London is not for sale was the first protest I’d attended organised by the Radical Housing Network, and London certainly needs some radical new thinking on housing, or at least a complete change in the direction so far as housing policy is concerned. The way to solve its housing problem is actually pretty simple to state, and, given a complete change in the mind of government would not be impossible to acheive. Build more social housing and make it available at sensible rents – rather less than the currently largely unaffordable ‘affordable’ rents.
Unfortunately such a change in mind seems unlikely. About as likely as the Green Party coming to power. Both major parties want to sell off London, whether it is the national parties at Westminster or the local parties in boroughs such as Southwark and Newham. The protest took place a few days before London Mayor Boris Johnson was to fly off to the MILIM world property market festival in Cannes, France to try and sell off more London property to foreign investors and make our housing situation worse. There’s money in it.
The Radical Housing Network was also launching its two case studies, one of which particularly interested me as it was on one of London’s great scandals that I’ve previously written about, the “murky tale of developer Lend Lease’s relationship with Southwark, which gave birth to one of the most appalling instances of community displacement, coupled with financial mismanagement and barefaced lies.” The other, about the South Kilburn estate
in Brent linked to another housing story I’ve covered, that of the Counihan family, now fortunately resettled a little further from the centre of London.
Photographically the main problem was that I’d forgotten to pack a helicopter. Difficult to get one into my camera bag, though I suppose a drone might be possible. As you may be able to guess from the image above, one of the organisers is trying to set out the modified estate agent signs on the paving outside City Hall in the shape of a house -or rather in it’s frontal elevation. So it would look like a picture of a house drawn rather badly by a child if seen from directly above – and so my need for a helicopter.
This was about the best I could manage – and you can see that as well as a rather tall door it has 3 windows and a chimney. This was taken with the 16mm fisheye held as high as I could reach – I didn’t have my monopod with me which would have given just a little more height. It wasn’t easy to get this, mainly because every time the house was clear of people another photographer – either amateur or professional – would walk on top of it.
The sun was inside the frame at top left when I took the picture and so there was chance of using a lens hood or a hand as a flag. I had to add some exposure to stop the image being underexposed. Using the Fisheye-Hemi plug-in has moved the sun just over the edge, but that area still needed quite a bit of burning in. It’s surprising – that the image was still virtually flare-free (I think I have done a tiny bit of retouching) but there were some annoying surface reflections from the boards at the right of the picture which I’ve attended to a little. I’ve also cropped the image a little to tidy it up.
I tried using Photoshop’s Adaptive Wide-Angle filter (I’d just upgraded to Photoshop CC from Photoshop 7) and the results were interesting but I couldn’t get anything better. You can twist your image in all sorts of ways, but it’s very easy to make a mess of things by trying to correct too much. The image above ws the best I could manage without obvious faults. By forcing the bottom edge to a straight line it gives a better idea of the ‘house’. I’ve made the image as large as possible, resulting in it being a little wider than the normal 1.5:1 format.
It would have been better to stand further back, but clearing enough people and photographers to do so and make it possible to get everything in frame with the 16-35mm just wasn’t possible.
I found another problem when updating My London Diary, which is that somehow I’ve managed to alter either the way I export files from Lightroom or how Explorer sorts them so that they no longer sort in correct order in Explorer. Usually I put images on the web site in more or less the order I took them, but somehow it didn’t happen for this story.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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