionally verge on the bizarre.
On April 30th my Travelcard first took me to Waterloo, and then on the tube to Westminster. After photographing the protests there it was back on the tube to London Bridge and then by rail to New Cross and a short walk to Goldsmiths. I then returned by train to London Bridge, again taking the tube to Westminster, where I photographed a protest by XR Families at the Treasury. I walked back to Westminster station and again took the Jubilee Line, this time to Finchley Road, with a short walk to cover a protest against a fundraiser to recruit young people to the Israeli army at the JW3 Jewish Community Centre. This is close to Finchley Road & Frognal station from which I caught the Overground to Richmond for a South West Railway train home.
I think the day would have needed a combination of 5 or 6 single or return tickets for the various stages in the pre-Travelcard era, each involving queing to buy a ticket from a clerk in the ticket office. I don’t think I could have contemplated a journey like this and had I done so it would have been expensive. I felt my Travelcard had served me well.
More about the last two protests of the day and of course more pictures:
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.
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, please share on social media. And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
Goldsmiths, University of London was once a small college in New Cross, establishe in 1891 by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths as Goldsmiths’ Technical and Recreative Institute in a building built in 1844 for the Royal Naval School who had outgrown the site. It became a college of the University of London in 1904 as as Goldsmiths’ College, losing the apostrophe in 1933.
Goldsmiths College is still its official name, but it no longer uses the ‘College’, perhaps too much of a reminder of its past role largely in training teachers, although also offering other courses. Many well-known British artists studied there, perhaps benefitting greatly from a thriving south London art scene in the 1970s in Bermondsey and other areas of nearby Southwark.
Goldsmiths too has outgrown its old building, although it is still its main building, but has spread its campus across a much larger area, with both new buildings and incorporating older ones, the most prestigious and ornate of which is the former Deptford Town Hall on the New Cross Road.
Over half the students at Goldsmiths are mature students, and around a fifth are overseas students as well as many BAME students from this country. That mix was evident when I visited Deptford Town Hall where students were preparing for a party to celebrate 50 days of occupation in the building – as it has also been on other visits to the campus. It feels more like a London university than most.
The Goldsmiths occupation was prompted after a candidate standing in student elections was racially abused and the university authorities failed to take action, but has longer and deeper causes. Students claim that the university fails to treat its BAME students and workers fairly, with higher dropout rates for them as well as lower academic results. I’d been at Goldsmiths a couple of months earlier, on St Valentines Day for a protest to launch the campaign by the IWGB union and students to directly employ its security officers and give them decent pay and conditions.
I was signed into the building by a student and given a conducted tour of the occupied areas, then watched and photographed the occupying students preparing for their party – and wished I could stay as the food looked delicious.
The students had a long list of demands, including that Goldsmiths develop a strategic plan to tackle the institutional racism – and bring workers on the campus into direct employment, several versions of which were written up in the occupation and on-line.
They also demand that Deptford Town Hall be made more available to the local community, as they say Goldsmiths have failed to live up to the promises they made about this. It really is a splendid building, and the interior even more so than the impressive facade, and it would be good to see it become a community asset rather than solely used for university purposes. It was after all built for the people, doubtless with money from taxpayers as well as from our exploitation of the Empire.
The occupation finally came to a successful end in July after 137 days when the Black, Minority Ethnic, Muslim, LGBTQ and disabled student-led occupation by Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action obtained a legally binding dcument signed by the Senior Management Team to their demands including that they would not pursue further legal action against those who had carried out the occupation.
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.
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, please share on social media. And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
I’d gone to the QEII Centre in Westminster to photograph one protest outside the AGM of London-listed mining company Anglo American, and found that there were two taking place and sharing the space not entirely happily.
I’d known well in advance that the London Mining Network were going to be there and hold a vigil because of the “unimaginable damage to communities and the planet” caused by Anglo American “through its disregard for human rights, the environmental devastation caused by its projects, and its neo-colonial policies in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Chile, South Africa and elsewhere.”
Protesting together with them were people representing groups in some of those countries, particularly Colombia, as well as Medact, health professionals for a safer, fairer & better world, many of whom volunteer to work abroad including in areas affected by the activities of Anglo American. And among the protesters were several who had bought a single share so as to be entitled to go into the AGM and question the activities of the company in the meeting.
But there is no booking system for protests – and for static protests there is even no requirement to inform the police, though this is necessary for marches to be legal. And another group had come and set up before them on the spot they had hoped to occupy.
As it says in the search description for their web site, “Anglo American is a globally diversified mining business. Our portfolio spans diamonds (De Beers), platinum, copper, iron ore and manganese, metallurgical …” (the rest of their activities are masked by the character limit, so you can finish the sentence how you like.)
