Mail transphobic hate


People came to the Daily Mail to protest against papers in the Mail group, including the Metro, Daily Mail and others publishing articles demonising trans people, particularly trans women, and in particular the publication of an advertising campaign by campaigning group ‘Fair Play for Women’, which they see as a hate group.

A small group of mainly older feminists have come out violently against the right of trans women to be considered as women; they have been labelled as ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminists’ and have published articles, picketed and protested at events against the inclusion of trans women as women, and of the right of trans women to identify themselves as women.

Many other feminists and those in sympathy with the feminist movement view them as extremists who are denying trans people their human and civil rights. They accuse the ‘TERFs’ of hate speech, while the anti-trans group say that the term TERF is itself hate speech.

Having several trans friends, I find the prejudice against them and the denial of thir problems and rights hard to understand and impossible to tolerate.  As the poster says, ‘Some People Are Trans. Get Over It‘. And while I might not share the language of the other poster below, I rather endorse its sentiment.

As the posters at this protest illustrate, feelings over the issue run high, and there have been some violent clashes between the two groups, disrupting some events.

Photographing the setting off of flares by the protesters as usual presented some propblems. At first I was too close to the protesters, at the right of the picture above, in the direction the coloured smoke was blowing. Everything went blue and it was had to see anything. I quickly rushed around and moved slightly further away from the protesters to take the picture above, and several others, moving in slightly closer to concentrate on particular women.

Smoke flares soon burn out, and I didn’t quite manage to do all I wanted to, but I was fairly pleased with a couple of the images.

 

Mail group end your transphobic hate

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : 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

________________________________________________________

Stratford to Old Ford

My walk from Stratford to Old Ford was not planned but rather on the spur of the moment, realising that I had several hours to fill between photographing BEIS refuse International Rescue help at lunchtime in Westminster and going on to my next  event outside the Daily Mail, and that the weather was fine, with sun and a clear blue sky. I set of knowing which way I would start but with no particular destination in mind.

I’ve been interested in the Lower Lea Valley since I first walked there in around 1980, that led to my web site ‘The River Lea’ and later the book ‘Before the Olympics’ which I think first came out in 2011 and is still available.

At first I was very much attracted  by its mixture of industry and post-industrial wilderness, particularly around the Bow Back Rivers between Stratford and Hackney, the very area that later became the Olympic site, and much of which is now a huge park. On earlier walks I’ve found this empty and alienating, but on this walk I was exploring one of the wilder areas, which was a welcome relief after walking through the urban hell of Westfield.

Coming out from these wetlands you still have to cross the arid desert that occupies much of the new park, before crossing the Lea Navigation into Hackney Wick, which is a far more lively place.

Tidied up for the Olympics, with much of the more vibrant graffiti removed, Hackney Wick is now in a rather curious balance between artistic ferment, peak hipster and gentrification.

As you can see from the full set of pictures and text on My London Diary, I wandered rather, and found myself having to rush to get to my next event.

You can see more pictures and text at Olympic Park walk.

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : 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

________________________________________________________

Greenwich Walk

Every few months I go out with a few photographer friends for a few drinks and a meal, and sometimes we take a few pictures too, though it is really more of a social event. But in October our walk was rather different, partly because it was a prelude to attending a book launch by another of our group of friends, Mike Seaborne, taking place that evening in the Isle of Dogs.

I’ve a long relationship with the riverside path at Greenwich, one of my favourite walks over the years, beginning back around 1980 when the area was highly industrial. In recent years there have been closures of parts of the path where riverside flats were being built, but the last part re-opened just a few weeks before we walked it, and with this in mind I proposed we meet at North Greenwich station and walk into Greenwich.

Mostly I was interested in taking panoramic images and all of those shown here have a horizontal angle of view of over 140 degrees and a vertical field of view of just over 90 degrees and are in the normal 35mm 1.5:1 aspect ratio. Occasionally (usually by accident) I take them in 16:9 widescreen ratio which my Nikon D810 defaults to if you go into Live View in movie mode even if you are taking still images. Often I crop them to more panoramic format, typically 1.9:1, which is equivalent to using a rising or falling front on the camera. For landscape images it is generally vital to keep the camera level to avoid a curved horizon, and the D810 can display both up-down and left-right level indicators.

