Ten years ago today, on Wednesday 10th April 2013, I was with cleaners and other outsourced workers at the University of London for a noisy protest at Senate House calling for equal sick pay, holidays and pensions with equivalent workers employed directly by the University – the 3 causes in their continuing ‘3 Cosas Campaign.’
Companies that want to maintain a respectable facade use outsourcing as a way to get workers on the cheap, using contractors to employ them under conditions of service that no respectable employer would use.
Outsourced workers are generally only entitled to the minimum Statutory Sick Pay (SSP), with no payment for the first three days out of work, after which they get the state provision – in 2013 of £85.85 per week in London.
Those who are on the university payroll get considerable extra benefits on top of the SSP, depending on their length of service. A worker who has been in the job for more than five years is eligible for full pay for the first six months of absence, and then a further six months on half pay plus SSP (so long as this total does not exceed their normal pay.) The university can at its discretion increase the period of sick pay in exceptional cases.
Natalie Bennett, then leader of the Green Party, supports the campaign
Holiday entitlement for outsourced works is also usually the statutory minimum of 28 days paid holiday (including bank holidays) but some of the caterers are on ‘zero hour contracts’ which means they get no holiday pay at all. In 2012 when many halls of residence were in use for the Olympics many outsourced staff were prevented from taking any holidays over the summer period.
Those directly employed by the university get an extra 5 to 10 days paid leave, as well as up to six more ‘school closure days, The 3 Cosas campaign wants similar treatment for all workers as well as more flexibilityover when they can take holidays. Many of the outsourced workers have families in South America or Africa, and given the high travel costs in visiting them would like to be able to take longer than two week breaks.
Companies who employ the outsourced workers generally also have far poorer management staff (often also underpaid) who bully staff and often impose quite impossible workloads so that the job is done much less well than it should be. Staff turnover is also often high. We’ve clearly seen the results of this elsewhere in hospitals where outsourcing of cleaning has contributed greatly to the spread of hospital-acquired infections.
Putting services such as cleaning out to contract may immediately cut costs, but doesn’t necessarily mean real long-term savings for organisations. Often it leads to necessary work not getting done which leads to greater costs in the long term, and it always results in lower standards of service. Any savings that are made are at the cost of the low-paid workers; outsourcing should be a badge of shame for any respectable company – and should be made illegal, along with zero hours contracts.
On My London Diary I give a clear description of the protest lead by the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), the union which now represents many of the outsourced workers at the university, so I’ll not go through the details again here. But although the IWGB has a majority in many if not most workplaces the University and the outsourced employers refuse to recognise them, and the campaign is also about union recognition.
Albion Yard and Balfe Street: My walk around King’s Cross on Saturday 8th April 1989 continues. The previous post was Along the Cally & York Way. I was taking part in a walk led by the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society, GLIAS.
Albion Yard, York Way, Pentonville, Islington, 1989 89-4e-34
I cannot now remember if we took an alley from York Way to enter Albion Yard or if we turned east along Railway Street, from where there was another entrance. But I think this building was on our route into Albion Yard, and is now still present either in Albion Yard or the connected Ironworks Yard.
Neither of these yards is named on the old larre-scale OS maps, and only Albion Yard appears on my old street atlas. A few yards away from the Balfe Street entrance on the corner with Caledonian Road The Albion pub opened in 1845 when Balfe Street was called Albion St but the yard was simply labelled on the 1877 map as ‘Blue Manufactury.’ The Albion building is still there though by the time of this walk known as Malt & Hops. For some years it was the Ruby Lounge wine bar, then a Be At One cocktail bar and is now home to the Institute of Physics.
The name ‘Albion’ is the oldest known name for the mainland of Britain, in use at least since it was recorded by Greek geographers around 6,000 years ago to distinguished it from Ireland. They are thought to have got the name from the Celts and it was Romanised as Albion.
Some believe it came from a word meaning white and relate it to the ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ but it seems more likely to have a different origin simply meaning ‘land’ or ‘world’, and possibly the same root that also led to Alps and Albania.
Albion largely survives in modern English simply in the name ‘Alba’ used by Scottish separatists and in Celtic languages for Scotland.
But Albion is the England of myths, with the fantasies of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century Historia Regum Britanniae being repeated as fact in histories in the five centuries that followed. But most important for its continued popularity was the work of visionary poet and printmaker William Blake and his ‘Jerusalem‘, subtitled ‘The Emanation of the Giant Albion‘ published in just as six copies before his death in 1827. Later many have come to regard him as the greatest artist Britain has ever produced.
Albion Yard had entrances from York Way, Caledonia St, Balfe St and Railway St and was the interior of this block of four streets. The entrances and a few of the buildings that were present in 1989 still exist though in rather different state, but the character of the area, now labelled ‘Regent Quarter’ is very different.
