It’s always nice to be invited to a party, and even better when its for what seems to be a very good cause, supporting the young women in East Thames’s Focus E15 Foyer who are under threat of eviction after Newham Council cut their support.
Social housing is very much under threat at the moment, and although much of this is down to the policies of successive governments since Thatcher determined to get rid of it with policies including the right to buy, in London it seems to be some Labour controlled councils who are most at fault.
I’ve written before about Southwark’s disgraceful behaviour over the Heygate estate at the Elephant and Castle, where their behaviour has been so blatantly disgraceful that they are currently fighting in a tribunal to keep the details secret over a scheme that has sold off property on the cheap to developers, forcing around 1,200 families from their homes and will produce a development with very few social rented properties. See my Southwark’s Shame and Walking the Rip-Off – Heygate & Aylesbury for more on this.
And in LB Newham there is the saga of the Carpenters Estate close to the centre of Stratford, where the council has been ‘decanting’ tenants for some years, leaving decent homes on a well regarded estate boarded up and empty for years – sending in their workmen to smash them up to prevent squatting. You can see more about this in my Around the Olympics, where I write about the problems I faced photographing in the area. Their scheme to sell of the area to University College appears to have fallen through, but doubtless they are now trying to get some other development with little or no social housing.
The young women and their children from the Focus Foyer have been shabbily treated by Newham Council. At first some were offered re-housing in distant parts of the country, away from friends and jobs and support systems, and now, after putting up a fight, the council wants to disperse them to private rented accommodation in different areas of London.
This is a council in an area with large numbers of properties currently being developed – particularly post the Olympics – by the East Thames Housing Association, and being made available at commercial rents, unaffordable to those who rely on housing benefits. Housing Associations aren’t being allowed to do what they were set up to do, Housing benefit has become a huge subsidy to private landlords and people like these young mothers are being forced to live in sub-standard properties with no real security of tenure.
We need much more social housing, Affordable should mean genuinely affordable for those on low or even minimum wages (and, if necessary, benefits.) Councils, especially Labour councils like Newham should be striving to provide housing in Newham, not trying to export its poorer residents to other areas.
We met on a street corner a few yards from the East Thames offices near the centre of Stratford. The details of the protest had not been released, and I had expected us to walk to some empty property nearby for the promised childrens’ party, but instead it took place in the show flat – just two rooms – built inside the foyer of the housing association.
When we walked into the offices, a young couple was being shown the show flat – it represents the properties being offered to those who can afford them in the Olympic village, and the mothers lined up outside for the local press photographer who had come along to take a picture.
Then when the couple came out, the mothers went in and I went with them. It was very crowded in the kitchen with perhaps around 20 people, and even with the wide end of the 16-35mm was difficult to get sufficient distance to photograph what was happening. Fortunately I’d got the 16mm frame-filling fisheye in my camera bag, and most of the pictures were taken with this. Although it has the same focal length as the wide end of the rectilinear zoom it takes in a much wider angle of view.
However it does compress objects and people towards the edges of the frame and renders any straight lines not through the centre of the image as curves. Photographing people, those curved lines are seldom too important, but the compression is. Software such as the Fisheye Hemi plugin convert the image to a more natural look, removing the compression and rendering all upright straight lines as straight – giving a similar image to a camera with a swinging lens. It does so at the cost of losing some of the image in the corners of the picture. When looking through the camera viewfinder you need to allow for this effect, and you can do so to some extent by using two eyes, one at the viewfinder and the other viewing the subject directly.
The mid-points of the two sides will become the midpoints of the two edges of the converted picture, and similarly to midpoints of the top and bottom edge are also the limits of the converted image. But anything in the four corners of the image will be lost.
I felt a little sympathy for the man from East Thames who came in to talk to the mothers and their supporters. His hands which he was waving around rather a lot were really rather tied by Newham Council. He was probably sincere in saying that he wished he could rehouse the mothers as they wanted and need, and certainly not responsible for the policy that prevented him from doing so.
It really was very crowded in their, rather more than it looks in the pictures, and it was very difficult to move around as you really need to to get into the best position to take photographs. There were others filming on their phones and a videographer working, and I was trying hard not to get in the way of others. There were really few opportunities too to show the posters that told the purpose of the event.
Later the party really got under way in the living room next door, which was a little less crowded, though there were still a lot of people in a fairly small room. But the main problem was really one of lighting. The show flat was in the window of the offices, with direct sun streaming in and lighting up parts of the room, giving a pretty extreme difference in lighting between the areas in sun and those in shade. With the 16mm fisheye it is hardly possible to use fill flash (and even with the 16mm rectilinear lens very hard to get it anything like even) so I was working without fill. It was hard to avoid burnt out highlights, and the images needed extensive burning of the sunlit areas and dodging of those in shadows to get results like the above picture.
Timing is also rather tricky when people are popping party poppers and I was pleased to get so many strands caught in the sunlight streaming into the room in this image.
You can see more pictures from the party in Focus E5 Mothers Party Against Eviction.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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