Lightroom by default corrects fisheye images to rectilinear perspective if you use the lens profile, which is frankly nonsensical. Fortunately it is possible to edit the profile to give no correction. In converting to rectilinear it throws away most of the image and gives you a fairly normal wide-angle view. Rectilinear perspective can’t really handle angles of view greater than around 90 degrees as I found using a 12-24mm lens. For most subject matter anything shorter than 16mm (97 degrees horizontal) was hardly usable, and I was very seldom happy with pictures I took at 12mm (113 degrees.) The 147 degrees of these images is simply out of range.

Very occasionally I’ll take a picture with this 16mm lens (or its 10.5mm DX equivalent) which looks fine exactly as taken, but for most scenes I’m thinking as I take it of a rectangle not quite as it appears in the frame, but defined by the centre of each of the four sides of the frame, knowing that I will lose the four corner areas. This is I think a ‘cylindrical’ perspective, exactly like I made for around fifteen years with a succession of ‘swing-lens’ cameras, where the lens rotates around the centre of a part circle of curved film, typically giving images with around a 130 degree angle of view.

There are quite a few software programmes that can perform this conversion, including both freeware and hugely expensive panoramic imaging software (which can of course also combine a number of images.) When I wrote for money on the web I was able to test a wide range of these, money no object as they came free (though sometimes time-limited.) They all did simple jobs like this well.

I’ve ended up using Fisheye-Hemi, now sold by Imadio simply because of its convenience as a Photoshop plugin (it also works with other software which can use Photoshop plugins.) Recently I’ve upgraded to the latest version which is a Lightroom plugin, even more convenient for my workflow. I now don’t get offered free software, but this isn’t hugely expensive, though a weak pound doesn’t help.

You can see these pictures (a little larger) and more – both panoramic and normal rectilinear – on My London Diary at Greenwich Walk.

Our walk ended at the Pelton Arms which has a good range of real ales and is less of a tourist attraction than the riverside pubs. If you are readling this on the day it is posted, unless the weather is really foul, I’ll be out and walking off a little of that extra Christmas food today.
______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : 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

________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : 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

________________________________________________________

Anarchists & Underdogs

I read a post a week or two ago, pointed out to me by an anarchist friend, on the British Culture Archive web site, posted there last March, Anarchists & Underdogs | Images of Social & Political Graffiti in the UK and as well as sharing the link with you, thought there were also a few images I took in the 1980s of similar material.

It was one thing thinking that, but since I had no real idea of when I might have taken the pictures they were not that easy to track down. I’ve never really concentrated on taking pictures of graffiti, though in more recent times I have photographed some of the more colourful images on walls in Leake St underneath Waterloo Station, a route a sometimes detour through when I’ve just missed a train home and have 22 minutes to wait for the next, in Shoreditch, London’s graffiti capital, and elsewhere, not forgetting Hull’s great Bankside Gallery. But these are more murals than graffiti, and the earlier examples, both in the BCA article and here are simple text statements, usually of a political nature.

‘George Davis is innocent, OK’ appeared on walls across London, and is one I’ve written about before, though I can’t remember where. It was so common it hardly seemed worth using film on, unless there was a little more to it. Of course he was probably innocent of this one particular charge but otherwise a prime villain. Police had deliberately held back evidence that would have led to his acquital and the identification evidence was unsound and the huge campaign over his sentence led to early release in 1976 although the conviction was only finally quashed in 2011.

Many of us knew that such things happen – and I was later openly threatened with being “fitted up” by a police office back in the 1990s – but the George Davis case brought it out into the open in a way that hadn’t happened before. But what made me photograph this particular instance was the anti-nuclear figure with a CND symbol  next to it and the location. I didn’t even feel it necessary to include all of the G.

Housing was an issue back in the 1980s as it is now, with London Councils being accused of racism and social cleansing. Of course things have changed. Then the councils were building council housing – if not always doing so in a way that really met local needs, and clearing largely privately owned slums, often in very poor condition, though some were structually sound and could better have been refurbished. Now they are working with property developers to demolish council estates and build properties almost entirely beyound the means of the council tenants who are being displaced by the new developments and mainly for private sale at market prices, under the banner of ‘regeneration’. Tower Hamlets, traditionally Labour, came under Liberal/SDP control days before I took this picture by a majority of twoin a low (35%) turnout.

Joe Pearce was, together with Nick Griffin, one of the leading members of the Nazi National Front; together they took over the party in 1983, and reorganised it from a racist political movement into a racist gang based on young poor working class urban youth, particularly skinheads. Pearce had set up the NF paper ‘Bulldog‘ in 1977 when he was only 16 and in 1980 became editor of ‘Nationalism Today‘. He twice served prison sentences for offences in his wiriting under the 1976 Race Relations Act, in 1982 and 1985–1986. In 1989 he was conveted from Protestantism and membership of the Orange Order to become a Roman Catholicism and, according to Wikipedia, “now repudiates his former views, saying that his racism stemmed from hatred, and that his conversion has completely changed his outlook.”