“Regents Quarter is a development of almost six acres of land next to Kings Cross Station that and has been transformed into a living working community. Victorian workshops have been converted into loft style apartments, sitting comfortably alongside ultra modern business and residential spaces…
This sought after gated development boasts a lovely entrance hall further benefitting from a 24 hour concierge/security service.”
Some of the properties were still in use as small workshops but others are clearly derelict. I was intrigued by the heads of mannequins visible in the first floor with a door on which the name MODRENO had been hand-painted. This photograph had a sign painted on the wall ‘NO PARKING MODRENO LOADING BAY – SIGNED LECKY’S DUMMY MODELS’. You can find out much more on Modreno at Foxxhunting – Modreno.
Leaving Albion Yard to Balfe St, Pentonville, Islington, 1989 89-4e-12
You can view a very detailed presentation of the proposed redevelopment of the whole area, which includes a plans and a number of photographs of the current Albion Yard, part of what will be called Jahn Court. You can recognise this and other buildings in my pictures in the photographs there.
Entrance to Albion Yard, Balfe St, Pentonville, Islington, 1989 89-4e-14
The mid 19th century house at left and the adjoining arch with its inscription ‘WORKS & MILLS’ and the date 1846 is Grade II listed. Balfe St was formerly Albion St, and was renamed after the composer of the opera The Bohemian Girl, William Balfe in 1938.
My King’s Cross walk with GLIAS will continue in a later post
Although I had begun this walk on my own, at some point I had joined up with others for a walk around the area organised by GLIAS, the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society, of which I had long been a member, and some of the others taking part in the walk can be seen in this and some later pictures.
This alley is now an entrance to the Regent Quarter, an estate which “is currently arranged in two blocks and comprises approximately 260,730 sq ft of mixed-use real estate, across 12 office buildings and 20 retail and leisure units” which was purchased by Hong Kong based Endurance Land in 2018 who aim to revitalise the 3.5 acre site.
The name Regent Quarter applies to a larger area, mainly within Islington but also including the ‘Lighthouse’ block in Camden which largely grew up around the railway. Back in 1989 around a third of the buildings in the area were vacant, some derelict and the rest largely in poor condition, partly because of the blighting effect of uncertainly over future major developments in the area, much of which was then expected to be demolished for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and in which I became interested through the Kings Cross Railway Lands Group in the late 1980s.
Old Forge, Business Centre, Caledonian Rd, Pentonville, Islington, 1989 89-4d-15
This is now a part of the Regent Quarter and I think these particular buildings in the block west of the Caledonian Road reached from the alley above through the opening at the centre of this picture are still present around this internal courtyard. But I can find no mention now of the Old Forge Business Centre name still in the area.
Old Forge, Business Centre, Caledonian Rd, Pentonville, Islington, 1989 89-4e-61
Another picture of the internal courtyard of what was the the Old Forge Business Centre.
We returned to the Caledonian Road and I took this photograph across the road of one end of Keystone Crescent, but our walk conitnued north up the Caledonian Road, though I did photograph Keystone Crescent on other walks in the area.
The group turned west down Caledonia Street stopping to admire the 1906 built frontage of the former Kings Cross Laundry, with the large intertwined KCL insignia. More recent signs included those for Lanitis Fabrics Ltd, and Stella Models, with signs calling for Machinists, Overlockers, Pressers, Finishers and Cutters, though I think the business had closed and the building was vacant. The building is still there, much cleaned up.
York Way, Pentonville, Islington, 1989 89-4e-51
Caledonia Street took us to York Way. I’m not sure but I think this may be one of the few listed buildings in the area at 34B, where the Grade II listing text mentions “The highly unusual roof structure is a notable survival.”
If so, the frontage on York Way is rather more impressive than this side of the building, with a nicely symmetrical frontage around an arched carriage entrance, a warehouse for the adjoining black lead works designed by Thomas Marsh Nelson and William Harvey in 1873.
I think this building was where I showed work and gave a presentation as a part of the The London International Documentary Festival in 2010, I think the first time the festival had included still photography.
Taxi depot, York Way, Pentonville, Islington, 1989 89-4e-53
I think the sign at the upper centre of the image once read COACHWORK DEPT with the later addition of MOTOCOL LTD. The sloping ramp to these first floor works was built for horses and this could possibly have been a converted stables.
Now it was a busy depot for London ‘black cab’ taxis, with the driver of one at right using an air line on a tyre and small group talking by a diesel pump.
Grange Motors, York Way, Pentonville, Islington, 1989 89-4e-55
A second picture shows others on the walk going to look more closely at Crash Repair Specialists Grange Motors, while more taxi drivers are now by the pumps. The alley along the side of Grange Motors led to an enclosed yard surrounded by derelict buildings, but I’ve not digitised the couple of pictures I made there. It was a dead end and we had to come back out onto York Way.
On Saturday 7th April 2018 around 2,000 came to Downing Street to condemn the shooting by Israeli snipers of peaceful unarmed Palestinian protesters on the first day of the Great March of Return, a peaceful protest at the separation wall in Gaza on Land Day, 30th March 2018.
