At lunchtime on Jan 28th I was with the cleaners, but it was certainly very dirty weather. Bouts of driving rain and gusts that blew umbrellas inside out if not out of your hands. I was in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a large open area now a public park, in the centre of London. Not as well known as some others, but it is the largest public square in central London, and was first laid out around 1630, and many of the buildings around date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Dickins based his ‘Bleak House‘ on one of them, and the east side is formed by Lincoln’s Inn itself. For a long time filled with lawyers, the square is now being increasingly colonised by the London School of Economics, better known as the LSE. In the Thatcher era, when we first saw large numbers of people living on the streets in England, Lincoln’s Inn Fields became home to many of them, until in 1992 a tall fence was put around the grassed area of the square with gates that are locked at night to keep out the rough sleepers.
The Royal College of Surgeons of England moved here (as The Company of Surgeons) in 1797, though they built a new building in 1833 with a splendid portico, which still faces onto the square; most of the rest of the building was rebuilt after it was destroyed by a German incendiary bomb in 1941.
I was here because although the RCSE is “committed to enabling surgeons to achieve and maintain the highest standards of surgical practice and patient care” (according to its mission statement) it isn’t yet committed to paying its cleaners enough to live on. Unison was here to protest for the London Living Wage, contractual sick pay and holidays for the people who clean the building, as well as for them to be treated with dignity and respect by their managers. Like many companies and organisations, the RCSE would almost certainly be ashamed of treating any of its own employees so shabbily, so they pay another company, Ocean, to do their dirty work for them.
Cleaners at the RCSE belong to Unison, and the protest was mainly by cleaners and supporters from other Unison branches, particularly in the University of London, including a number I’ve met and photographed before in Living Wage and ‘3 Cosas’ campaigns.
Although I always carry a small folding umbrella in my camera bag (weather in the UK is often changeable) I hate to use it while actually taking pictures. But soon after the protest started the rain came down so hard there was no real choice.
It’s hard to hold both an umbrella and a camera to photograph in a high wind, and it was tiring on my left wrist. I had to stop quite a few times to turn the umbrella around after it had blown inside out to get the wind to blow it back again, and I didn’t stay very dry underneath it, but without it I would have got soaked, and there was nowhere nearby to shelter. A few images were ruined by drops of rain on the lens filter, though yet another thing in my left had was my microfibre cloth to keep wiping the lens clear with.
At times too, the gusts pushed the umbrella down and into my field of view. But I kept on taking pictures, and there were some compensations. The union flags held by some of the protesters blew well in the strong wind, and otherwise rather dreary areas of pavement look much better when wet, and sometimes have good reflections. And the rain also brought out the umbrellas in Unison (and other) colours.
But I was pleased when I had to leave, shortly before the scheduled end of the protest, as I was cold and wet, and it was good to get to some more sheltered places away from that large fairly open square. And as I did so the sun came out.
I met some of the same cleaners (and Unison reps and organiser) the following lunchtime at SOAS, where campaigns over the years supported by students and SOAS staff have resulted in some successes, but the cleaners still want parity of treatment with staff directly employed by the University. They say ‘One Workplace, One Workforce’. Outsourcing adds complexity and extra layers of management and can only cut costs by cutting the pay and conditions of workers. Time to get rid of it.
SOAS Cleaners demand Dignity & Respect
Cleaners protest at Royal College of Surgeons
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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