De Beers is the worlds leading diamond company. Inminds came to demand that they end their trade in Israeli blood diamonds, saying the Kimberley Process, meant to prevent the trade in diamonds that fund human rights violations is purposely neutered. De Beers supplies diamonds to Israel where they are cut and polished and produce around about $1 billion annually to bankroll the Israeli military and security industries and its horrendous human right abuses against Palestinians.
Inminds say that in 2015 Israel managed to block a proposal by the World Diamond Council that would have extended the definition of conflict diamonds “to include countries who flout human rights laws not just in mining areas but also in diamond trading centers“.
The London Mining Network held their protest a few yards away, and not as they had intended at one of the entrances where shareholders might walk to the AGM. Although the two protests remained separate, some of those attending spent time supporting both. I’ve photographed both groups before and probably should have reported the two protests separately, but I hope the captions to my images filed made the position clear – as I think it is on My London Diary in Protests at Anglo-American mining AGM.
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.
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, please share on social media. And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
Finally my pictures and comments for July 2019 are online. It should have been easy as I took the last week off with various family events, which even if they get photographed very seldom get shared publically on-line. But somehow I’m finding keeping up with things rather difficult, and for various reasons I think My London Diary is likely shortly to come to an end. But at least a few months more…
As usual in July I went to the annual Procession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel at St Peter’s Italian Church in Clerkenwell and managed to get all three doves leaving the basket in the same picture – always a challenge.
Today is the first day of Carnival, but I’m almost resigned to not going. My legs really won’t take it any more and I’m only just getting over a few hours slow walking last Wednesday, though I was out taking pictures again yesterday. This year I got as far as planning my route, complicated by rail closures today on two lines that I would normally use, but I’m not going to make it. The nearest I’m likely to get is a can of Red Stripe.
It took me 25 years to get to Notting Hill Carnival for the first time in 1990, partly because for the first few years it was a relatively small and poorly publicised event but later because of the demonisation it suffered in our largely racist press.
By 1990 I was becoming increasingly interested in documenting London as a multicultural city and knew I had to photograph carnival, so set out still with some trepidation and anxious warnings from friends. I loved the noise and the atmosphere and the colour, so of course I photographed it in black and white!
I continued to go back for the next 20 or so years, usually going for both days, and it became one of the highlights of my photographic year. I think there was perhaps a year or two when I was out of the country at August Bank holiday, and in 2005 I was suffering from a knee problem. I packed my photographic bag – always a small one for carnival – and dragged myself the 500 yards to the station, climbed up the bridge to get to the right platform and collapsed to the ground in pain. It was only then I realised that there was no way I was going to make it, rested for a few minutes and then hobbled my way slowly home.
I did allow myself to photograph in colour some years, but I found it a distraction and I think my best pictures are black and white. Some years too I took a panoramic camera too, loaded with colour film, and I felt its wide sweep enabled me to capture more of the atmosphere of the carnival procession. One of those images ended up being printed huge with a doorway people could walk through as an entrance to a museum exhibition; I was delighted to see it used but felt it didn’t improve the picture.
Rather to my surprise I find it’s 7 years since I last went to carnival, and on My London Diary I then wrote:
But either I’m getting too old for it, or perhaps carnival is changing, and this year I found it a little difficult. So I went on the Sunday, stayed around three hours and didn’t really want to return for the big day. So I didn’t.
But I am thinking about Notting Hill today, and about North Kensington in particular. Although I haven’t been to carnival I have made quite a few visits there over the past couple of years, and I’ve set an alarm and like carnival I will stop at 3pm for a period of silence to remember Grenfell.
You can see more pictures from several years at Carnival on My London Diary, but my favourite selection of the black and white work is a set of 20 pictures from the show English Carnival with three friends at the Juggler in Hoxton in 2008 from which the black and white images above come.
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.
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, please share on social media. And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
This wasn’t the first time I’d been to Southall for a rally remembering the murder there of Blair Peach by the police Special Patrol Group in 1979, though I don’t remember if Gurdip Singh Chaggar’s murder was also remembered at those earlier events.
Blair Peach had come to the UK from New Zealand in 1969 and he was roughly my age. He was working as a teacher in the East End, and like me was an active member of the National Union of Teachers, though I didn’t come across him as I was working around 40 miles away and only involved at a local level.
I suspect we went to some of the same protests agains apartheid in South Africa and against racism, but I was not at the Anti-Nazi League demonstration in Southall on the day he was murdered, probably because although it was not far from where I was living, it was a week after Easter Monday and I was probably working and could not have arrived until it was due to finish.
The racist National Front had called a meeting in Southall Town Hall for 7.30pm, and because it was in the run-up to the forthcoming General Election on 3rd May in which the NF had a candidate (he got 1545 votes, 3.0% of the vote) Ealing Council were unable to refuse them the use of the hall, despite a petition from 10,000 local residents.