Live fire by the Israeli army had killed 17 and wounded over 750 unarmed protesters on that day. The second protest had taken place a week later on the day day before the London protest in this series of protests planned to continue in Palestine every Friday until Nakba Day (May 15th). Another nine Palestinians, one a journalist had been targeted and killed, and around 1,350 injured.
Many had been appalled by videos of the shooting, and by seeing Israeli citizens who had gone to watch and support the snipers who were shooting to kill.
The UK parliament was in recess and there were few UK politicians at the event, with only Baroness Jenny Tonge and a Sinn Fein MP among the speakers, although both Jeremy Corbyn and Caroline Lucas had sent messages of support.
With the current threat of accusations of anti-Semitism being raised against any who speak out to support the Palestinians, perhaps some did not want to speak out in public, but there were many Jews at the protest, including those in Jewish Voice for Labour, many Jewish supports of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and others including a group of ultra-orthodox anti-Zionist Neturei Karta members. A speaker from Jewdas recited a prayer for peace in Hebrew and then in English translation.
Among those who spoke at the event was Glen Secker of JVL, the captain of the Jewish Boat to Gaza in 2010. In 2018 he was suspended from membership of the Labour Party on a vague and unspecified accusation of anti-Semitism. Many other Jewish members of the Labour party, including the sons, daughters and grandchildren of holocaust survivors, have also been expelled from the party for the same reason.
Other supporters of Palestine, including Jeremy Corbyn have been banned from standing as Labour candidates in what can only be seen as a witch-hunt.
A few yards down the road were a handful of right-wing Zionist supporters waving Israeli flags and shouting slogans in support of the shootings and against Hamas. The few protesters who could hear them simply turned their backs on them and ignored them.
At the end of the protest the names of those murdered last week were read out and there was a two minute silence honouring them. The London protest was organised by the Friends of Al-Aqsa, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Palestinian Forum in Britain and Stop the War, and supported by EuroPal, Olive and Muslim Association of Britain.
Death Penality, Social Housing, Iraqi Killing and a Pillow Fight: Ten years ago on Saturday 6th April 2013 I photographed a Sikh vigil against the death penalty in India, a protest against the unfair ‘Bedroom Tax’ and benefit caps and demanding more social housing, Iranians calling for an enquiry into Iraqi attacks on Camp Liberty and finally a pillow fight.
Vaisakhi “Save a Live” Vigil – Old Palace Yard, Westminster
Thousands of protesters, mainly Sikh men, women and children came to Old Palace Yard opposite the Houses of Parliament to back the Kesri Lehar vigil against the death penalty in India.
The Kesri Lehar or ‘I Pledge Orange’ campaign, takes its name from the colour which stands for sacrifice in the Indian flag and is also the colour of the Sikh flag and the dress worn by baptised Sikhs which makes Vaisakhi such a colourful festival. It began as on-line campaign by US-based Sikhs for Justice. Most of those attending the protest wore orange turbans or scarves to show their support for the campaign.
There were then around 480 prisoners in Indian jails sentenced to death, and protesters feared that some were about to be hanged. These included Balwant Singh Rajoana, sentenced in 2007 for his part in a suicide bomb attack which had killed a former Chief Minister of Punjab, Beant Singh and 17 others in 1995. He remains in jail in 2023.
A large group from Derby had come in support of Professor Devender Pal Singh Bhullar who has been on death row in India for 18 years, for his alleged involvement in a car bomb in Delhi. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2014.
Sikhs were poorly treated when India and Pakistan were granted independence in 1947, with their homeland area being split across the border and most of those in jail are activists for an independent Sikh state of Khalistan. The India government has carried out a determined policy to stamp out Sikh separatists and Beant Singh who was assassinated is held by Siks to have been responsible for the extra-judicial killing of over 25,000 Sikh civilians during his period of office.
The Counihan-Sanchez Family Housing Campaign from Kilburn organised a protest opposite Downing St against the unfair Bedroom tax and benefit caps which are effecting so many people and called for the GLA and London councils to build more social housing.
They and others spoke at the campaign about the problems in getting councils to provide proper housing, and the failures of our benefits system which leave many destitute and some desperate enough to kill themselves.
As I commented, “The huge housing problems in London come from the failure over the past thirty years to provide social housing for the many low paid workers that support the city and keep it running, with a housing benefit system that has simply acted as a subsidy for private landlords and driven up rents. The cap on benefit will do nothing to solve the problem, but just make life difficult or impossible for the poorest in our society. We need more social housing and an end to poverty pay and of course more jobs.“
Ten years on things are certainly no better. Further changes in benefits including the move to Universal Credit have increased problems for many, local authority budgets have been further cut and the cost of living crisis has hit many more people. We do have more food banks, but many of these are finding it hard to cope with demand.
Also protesting at Downing Street were the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI). They called for an enquiry into the Iraqi attacks on Camp Liberty in February and previous attacks which have killed and injured many of them.
