12 Days of Christmas -some of my favourite pictures from those I made in May.
More of my favourite pictures from June 2025 tomorrow.
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12 Days of Christmas -some of my favourite pictures from those I made in April 2025.
More images from May 2025 tomorrow.
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12 Days of Christmas -some of my favourite pictures from those I made in March 2025.
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Some of my favourite pictures from those I made in February 2025:
Some of my favourite pictures from those I made in January 2025:
Tommorow some of my pictures from February.
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Christmas Walks. For many years we have had a family get-together on Boxing Day and we will do the same today, but it will be a little different as for the first time for many years we will not be walking the five or six miles to it.
We always needed that walk to work up enough appetite for a large meal in the middle of the day after a little overindulgence on Christmas Day. I’ve posted some pictures from our Boxing Day walks here in previous years, But as we got a little older they became simply a matter of the shortest route- a pleasant stroll along the Thames Path rather than any of the slightly longer and hillier variations that use to add interest.
And in late 2023 the Environment Agency found an unsafe 90 year old footbridge across a small creek close to Runnymede Bridge and fenced of this short section of the Thames Path in February 2024. Almost two years later it remains fenced off with work yet to start. The diversion isn’t a great deal longer but makes the walk less interesting.
We’d also go out on at least one walk between Boxing Day and New Year’s Day on a longer walk with whichever of our family were staying with us. But now our house seems to have shrunk as our children’s families have grown and we go away to stay with or near them. But I think we will still make some walks.
In 2019 we made three walks between Christmas Day and the New Year and I posted about all three on My London Diary.
The first, our walk on Boxing Day 2019 from Staines to lunch in Old Windsor was cut a little short, not by the Environment Agency but by the weather. We made it roughly two-thirds of the way to the café at Runnymede when the heavens opened – and we rang to be collected.
The second walk, two days later, followed an invitation on the Christmas card from the father of my younger son’s wife to join a walk he was arranging from Wimbledon across the common and through Richmond Park. We hadn’t intended to go, but it was a fine day and we decided at the last minute to join them, though we had to leave before the lunch they had planned at the café in Richmond Park.
More at Wimbledon to Richmond
The next day we took the trains to briefly visit my elder son and family in Milton Keynes and from there were driven up to Matlock by my younger son to stay with them for a couple of days. And the next day we walked what was described by one sensationalist article in a tabloid newspaper as the “most dangerous footpath in England” around the face of High Tor to Matlock Bath.
Of course it is no more dangerous than many other paths on cliffs around the country – and even has a handrail to hold on the narrowest section, as well as a short ‘one-way’ section to reduce the risk where passing others could be dangerous.
Matlock Bath is in parts tourist hell, full of fish and chips and ice cream shops, and a mecca for bikers, but it does have at least one decent pub – where we ate and went to look at some very large specimen fish before visiting the Mining Museum.
Coming out, I and my younger son started to climb up the hill on the west side of the valley while the rest of our party decided to take the short train journey back to Matlock. The climb of the valley was steep and exhausting, but once we had reached the top it was fairly easy going, with more great views at times of the Derwent valley as the light was beginning to fade.
By the time we reached Matlock I was thinking I should have taken the train.
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Merry Christmas 2025
Merry Christmas
A few weeks ago i looked through the all of the pictures I had taken this year – or as least all those I had selected to put into my Lightroom catalogue – this almost 25.000 was probably rather less than half of the actual exposures made as I cull out many I don’t find of some interest and choose only the best of similar images. These are are the two pictures I printed and gave to a few close friends, now online with my Christmas Greetings too all on social media.
It was a long process – and made rather longer by my falling asleep a few times working late at night so I’m not sure I saw every one of them. At first I selected around 30 or 40 pictures, then cut these down to a final two.I wasn’t looking for my ‘best pictures of the year’ but ones that might be usalble as Christmas Cards,
Most of my pictures this year were of pro-Palestine protests which our politicians have stigmatised as ‘Hate marches’ and anti-Semitic. Quite clearly they are neither, with many Jewish protesters taking part, including including a few survivors of the holocaust and rather more of their sons and daughters.