I took all of these pictures in London’s East End in May 1986.
______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : 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

________________________________________________________

Christmas Greetings

Wishing you all a happy Christmas

And this is the picture on the Christmas card I physically gave to just a few of my close friends. It looks a little better on-line as I was having printer problems when I had to produce it.

I’m not actually writing this on Christmas Day, as I’ll be too busy, but I’ll schedule this to be published. It’s one of the few days in the year I usually go to church – for years Sunday was always a day for taking photographs, and it still is at times. But we’ll have something of a family day and I’ll be helping getting dinner ready for it and then relaxing afterwards.

The advantage of an online greeting is that you can see a few more of the pictures I took when I chanced to come across this year’s Santacon in London.

Of course I knew that Santacon was taking place, but hadn’t bothered to find the places and times, and just happened to walk down one of the right streets at the right time, intending to get on a bus on my journey home.

There were elves as well as Santas, and the occasional reindeer.

and music and dancing. We do the music at home at Christmas, but I don’t think our rooms are large enough for much dancing.

Although I don’t much like using flash it adds something to the interaction with people in pictures like this, though it also needs quite a lot of work – burning and dodging – to even out the light, particularly when scenes includ people very clost and at a distance from the flash.

I stayed working with the santas as they made their way from High Holborn down to Trafalgar Square, with rather a lot of stops for dancing and crowding around cars and other harmless fun.  You can see many more pictures on My London Diary at London flooded with Santas.

Again I’ll wish you all Happy Christmas!

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : 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

________________________________________________________

No More Grenfells

I’ve been fortunate always to have had a roof over my head, though it hasn’t always been a comfortable one. A few of the places I lived in as a student were beyond grotty and  one I had to leave after a week it was so desparate. The bed bugs were the final straw.

The room I moved into certainly wasn’t palatial, but it was at least clean and the walls weren’t running with damp. The rent was a little more, but it was reasonably warm and safe, in a house where the owner, my landlord lived.

I’ve lived in some cold places. Back in 1963 in a viciously cold winter there was a month or two where the bathroom never got above freezing and I never had a bath, and in Leicester the ice was thick inside the windows and I gave up shaving – and never started again.

In Manchester, where we lived on the top floor of a small terraced house, there were slotmeters on the landing for gas and electricity, and the landlord came and emptied them. We were paying three or four times the going rate. We went out and bought a paraffin heater. It was smelly but got our room warm – and the condensation from it brought the wall-paper off the wall.

Everything changed when I got a job in a new town – and a large new flat at council rent with a hot-air heating system run on off-peak electricity, and we lived in comfort for several years before buying a house of our own. We wanted to move and it wasn’t possible to remain in social housing.

We moved into a small victorian semi which was cold and draughty and which had hardly been modernised since it was built, other than having the gas lighting replaced by electricity – though some of the piping was still there.

We were fortunate that we could afford to replace the old draughty sash windows with double glazing. I spent hours fitting draught-proofing, putting insulation in the loft and on the inside of front and rear external walls behind plasterboard fixed to battens. The exterior walls were just a single brick thick – which didn’t stop people trying to sell me cavity wall insulation, though there was no cavity. We had gas fires put in rather than central heating as it was more energy efficient but it remained a rather cold house, though much better now since we had external insulation on the gable end a few years ago.

We were fortunate that we owned the property (though it took 20 years to pay off the mortgage) and could make it warmer – and that we could afford to do so – with the help of government grants to meet part of the costs for a new roof and, many years later, external insulation. And that we had enough income never to have to make the choice between turning on a fire and eating. When we were in private rentings things were much tougher.

I spent a year in a tower block too, on the 10th floor about half-way up. But fortunately it wasn’t covered in highly flammable material and didn’t catch fire. The worst that happened was broken down lifts. But there are still many blocks with the same dangerous cladding that was used at Grenfell, and probably also applied with much the same disregard for proper support and breaks; not really accidents but tragic fires waiting to happen.

We need new laws – like that the Conservatives – many of them landlords – voted down to ensure that properties are safe to live in. And for governemnt to keep the promises it made just after Grenfell. To bring in proper and regular fire safety checks, to ensure that building regulations are adhered to – and toughened where neceessary. To remove flammable cladding from all tall buildings, to reverse cuts in firefighters and fire appliances and so on.  To listen to the complaints of tenants and take action, and to end evictions of those who complain or ask for repairs of private rented properties. And of course to build much more council housing and end the demolition of existing council estates.