The PMOI, also known as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) was founded in 1965 and took part in the 1979 Iranian revolution which deposed the Shah. Soon after they were in armed struggle with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards and had to take refuge in neighbouring Iraq, where Saddam Hussein gave it refuge.
During the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq they agreed a ceasefire with the US and gave up their arms – which included 19 Chieftain tanks – and became the majority in the Iranian parliament in exile, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), with its base in Paris.
In Iraq the roughly 5000 MEK fighters were confined in the refugee Camp Ashraf, guarded by the US military and declared by the US as protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention. The camp was transferred to Iraqi control at the start of 2009, and in 2012 those remaining were transferred to the former US military base Camp Liberty in Bagdhad, renamed Camp Hurriya.
There had been many attacks by Iraqis on these camps, with deaths, injuries and arrests. In the most recent on 9th Febuary 2013, Iraqi mortars and rockets killed at least seven MEK members. The MEK has appealed to the UN Secretary General and the US for help and was at Downing Street to ask the UK government for support.
Feathers Fly in Trafalgar Square – Trafalgar Square
This had been designated World Pillow Fight day by the urban playground movement and this pillow fight was one of around 90 such events in cities around the world.
The urban playground movement aims to make cities into more public and social spaces by encouraging unique happenings like this pillow fight. It aims to help people move away from “passive, non-social, branded consumption experiences like watching television” and to consciously reject “the blight on our cities caused by the endless creep of advertising into public space.” They hope this will result in “a global community of participants, not consumers.“
Despite once company bringing a team of young women and handing out prominently branded free pillows, this remained large an unbranded event, and hundreds turned up with their own pillows and cushions to take part.
An earlier pillow fight had been planned for Hyde Park, but relatively few people had turned up and park police were able to prevent it taking place. But the numbers here – over 500 – made it impossible to stop. As well as the participants there were rather more who simply stood and watched. Which went against the spirit of the event, meant to be something to take part in rather than a spectacle.
It started on time and a great deal of fun was certainly being had, with some at least of those taking part adhering to the ‘rule’ not to attack photographers. At first the air was clear, but then pillows began to break up and more and more feathers filled the air. After half an hour there was a brief break and then the fight recommenced, but I left for a nearby pub where the air was clearer.
20 years ago we were at war with Iran, despite the largest ever protests in this country. I’d missed the big protest on 15 February when 1.5 million people were on the streets of London – including the rest of my family, as I’d only come out of hospital the previous day and was still very weak following slight complications after a minor operation following a heart attack. But I’d covered all the main protests in London before that, as well as taking part in our local protests every Friday night.
Of course it hadn’t just been in London that there had been protests that weekend, and there were others in at least 600 major cities around the world – the largest of all in Rome – combining to make this “the largest protest event in human history” with the BBC estimating around 6-10 million taking part around the world. And in the two and a half months leading up to the invasion on March 20th there are thought to have been 3,000 protests involving 36 million people around the world – though I think even that number fails to include small local protests like our series on Staines Bridge.
Of course it had been clear for at least a year that the USA would go ahead with its invasion whatever and had been preparing its military for it. More at stake was whether other countries would join them, and for us whether Britain would. There seems to have been no sensible reason why we should, but Tony Blair had made a promise to George Bush and was prepared to lie and mislead the country and parliament to keep it.
The major pretext for the invasion was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but the UN inspection team led by Hans Blix had found no evidence that Iraq had any – and none were found following the invasion.
The USA also claimed it was to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had ordered the Pentagon to make plans for the invasion before the dust had settled on September 11th 2001 despite being told that the attack had been carried out by al-Qaeda with no cooperation from Iraq.
Finally the US had claimed they were “going in to free the Iraqi people“, but they appear to have done little or no planning as to what could replace Saddam Hussein to keep the country from descending into chaos, a process they accelerated after their victory by disbanding the Iraqi army and disbarring from public office all of the civil service, teachers and others in public sector jobs for whom membership of the Ba’ath Party had been obligatory.
The US Institute of Peace has a useful timeline of events in Iraq since the war which has an introduction which ends “Iraq suffered through a civil war, political turmoil, widespread corruption, sectarian tensions and an extremist insurgency that seized a third of the country. Iraq has evolved through four rocky phases.”
The coalition forces – three quarters from the USA, a quarter from the UK and a handful of military from Australia and Poland, with a little support from Iraqi Kurds were still busy fighting across Iraq on April 5th, capturing Baghdad on the 9th and the war ended on May 1st, though US forces remained in occupation until 2011. Saddam was only found and captured in December 2003 and was eventually tried, found guilty of crimes against humanity and executed on 30th December 2006.
Of course the Iraq War has also had a great influence on British politics. In particular it has led to a huge distrust for politicians and our political system because both of the fact that our prime minister and other leading politicians in both parties lied to us, but the failure of huge protests over serveral years to have any effect on policy showed a failure to take any notice of the views of the people. Politics needs to be a politics of consensus and the Iraq war showed it was one of disdain.
