Friday was a beautiful day in London, sun and nice clouds in the sky, but with quite a breeze so it didn’t get hot. I got on my bike around 9 o’clock to cycle to Sipson to meet the Climate Rush who were camping on the Airplot there, for a “photo opportunity” at the start of their month long tour around the South West – which will take them around 250 miles on foot and horse and cart to Totnes, with many stops on the way to educate and campaign through the country. The Rushers in their white suffragette-style long dresses and red sashes were to take a trip to the perimeter fence of London’s main airport along with local residents from NoTRAG, the action group opposed to expansion of Heathrow – and in particular a third runway that would mean demolishing their homes.
As expected, there were several other photographers there, mainly from agencies and a couple people making videos, which is rather more than most small demonstrations attract. The rushers – and Tamsin Omond in particular – have gained a little of the only thing most of the media are interested in now, celebrity. Although I tend to feel it’s unhealthy to pander to the press like this, it is effective, and certainly I find them more interesting to photograph than many demonstrators. It also helps that they want to be photographed – quite a change after some (fortunately not all) Climate Campers.
Sipson is pretty rural, and the Airplot, as well as its own small allotment – raised beds of vegetables – has fruit trees around its edge, the remains of an orchard. Much of the site for Heathrow – the old Middlesex village of Heath Row – was covered with orchards, and the rest with fields of crops. Before the airport it had been one of the most productive agricultural areas of the country since cultivation began here, perhaps 5000 years ago. Add some horse, a couple of wagons, a wood fire with a kettle hanging from a hook above it, some rather ancient looking tents and young women in long white dresses and you have a scene that could come from the novels of Thomas Hardy.
‘Deeds not Words’ and ‘No Third Runway ‘are clear but…
It wasn’t a huge group that set off down Sipson Road for the mile or so to Heathrow, and at first the pictures of the ‘caravan’ on its way were perhaps a little disappointing. What made the difference for me was the light once it turned west along the northern perimeter fence (by which time some helpful police were holding traffic back.)
My behaviour, moving in close to the protesters and using a fairly wide lens with flash to balance the powerful back-lighting didn’t endear me to the couple of agency photographers. Their fixed idea was to stand on the other side of the road with a long lens and try to get pictures with aircraft visible in the background. But we were really at the wrong place in the airport for that to work, and it was in any case a cliché that didn’t appeal to me.
If you can cope with the lighting, it does give the pictures rather more interest. I don’t think I could have done this on film, certainly transparency wouldn’t have held the range, and although colour neg might theoretically handle a longer scale than digital, I wouldn’t like to try it in practise. On digital it’s pretty easy. I shot RAW of course, and this was taken at the metered setting with no correction, using aperture priority (ISO 400, 1/800 f9.) The Nikon D800 did its usual grand job at -2/3 stop to add a little to the closer figures. In Lightroom, parts of the sky needed considerable burning in and subduing of extreme highlights, and the figures also needed a little burning or dodging – it wasn’t the kind of picture I could have sat down and wired off immediately.
The agency guys had gone as soon as the procession left Heathrow, but I went back with the procession. You may not think that long white dresses are made for climbing trees.
The scrumping suffragettes were just a little disappointed, as these apples turned out to be cookers, though I’m sure they made some fine stewed apple for pudding later.
Many more pictures from the morning with the Climate Rush on My London Diary, as well as more about the Climate Rush on the Run tour.