In my twenties I was a housing activist, part of the Moss Side Housing Action Group, trying hard to persuade the city council to build homes that people wanted and would last. We wanted safe, decent housing – and they built instant slums, now largely replaced. People deserve good  housing – and the cheapest way to provide it is council housing.  Rents are much lower not as many think because of subsidies, but because it is more cost-efficient and most council estates have more than paid for their costs in a reasonable time-scale.

I’ve not written anything here about the actual protest, but you can read that in the text and captions on My London Diary.

No More Grenfells – Make Tower Blocks Safe

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : 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

________________________________________________________

Love our colleges

Further Education has often been discribed as the ‘Cinderella of Education’, and it is still sitting in the dirty fireplace, with no sign of a fairy godmother, ball or glass slipper. It remains terribly unfunded compared both with schools and with the more glamorous ‘Higher Education’. As well as colleges being strapped for cash, students have also suffered, particularly with the withdrawal of maintenance grants in England.

The march was a part of the ‘Love Our Colleges’ campaign week of action and was followed by a rally which I didn’t photograph, as well as a lobby of Parliament.

FE colleges have long been a vital part of our education system, and many were founded because of local needs and have very strong community links. Years ago many were a matter of fierce local pride. Some of these gradually took on more and more higher education courses and have transitioned to become universities, but FE remains vital for training at lower levels and in particular for 16-19 year olds. As well as providing the kind of academic courses available in school sixth forms they also offer a wide range of more techinical and vocational courses.

As the campaign states:

“Further education colleges are an essential part of England’s education system. Whether it’s through top-class technical education, basic skills or lifelong learning, colleges help people of all ages and backgrounds to make the most of their talents and ambitions. Rooted in local communities, they are crucial in driving social mobility and providing the skills to boost local and regional economies.”

The future of FE colleges is under threat as funding has been cut by 30% since 2009, meaning young students get fewer hours of teaching support and a huge reduction in learning opportunites for adults. The value of staff pay has falling by mnore than a quarter and they now get £7000 a year less on average than school teachers.

More pictures on My London Diary: March for Further Education

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : 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

________________________________________________________

Rally Against Islamophobia

There were two events in London opposing what the organisers of this event, Stand Up To Racism and Unite Against Fascism, described as “a demonstration for bigots and Islamophobes in London “by the racist ‘Democratic’ Football Lads Alliance (DFLA)”.

The more interesting and larger protest by anti-fascists was taking place starting at the BBC, and went to actually try to physically stop the march – with considerable success, holding it up for some time and forcing police to take it on a different route. But because I’d been with the ‘Funeral For the Unknown Cyclist‘ I hadn’t been able to keep up with what was happening there, and had ended up next to the SUTR/UAF demonstration, a static rally in Parliament Street, close to where the DFLA rally was to happen (though well separated by a large gap and many police officers.)

It wasn’t a huge rally, though rather more supporters than on the previous similar occasion, and with a better sound system which this time police had allowed them to put in place – at the earlier protest police had blocked them bringing it.  This time the police seemed more concerned about facilitating their protest rather than obstructing it, and at keeping out the handful of racists who came to try and disrupt it.

After taking some pictures of the rally, I went back into Parliament Square to sit down and eat a very late lunch of the sandwiches I had brought with me. I usually bring sandwiches when I’m working across the middle of the day, often eating them in the middle of protests. Of course you can buy food in London, but not always conveniently and seldom really suited to my dietary requirements as a diabetic. I watched police turning away a few shouting men and wandered across to take pictures, but decided there was really little of interest.

I’d been planning to walk around through St James Park (as Whitehall was blocked) to Trafalgar Square and Whitehall to find the DFLA and Anti-fascists, but felt too tired, and decided to leave this to younger and fitter photographers who also have the advantage of not being as well-known to the thugs, and went home.

More pictures, including a number of the speakers, at Rally opposes Islamophobic DFLA on My London Diary.

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : 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

________________________________________________________

AI Faces

Around twenty-five years ago my elder son passed his GCSE Art with a project, rather reluctantly endorsed by his art teacher, using ray tracing to produce drawings which he had generated on my computer, I think at the time still an Amstrad PC1512. I think we had to leave it running overnight for the best of them, and could only produce hard-copy by photographing the screen as we only had a black and white printer, but my memory of them is faint.