April started with the country at war, invading Iraq together with the USA.
In Saturday 5th I went to a march to protest against this and to call for proper reporting of the events in the media, especially the BBC.
I walked to the march past the Houses of Parliament and a small group of protesters in Whitehall who were pointing out the number of Iraqi civilians already killed by the allied forces.
The main thrust of the demonstration now was that the civilian population of Iraq should be respected. The use of weapons such as depleted uranium shells and cluster bombs will mean the deaths continue for generations after the end of the fighting.
The march started opposite the old BBC building in Portland Place and went to Grosvenor Square, close to the US Embassy. There were perhaps five thousand marchers, and several hundred police surrounding them most of the time. As the speakers pointed out, it was difficult not to see the war as a US takeover of the country when plans were already in place for Americans to run the country after the war.
The killing of Iraqis must stop, and rapid progress should be made to hand control of the country back to its people.
The Source of the Thames: Ten years ago today we were engaged on a very different walk to those I’ve been writing about in recent posts on my wanderings in London in 1989. Together with my wife and elder son we were about to complete our walk along the length of the Thames Path which had begun a couple of years earlier.
Cricklade
Of course I’d walked along by parts of the Thames in and around London, out to Windsor and towards Reading and to the east all the way to rather remoter regions on the estuary beyond the end of the route over the years in piecemeal fashion, but around 2010 we’d bought a guide to the Thames Path and began walking and marking off sections in an organised way.
The National Trails site says the path is 185.2miles (298 km) from its source in the Cotswolds to Woolwich. The path was first proposed in 1947 but it was only 49 years later that it was officially opened in 1996, though I’d walked a few sections and made some minor suggestions after the Ramblers released a draft for consultation a few years earlier.
Ashton Keynes
Some physical improvements needed to be put in place, with several footbridges needed to cross the river where ferries had long ceased operation, and there were also many negotiations with riverine land owners, angling groups and local authorities to allow access. Not all these were successful, and there are still lengths of the route which are less than optimal in the upper reaches of the river.
Neigh Bridge Country Park
According again to the site, the trail is “Easy to reach by public transport”, but that is only partly true. Even below Oxford there are some sections a mile or two from the nearest station or bus stop which adds significantly at one or both ends of a day’s walk, and once you get much past Oxford things become more difficult or impossible, certainly for those of us coming from the London area.
Old Mill Farm
The last reliable and reasonably frequent bus route from Oxford back in 2013 took us to Hinton Waldrist, a small village a mile or two from the path, and our day walks had ended there. For the final section my son had booked us into two nights accommodation on route between there and the source, at Buscot and Cricklade and we returned home at the end of our third day of walking from Kemble Station, a mile and a half from the source.
We had decided to make the walk in the week after Easter Sunday, which in 2013 was on March 31st and had begun on the Tuesday. On Thursday 4th April 2013 we left our hotel in Cricklade by 9am and after a short look around the town began the final day of our 3 day walk.
It was a cold day and there was still ice on some of the puddles. Our route guide – David Sharp’s ‘The Thames Path’ – told us we had 19.7km to walk to the source, but we had to do a little further as there was a diversion: “The Thames has changed course and is now flowing over the Trail, just inside Gloucestershire” a notice with a helpful map told us – and another 2.5km to the station. The guide was otherwise excellent, but would have been rather easier to follow had we been walking down-river as it suggested and described rather than in the opposite direction.
On My London Diary I described our route and day in some detail so I won’t repeat that here, and there are over 80 pictures from the day in the account. Perhaps some of them are a little misleading as I used a fisheye lens and made the river look as if it turns considerably more than its already rather twisty route. The were some long and rather boring sections too on which I took no pictures.
There was no river on the final section
Scenically this is one of the less interesting of the Thames Path sections, but it was important to complete the walk, even if the final section was completely dry. It was bitterly cold and would have been more enjoyable in warmer weather even though we were well wrapped up – and needed to take a short rest in a pub in Ashton Keynes in the middle of the day to warm up before continuing.
The dry spring – though Spring had been wet
The source was something of an anti-climax. What is supposedly a spring with a stone marking it erected there by the Thames Conservators. I don’t know when water was last seen there, and others I know who have walked the river have all found it dry. The best I could find for some distance down the hill was a blue pipe on the grass – but there was nothing flowing from that either. There were some deep puddles in the mud by a gate some way down, and a larger one in the grass just above Thames Head, but it was only below the Fosse Way (A433) at Thames Head that a small stream became visible.
Kemble
We walked to Kemble station to find we had just missed a train and it was 50 minutes to wait for the next. There was what looked like a cosy waiting room but it was locked. It was far too cold to stand and wait on the windswept platform so despite our aching legs we went for a walk around Kemble before catching the first of three trains for our journey home.
