Sometimes you seem to wait an awfully long time for a demonstration and then two come along at once, and it happened again last Saturday. The National Pensioners Convention had organised a march to defend the welfare state, and lots of trade unionists were joining them, meeting up at noon to start marching at 1pm to Trafalgar Square for a long rally with along list of speakers. And at that same time, 1pm, the UK Tar Sands Network, Rising Tide and the Camp for Climate Action were meeting up at Oxford Circus to travel to an undisclosed destination for an action as a part of a ‘BP Fortnight of Shame leading up to their AGM on 15 April.
I thought about it and decided to make a quick visit to the Welfare State March and leave around when it was starting, close to Temple Station. A quick trip on the underground would then get me to Oxford Circus for the Tar Sands action, and if that didn’t look promising I could jump back on the tube and meet the pensioners back at Trafalgar Square. For once the two Underground lines I needed were both working at the weekend, something of a miracle in recent weeks, so it was possible.
More about and pictures from the Defend the Welfare State March
I’d thought there would be a lot of photographers at the Welfare State event, not least because of the union support. Unions often actually commission photographers, but otherwise they may buy pictures from freelances for use in union magazines and they pay union rates. But also it was a large national event and that too might increase the chances of sale. The downside of course is that with more photographers there, the chance that they will use your picture rather than someone else’s decrease, and experience tells me that having a better picture is seldom a great deal of help.
I prefer to photograph events where there are fewer photographers even though this often means they are in some way less “newsworthy” partly because I think my pictures are more important simply because there are few others, and also because I won’t get in the way of other photographers and they won’t get in my way. Those of us who like to get close to the subject and work with wide-angle lenses are not always popular with the guys who like to stand further away with something longer.
As I expected there were relatively few people around when I got to the Oxford Circus rendezvous, and fairly few photographers among them. Our destination turned out to be Shepherds Bush, just a little further from the centre of London than I’d hoped, and by the time I’d finished taking pictures there it seemed hardly worth going back to Trafalgar Square.
There weren’t any speakers to photograph at Shepherd’s Bush, but there was an occupied garage, dancing and a mermaid, so I think it was almost certainly more fun.
More pictures and more about BP’s plans to take part in “the dirtiest and most desperate attempt yet to profit from – and prolong – humanity’s crippling addiction to oil” in My London Diary.