The mass media have largely give us a very misleading view of the marches, which are against not Jews but the policies of an Israeli state which as widely been accused of genocide, killing large numbers of women and children as well as men with little or no connection to Hamas, bombing schools, hospitals and refugee camps preventing medical and other urgently needed supplies from crossing the border.
What hate I have seen has come from largely from those small groups of Zionists and others who have opposed these marches. I think all or almost all the Jewish people I know are opposed to Netanyahu, some seeing his relentless killing of Palestinians as a desperate attempt to cling to power and avoid prosecution.
But in the end I didn’t chose an image from the Palestine protests, but one from the March 8th women’s march, and the second from a March 22nd protest by disable people in fear that a Labour government will drastically cut the Personal Independence Payment, PIP.
DLR – Connaught Rd & Bow Creek 1994. Continuing my panoramic images made along the path of the DLR in July 1994.
The road layout in this area has changed completely since 1994, but you can see at right the DLR Beckton branch going over the concrete lead-up to the Connaught Bridge. I think GATE 30 at extreme left is to the Excel site and the Connaught Tavern is hidden by the trees in the centre of the picture – and so this road was the old Connaught Road which led to the old swing bridge. I think where I was standing is now the middle of a hotel car park.
I moved around a mile and a half west and four stops along the DLR line to Canning Town and one of my favourite areas around Bow Creek, which here does two more or less 180 degree turns before flowing into the Thames. These two ‘bridges’ are a few yards south of East India Dock Road and I think both were built as pipe bridges to carry gas across the river.
Only the brick end supports of first remain on each bank. The metal bridge in the centre of the image is also a footbridge, now painted blue and leading across the river to the ecology park. Just beyond it, almost completely hidden is a third bridge, a long disused rail bridge. At left are the sheds of a timber yard.
Further East on the East India Dock Road I made this panorama with a sawmill in Wharfdale Road. Beyond that road is a train on the DLR line, and over the top of this you can see the Pura Foods factory on the site where London City Island now is.
A few yards further east on East India Dock Road gave this view of Bow Creek, curving 180 degrees around Pura Foods. Locals were pleased to see this London City Island factory go as you could smell it across much of Canning Town.
And a similar view but including a DLR train.
A few yards away I used a crane to frame the image of Pura Foods on its not quite island site. At right of the picture is a bridge across the DLR leading to a riverside walk to Canning Town Station. Although I managed to walk across Reuben’s Bridge several times, it has been mainly locked for the last thirty years, despite being a useful short cut to the riverside station entrance.
Apparently it was closed because people were throwing stones from it onto the DLR, and more recently in 2019 a survey determined that it is non-compliant with current Health & Safety Legislation, Building Regulations, British Standards and associated supplementary guidance.
The initial plans were for the riverside walkway to lead all the way to Trinity Buoy Wharf at the mouth of Bow Creek – and a competition was held and awarded for a new footbridge to enable this – but then the plans were dropped. Until a new bridge was built for London City Island the riverside entrance to Canning Town station only led to two dead ends.
More to come.
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NHS campaigners came to Downing Street on Friday 23rd December 2016, the day that contracts were signed for 44 areas covering the whole of England to implement the government’s ‘Sustainability and Transformation Plans’ (STP).
Including many health professionals the campaigners saw these plans as the last nail in the coffin of the NHS, effectively handing over the NHS to private companies without any public engagement of consultation, ending a public service whose vision which has long been the envy of the world, signing the NHS over for private profit.
A series of speeches was interrupted every 15 minutes by three long and loud ‘howls of protest‘, timed to coincide with three social media ‘Thunderclaps’ across Facebook, Twitter & Tumblr by several hundreds unable to be there in person.