Several local groups as well as the Anti-Nazi League organised protests across the day, including the Indian Workers’ Association, outside whose offices Gurdip Singh Chaggar, coming home from the Dominion Cinema, had been set upon and murdered by skinheads in June 1976, and Peoples Unite, a largely Afro-Carribean group who along with others had been involved in disturbances which followed Chaggar’s murder.
Although there had been some reports of bricks and bottles being thrown, the real violence began when the police Special Patrol Group decided to raid a squat being used by People’s Unite as a first aid post. Two officers were reported as wounded and the SPG took out vengeance on all those in the house, and Clarence Baker was hit on the head by a police truncheon, fracturing his skull and putting him in a coma for five months.
Police had kept a cordon around the Town Hall, and escorted the fascists in. Once the meeting had begun they decided to clear the area, allowing protesters to move away westwards along Southall Broadway. Peach and a group of friends were leaving, going back to where they had parked, and turned off south down Beachcroft Road. Unfortunately for them, this road stops short, running into Orchard Rd and then going back towards the Broadway. As they approached Orchard Rd they were met by the SPG, who jumped out of their vans and were now rioting out of control and lashing out at everyone on the road. It’s unclear whether the baton wielded by the officer who killed Peach was standard police issue or as some report soemthing rather heavier. Conscious but in obvious difficulties he was taken into a nearby house and an ambulance called, but he died in hospital four hours later.
Today’s protest started close to where Gurdip Singh Chaggar was murdered and the march halted there for a minute’s silence before going on to stop outside the Gurdwara where he and his family worhsipped. Later it took Peach’s route from Broadway down Beechcroft Road and people laid flowers on the corner of Orchard Road where he received the fatal blow, before going on to a rally outside the Town Hall.
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.
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, please share on social media. And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
I’ve written recently about Facebook’s censorship of posts and many of my friends who are on Facebook (and more who I don’t know but are ‘Facebook Friends’) seem regularly to disappear for a few days or even permanently having been banned from FB. (Though most of those who have been permanently removed seem to reappear in a few days under a slightly different name.
Often their ‘offences’ seem to have been trivial or non-existent, sometimes just sharing a link to an article in the mainstream press seems to be enough to generate a ban. At times FB’s arbiters seem excessively prudish, objecting to the kind of language that is commonplace in many groups in our society, or in their obsessive fear of women’s nipples.
FB’s censorship reached a shameful new low a few months ago, when they blocked people recording ‘Likes‘ on the site of Access Ability who have a Facebook help line to empower people with disabilities. When this was queried on a phone call, the site was told the action had been taken by FB because “some people find it disturbing to see pictures of disabled people“.
Together with a colleague I went to photograph a protest by disabled friends from DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) outside Facebook’s London HQ against this discriminatory treatment by Facebook of disability-related pages, and you can see my pictures of their protest. During the protest they played a recording of the phone call which the above quote came from, and there were other similarly disturbing statements.
But what you can’t see pictures of is a meeting which I think took place between the protesters and a manager from Facebook about the ban. FB were clearly so ashamed about their behaviour that they were unwilling for this to be recorded. Their security manager came out and told DPAC that a manager would only come out and talk with them if the meeting was not photographed, videoed or recorded in any way.
My colleague had already left, deciding he had enough pictures of the protest for his newspaper which had asked him to cover it. I decided not toprejudice the outcome of the event for the protesters and felt that reporting the prohibition was a more powerful admission of FB’s guilty shame than any photographs of the meeting could be and left.
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.
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, please share on social media. And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
I lost count of the number of police vehicles that I saw as I walked along the centre of the northbound carriageway of Park Lane – and not all of them are in the picture. There were more in some of the other streets in the area too, and it was clear that this was an operation on a huge scale
Marble Arch is a key junction in London, with the Bayswater road, Edgware Road, Oxford St and Park Lane all feeding in and taking out traffic from the gyratory system around the arch. The whole area had been closed off by Extinction Rebellion on the morning of 15th March and remained closed over a week later on the 24th. I imagine there was a great deal of political pressure on the Met to clear it.
On the hard standing in front of the Arch, things seemed to be going on much as usual, though there were noticeably fewer tents and fewer people than when I visited the previous week.
But there was a crowd around a ring of police who had surrounded the group blocking the entrance to the system from Oxford St and were clearly intending to arrest them. This appeared to be the last of the road blocks still in place, with a few people still locked together. Police were trying to get those outside the cordon to move away, and were beginning to threaten them and me with arrest, but I managed to take a few pictures working between police legs.
I walked around the area for a few more minutes taking pictures, then began to walk towards Belgrave Square where I hoped to photograph protesters calling on Turkey to recognise the Armenian Genocide. As I walked down Park Lane I passed the samba band and others coming to Marble Arch around 45 minutes after me.
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.
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, please share on social media. And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
