The pavement outside One Hyde Park, luxury flats on the south edge of Hyde Park, a stone’s throw from Harrods at the busy junction of Knightsbridge and the Brompton Road. Th 86 flats here are the most expensive in London, selling for up to £68 million pounds. They are a potent symbol of growing inequality in a city with a desperate shortage of truly affordable housing. Many of the flats here are owned simply as investments by overseas companies and seldom if ever occupied. In the 86 flats, there are apparently only 8 residents paying council tax.
The pavement here looks wide, but that is misleading. The protesters are on a narrow strip next to the road because most of the paved area is private land, part of One Hyde Park, and police and security moved them off of this. The roadway is also misleadingly empty, as I took the picture when the traffic lights just out of frame on the left were at red. Several times while I was taking pictures police moved me off the roadway “for my safety” though I was being very careful not to put myself at risk from the traffic, stepping back into the gutter or on to the pavement every time the lights changed.
So physically there were some problems in taking pictures, and photographers had to mainly work inside the crowd, which was soon a little more dense than when I took this picture around the start of the protest. Of course I’m happy to work in close and use a wide-angle, but sometimes there just wasn’t enough room to move.
I managed to move into a good position when the speeches started, but had very limited freedom to move as there were people with large video cameras on either side of me. When you are in a good place in crowded situations with other photographers there is a danger of staying too long there, because you know if you move away you are unlikely to be able to get back in. So in Axe the Bedroom Tax at One Hyde Park you can see I took a number of images of Paula Peters of DPAC speaking, trying to make them all different. People with placards were moving around a little behind her which helped. My favourite among the eight on the web site is the one where I’ve cropped her face at the right of the image:
which I think breaks most of the ‘rules of composition’ that some people like to talk about. While she was speaking I was also taking pictures of others in the crowd, but my view was rather limited by the two large cameras each side of me.
I also rather liked the image above of Rev Paul Nicolson, a retired Anglican Vicar ( they used his church as Dibley) with that central hand tightly clutching the microphone and the eyes perhaps looking up to the heavens for inspiration, taken with the lens at 98mm focal length (147mm equiv.)
Unusually there are two images on the web pages not in the normal 35mm 1.5:1 format. Somehow I could fit neither of them into it.
______________________________________________________
My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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.
To order prints or reproduce images
________________________________________________________