More about the three days of our walk on My London Diary:
Kings Cross Road, Lorenzo St, King’s Cross, Islington, 1989 89-4d-32
140-142 King’s Cross Road on the corner with Lorenzo Street had a distinct style to it, with the two oval windows and some interesting brickwork. British History Online states “This five-storey office block is largely of 1991 but incorporates the front and side elevations of a tenement building of 1888” and the view from where I made this picture is still much as it was before the rebuilding.
The two terracotta panels facing Lorenze Street are still there and together give the date of AD 1888. The BHO article suggests the architect was probably W. Youlle who was the architect for a similar building on Pentonville Road. The ground floor was occupied by shops – bricked up and fly-posted in my picture – with rooms and a toilet on each of the upper floors.
Almost legible in my picture is a line of text above what had been a shopfront on Lorenzo Street which appears to read ‘B R E E D O M E T E R S’ though some letters are unclear and part obscured by the no-entry sign. Perhaps someone will be able to clear up this mystery.
Leeke St, King’s Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4d-33
The buildings at 5-11 Leeke St have become the offices for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, established by Paul Hamlyn in 1987; after his death in 2001 this became one of the largest independent grant-making foundations in the UK. At left is a doorway with the date 1890 and an arm in armour holding the butt of a broken spear, the Irish Foster family crest for the Foster Parcel Express Co. The conservation area document describes it as “a microscope emblem”.
These buildings are still there but their uses have changed and the café is now a property management company. The fine block at 150-158 was being refurbished in 1989 and is now home to an advertising agency.
Again British History Online is informative and suggests it was a speculative development. Built in 1902–3 with what it describes as a ” mildly ambitious” facade, it says that 154 and 156 had goods hoists and winches, though there is no sign of them in my picture.
Again the BHO article linked above tells us that this was built as an office, workshops and stabling in 1899–1900 and was from many years occupied by J J Connelly who probably built it. The wide doorway at left was for horses with a ramp leading up to stables on the upper floor. It was apparently still being refurbished when I made this picture as offices for Community Service Volunteers. The structure is still there but looks rather different as the striped window shades have been removed and the frontage painted a uniform white.
The taller building at right was the Mary Curzon Hostel for Women, built in memory of his wife for Lord Curzon in 1912-3 to provide inexpensive hostel accomodation for working women. Again there is a fuller description in the BHO article. When it was taken over by the LCC in 1955 it was renamed the Susan Lawrence Hostel.
Dodds the Printers had these shopfronts at 193-5 on King’s Cross Road for many years and their signage shown looked like something from a different age in 1989. From around 2013 the shopfronts have been put to other uses but the printers still appear to be in business at the rear of the premises down St Chad’s Place, the alley through the doorway in this picture. I’d taken a few photographs in this alley in 1986, which show the signs for Dodds on the back of their property.
Kings X Radio Cars, Pentonville Rd, King’s Cross, Islington, 1989 89-4d-11
I turned left onto Pentonville Road, and took a picture of these shops on the north side of the road, all of which are now a Pizza Restaurant, though not the same Italian snack bar as in my picture.
There is still a clock high more or less in the same position though that blank wall has now got four windows. The rectangular clock permanently at three minutes past four which had I think once advertised a businness here has been replaced by a slightly bulky circular one which appears to change with the hours.
I walked a few yards west and tuned right up Caledonian Rd where the next post on this walk will begin. The first post on this walk was Kings Cross, St George’s Gardens & More.
Too much was happening on Thursday 2nd April 2015 to fit it all into a headline, with protests against evictions, jailed Palestinian children, arms companies, sacking of trade unionists at hotels in Ethiopia and the Maldives, a politically motivated arrest and a failed visit to a squat in a prominent London building.
Sweets Way at Annington Homes – James St,
I began work at a lunchtime protest outside the offices of Annington Homes, the tax-dodging equity investor owned company which owns the Sweets Way estate in north London, calling for an end to evictions and the right to return for all decanted residents.
It was a small but lively protest and attracted considerable attention and support on a street busy with office workers taking their lunch break.
Despite the efforts of the campaigners this small former Ministry of Defence estate of 142 social homes was finally forcibly evicted by evicted by dozens of High Court bailiffs and 7 vans of Met police on 23-24th September. Annington planned to replace these with around 170 homes for private sale at up to £700,000, along with just 59 so-called ‘affordable’ homes at £560,000. Nothing on the new estate was to provide social housing and this was clearly an exercise in social cleansing for profit.
Admiralty Arch, the landmark Grade I listed building providing an impressive entrance to the Mall from Trafalagar Square was commissioned by King Edward VII to commemorate Queen Victoria’s death, designed by Sir Aston Webb and completed in 1912. Initially a residence for the First Sea Lord and offices for the Admiralty it was later more general government offices. The government sold it off in 2012 to be developed as a hotel.
Activists from the Autonymous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians had entered the building through the roof at night and were occupying it. I photographed the various notices and banners on the outside of the building and some activities of security and occupiers outside, and talked to a couple of the them. I and a couple of other journalists were offered entry if we brought tobacco or alcohol but felt it wise to refuse and left. I think the squatters were evicted within 24 hours.