Among speakers were Paula Peters of DPAC, Ealing Councillor Aysha Raza, trainee nurse Anthony Johnson of the Bursary or Bust campaign, trainee mental health nurse Gina, a patient and campaigner and retired Paediatrician Tony O’Sullivan, Co-chair of Keep Our NHS Public.
At the end of the rally, a small group of those present, led by DPAC and a banner listing of few of those who had died because of government cuts marched down Whitehall holding up traffic for a final howl outside Parliament and a speech there by Paula Peters.
As they came to the end of Parliament Street police came to harass them, threatening them with arrest if they did not get onto the pavement. Like many such police interventions this only prolonged the traffic holdup as the protesters were about to cross the road to the wide pavement outside Parliament but were delayed by police arguing with them.
Sustainability and transformation plans were fortunately short-lived and soon morphed into ‘sustainability and transformation partnerships‘ which by 2018 were becoming known as ‘integrated care systems‘, and then were expected to evolve into ‘accountable care systems‘. It all reflected an increasing half-baked emphasis on managers and management changes which damaged the ability of the NHS to actually treat patients.
Many feel that government policies – under both Tories and Labour – have been designed to wreck the NHS so it can be replaced by an insurance-based system – with great profits for the mainly US-based healthcare companies who make large financial contributions to leading politicians and in which many also have a direct financial interest.
More pictures at Howls of protest for death of the NHS.
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Scrooge Debenhams & Bikelife: Striking cleaners in the Independent Workers Union – CAIWU – protest outside Debenhams in Oxford Street with a noisy rally on Saturday 22nd December 2018, one of the biggest shopping days of the year. While I was there a large group of boys and young men on bikes rode past, some pulling wheelies.
Oxford St
The workers who clean the Debenhams store were not employed by them but are outsourced, working forInterserve, a company who have the cleaning contract with Debenhams.
Interserve are lousy employers, treating the cleaners badly and paying the minimum legal wage and conditions, interested only in making as much as they can for their owners or shareholders. The minimum wage isn’t enough to live on in London and reputable employers pay workers at least the London Living Wage – an amount determined every year and roughly 30% above the legal minimum.
The workers belong to the Cleaners & Allied Independent Workers Union, CAIWU, but Interserve refuses to recognise the union or to have any talks with them about their claim for the London Living Wage. CAIWU is one of several small grassroots trade unions which has been very successful in getting better pay and condition for low paid workers.
Reputable companies such as Debenhams would be ashamed to pay their workers so little or treat them so badly and by using companies like Interserve they claim they have no responibilty for the people who work inside their shops to keep them clean.
Many of the shoppers walking by took leaflets and showed support for the cleaners and were surprised that Debenhams could legally evade their responsibilities to the workers in this way.
The cleaners had begun their picket in the early morning and were still protesting when I had to leave.
Oxford St
While I was outside Debenhams a group of several hundred mainly boys and young men rode past on bicycles, some balancing just on the rear wheel of their bikes. They were obviously having fun but it looked rather dangerous as they wove in and out of traffic.
I had heard there was going to be some sort of bike ride in London that day, but could not find any of the details in advance. And when it did arrive it came as a surprise and I didn’t have time to think about my camera settings but took the pictures at the same ISO and shutter speed as I had been using for the protest on the pavement – which meant many of my pictures were blurred and unusable.
I didn’t have time to choose a different position either, though I think the yellow ‘bananas’ bus was quite appropriate.
Later I found that these ‘UK Bike Life Wheelie Rides’ begin somewhere south of the river perhaps at Tower Bridge, Druid St or Leake St, around lunchtime. They have fun swarming around the city, showing off with wheelies, stopping traffic, riding on pavements as well as roads, ignoring traffic lights, forcing drivers to stop and generally behaving badly on bikes. Several missed me by inches as they sped past while I was taking pictures.
Some certainly displayed an impressive degree of skill, but it still seemed dangerous both to themselves and to other road users and pedestrians – and an activity that gives cycling a bad name.
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