G4S provides security services for Israeli jails in which Palestinian children are held, some as young as 12 years old. The most common charge is throwing stones. Typically there have been 500-700 of them a year in the Israeli military detention system with between 120 and 450 held at any one time. In 2014 Israel held 1266 Palestinian children for interrogation; campaigners say 75% of them are physically tortured and many sexually abused.
One of the protesters who spoke about G4S involvement in the imprisoning and torture of Palestinian children also spoke about her mistreatment by Israeli Security, who forced her to remove her clothes and stand naked to be inspected in public because she was going to visit Palestinians in jail
Thursday 2nd April 2015 was Maundy Thursday and Catholic Workers were taking part in a walk around the “geography of suffering” in London halting outside the offices of companies in the arms trade for prayers against the arms trade, war, torture, nuclear weapons, international debt, homelessness, immigration policy and climate change. The ‘Stations of the Cross’ was a day early as this usually takes place on Good Friday.
Among the companies whose offices they prayed outside were arms company Qinetiq in Buckingham Gate, where a security man came out and told them they could not protest there. They told him they were on the public highway and if they wanted to protest they could do so. But they had come to pray not to protest and continued, leaving as they finished their service.
Among other companies I photographed them outside were Rolls-Royce, another weapons manufacturer, where the pilgrimage ended. I had only joined them part way through the event, when the came past the protest at G4S.
Workers at Sheraton hotels in Ethiopia and the Maldives have been sacked for trade union organising and members of the fast-growing Unite Hotel Workers Branch protested in solidarity with them outside Sheraton’s two Mayfair hotels.
Hotel workers are one of the most marginalised groups of workers in the UK, and many are exploited because their English is poor or non-existent. Here in the UK they can also get sacked for joining a union but despite this, the Hotel Workers branch is the fastest growing branch of Unite because of its determined support for the workers.
I met and photographed their protest outside Le Meridien on Piccadilly for around half an hour before walking down with the to the Park Lane Hotel where I had to leave them to go to Aldgate.
Chingford candidate arrested at Poor Doors – One Commercial St, Aldgate
Police clearly had it in for Lisa McKenzie and during this weekly Poor Doors protest outside One Commercial St a woman officer came up to her a and told her she was being arrested, accused of criminal damage. The officer said she had stuck a Class War sticker on the glass next to the rich door two weeks earlier on March 19th. A snatch squad surrounded her, and despite opposition from the protesters she was led away and put in a waiting police van to be taken to Bethnal Green police station.
While many people had stuck posters and stickers onto the glass windows at almost every Poor Doors protest, this was the first arrest. It’s doubtful whether this is an offence, and it is certainly not criminal damage, as glass is not damaged, with posters and any glue residue being easily removed leaving the surface in as new condition.
I had photographed Lisa and others at the Rich Door fairly extensively on March 19th and was ready to testify that she had not herself stuck anything on the glass – though when her case eventually came to court it was thrown out before I was called.
Lisa was certainly a very vocal protester (as usual) but it’s hard to avoid thinking what picked her out was political pressure because of her candidature for Class War against Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford in the forthcoming general election.
Before her arrest the protest had been hampered by barriers for work on the wide pavement outside the Rich Door of the building, and the protest had started on the opposite side of the main road.
Two incidents caused some hilarity, one where a police officer came to deal with a yellow smoke flare that had been thrown into the road, first seeming to kick it, then picking it up and carrying it away down the alley towards the poor door. It had burnt out by the time he reached this, but as I commented “Everyone else may throw their rubbish here but I was surprised the police thought it a good idea.”
The second was when Lisa pointed out that one of the two women officers standing behind the banner she was holding had taken part in plain clothes in a previous ‘poor doors’ protest, and Ian Bone offered her the megaphone to speak – but this was immediately followed by another woman officer coming to arrest Lisa.
There were some angry scenes as she was driven away, and police refused to talk with the protesters. The protest continued with several speeches before people went home.
Saturday 1st April 2017 turned out to be a busy day in London, though the buses in my picture on Westminster Bridge were not then going anywhere – and the driver of the No 12 at the front of this row was taking a rest from his seat. Various protests and the police had brought traffic to a stop. As in many other months you can see more of my pictures taken as I travelled around in a London Images section.
Motorcycle Theft Protest Ride – Westminster
I’d vaguely wondered about paying another visit to the Ace Café on the North Circular Road at Stonebridge, but not riding a bike I would have felt something of an outsider, and the journey back to central London by the Bakerloo line wold have taken me around 40 minutes and I would have missed other things that were happening.
Organised gangs are still making rich pickings around the whole of London – and one of my neighbour’s had his bike targeted a few months ago, but the two men cutting through a substantial lock were spotted from the house opposite, and ran away when they were challenged halfway through.
In 2017 there were reported thefts in London of 8,131 motorbikes, 4,121 moped and 3,218 scooters, a total of almost 15,500 thefts. That amounts to one for every 7.5 powered bikes registered in the city. Motorcyclists came with a petition to the Mayor of London and the Home Secretary to give the police greater resources to tackle this crime, and for them to give it higher priority, for more ground anchors in bike parking bays and for tougher sentencing of offenders.
Ten Days after the Westminster terror attack by a deranged driver, people were still stopping to look and and photograph the flowers for the victims, around the lamp standards on Waterloo Bridge, along the whole of the front of Parliament Square and in front of New Scotland Yard in its new building on the Victoria Embankment, where an eternal flame also remembers all police who have died while doing their duty.
There was a long strip of tributes along the front of Parliament Square opposite were PC Keith Palmer was killed to him and the others who died.
Youth protest over housing benefits loss – Parliament Square
A grass roots group of young people, ‘#1821Resist’, were in Parliament Square to protest against the scrapping of housing benefit for young people which coming into force on this day.
They say that under Tory rule since 2010 homelessness has doubled and that this change will continue to leave vulnerable people without homes, making it almost impossible for them to get into work or education.
Iraqis, mainly women dressed in black, were protesting opposite Downing St against the killing of civilians by US and Iraqi forces during the assault on Mosul. Attacks on the city, then held by the Islamic State (ISIL) begun in October 2016 and continuing until ISIL were defeated there in July 2017. According to Wikipedia (and the BBC) “The battle was the world’s single largest military operation since the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was considered the toughest urban battle since World War II.”
The women said that hundreds have been killed by US air strikes after being told to stay in Mosul; people were stopped from leaving were then bombed. The protest was organised by a group of Iraqi women, one of whom told me a nine-year old relative in Mosul had died earlier today. The photographs they held up showed some of the results of the US bombing.
Britain First & EDL exploit London attack – Westminster
Extremist right-wing groups including Britain First and the EDL (English Defence League) were quick to exploit the London terror attack to fuel their anti-Muslim and anti-migrant racist propaganda, both organising marches. Police had imposed restrictions on both marches confining them to particular short routes to rally points on the Emabankment. London Antifascists and Unite Against Fascism (UAF) who had come to opposed them were only allowed to hold a static protest.
I was able to photograph Britain First at their designated meeting point in the taxi area outside Charing Cross station where their leader Paul Golding arrived with a van full of flags and handed them out, while his deputy Jayda Fransen was busy talking to the media.
The EDL were supposed to be meeting in Trafalgar Square, but were actually gathering in their usual pub, Lord Moon of the Mall, close to the top of Whitehall. Police were busily and rather forcefully keeping back a crowd of antifascists against the shops on the opposite side of the road, injuring a few of them in the crush. Police behind them were shouting at them to go forward, but police in front were preventing them from doing so.
I photographed the EDL on the pavement in front of the Lord Moon of the Mall over the shoulders of a line of police protecting them, but left as police pushed them back inside the pub and returned to Britain First at Charing Cross station where they were getting ready to march.
There were few people on the street as they marched down to the Embankment for a rally, but a couple of women shouted at them calling them racists. Police stopped the marchers from moving towards them, but they had to refuse a Britain First fake-news team who tried to stop them for an interview.
I listened to the rally for a few minutes then tried to go back up Northumberland Avenue to photograph the EDL march, but it was hard to see for police surrounding it. The police quickly went to grab one woman who started to shout at this march.
But the police relaxed their cordon when the marchers reached their rally pen on the Embankment and I was able to walk past them and began to take pictures.
But after a couple of minutes one of the stewards saw me and objected to me being their and called on the police to remove me, after which I had to photograph over the shoulders of the police. One of the officers came to tell me off for having been in with the marchers, but I simply told her I had every right to be there. Shortly after I decided to leave as I had taken enough pictures, and I decided to go to photograph the counter-protesters.
Police had decided that the UAF could only hold a static protest on the Embankment rather than their intended and already advertised march to there from South Africa House in Trafalgar Square, despite ‘facilitating’ the two extreme-right marches. The UAF had turned up at South Africa House on the morning and police had slowly with unnecessary force pushed them down the march route as I’d witnessed earlier in the day.
From the EDL rally I could see and just hear the Unite Against Fascism rally taking place perhaps a hundred yards away down the Embankment, shouting ‘Fascist Scum off our streets’ and other slogans. From the speeches I had heard at the two right-wing rallies both groups were clearly racist and Islamophobic and among the marchers I recognised many faces from clearly fascist organisations I had photographed in the past.
I could see and hear that there were speeches at the UAF rally but not make out what was being said from the distance and over the noise. I tried to walk down towards the UAF but police would not let me take the short direct route despite my showing my press card.
I had to walk back and out onto Whitehall and then around to get to be back of the UAF rally, and by the time I got there many of the counter-protesters had left for home and the speeches had ended, though there were still rather more around than at the two right-wing rallies combined.