They weren’t particularly good drawings, though better than some entered for GCSE Art, and were certainly in no way photo-realistic. But both computer hardware and techniques have made great bounds since then, and the latest faces generated using AI and shown on PetaPixel in These Portraits Were Made by AI: None of These People Exist are entirely convincing.

The were produced by NVIDIA researchers Tero Karras, Samuli Laine and Timo Aila using generative adversarial networks (GAN), about which even they write “Yet the generators continue to operate as blackboxes, and despite recent efforts, the understanding of various aspects of the image synthesis process, e.g., the origin of stochastic features, is still lacking.” Having briefly scanned their publication, which contains the images shown on PetaPixel, my understanding is still definitely lacking, and, unless you are the kind of person who crunches tricky equations before breakfast it is unlikely to add much to your comprehension either.

I can’t even get this blog to reproduce the equations properly, but here’s one I just found:

lZ = E h 1  2 d G(slerp(z1, z2; t)), G(slerp(z1, z2; t + )) i

where z1, z2 ∼ P(z), t ∼ U(0, 1), G is the generator (i.e. g ◦f for style-based networks), and d(·, ·) evaluates the perceptual distance between the resulting images. Here slerp denotes the spherical interpolation operation [49] that is the most appropriate way of interpolating in our normalized input latent space…

So I guess that makes it all clear?

What I can see is the potential that this development has for fake news and for advertising images (and as another group of images from the paper illustrated entirely filling the few gaps in Facebook not already occupied by cat pictures.)

Doubtless it won’t be long before programs based on this a other similar research are common on our desktops (and even on our phones) and as well as producing non-people will be churning out images of real people doing things they never did in places they never visited.

I’m unsure too, about the copyright issues involved around these images, which rely on multiple real photographs for their generation, though I suspect those who run the software will claim the copyright.

Nor is it easy to predict the effect it will have on photographers, though it has the potential to replace much of the stock photography market, something that would not greatly worry me, though I think may greatly reduce employment in the area.

It may even increase the value of the ‘real’ photograph, an image whose integrity is vouched for by the credit line of the photographer – so long as we retain our integrity and our photographs have something to say.

 

 

 

Cyclists’ Funeral

Cycling is an inherently safe and healthy mode of transport; what makes it dangerous in some places are massive chunks of metal moving at high speeds, often with poor awareness of the surroundings and occasionally driven without proper care. Bad road design, badly designed vehicles and a few bad drivers.

Getting more people cycling would make an important contribution to our national well-being, cutting the huge amount of air pollution caused by traffic, particularly in cities such as London, where air pollution causes almost 10,000 early deaths each year with a much greater number suffereing from pollution-related health problems. It would cut the admissions to hospitals, reducing the pressure on the NHS.

For those who cycle, the healthy exercise involved gives even greater health benefits – though these are somewhat reduced by the filthy air in our cities. It also has financial benefits, providing by far the cheapest form of transport other than walking. And for many journeys of short to moderate length it can be the fastest way to go, particularly as there are few problems with parking a bike.

Even more important for many is the reliablity. When I cycled to work I could rely with almost certainty in getting there in somewhere between 12 and 15 minutes; colleagues driving a similar journey might occasionally do it a minute or two faster, but at least once a week would be delayed  by traffic and take twice as long as me or more.

Once in 20 years I did get delayed, when hit by a car coming out from a side road who failed to see me, and a handfull of times by punctures and mechanical faults, though I think these happened less often than with most drivers. And there were a few days when heavy snow made both cycling and driving impossible and I and drivers had to walk (though they often gave up and stayed home.)

The major reason people give for not cycling is that they don’t think it is safe. Even many people in cities who have bikes only use them recreationally, perhaps on footpaths or towpaths, some taking them by car to places where they can cycle away from traffic.

The widespread use of cycle helmets has added to people’s fears about safety, while also making cycling rather less convenient. They may marginally improve a cyclist’s chance of avoiding head injuries in some collisions (the evidence isn’t entirely clear and is certainly disputed) but provide little real protection.  They are certainly not an answer to the problem we have of safety, and most cyclists who are killed or badly injured were wearing helmets.

On busy routes we need far more provision of high-quality cycle routes protected from traffic. Much of what we already have – virtually all in my local area – is so badly designed that few cyclists use it, with ‘give way’ signs every few yards making it impracticable. Simply having marked cycle lanes also seldom works as too many vehicles park in them.

‘Stop Killing Cyclists’ calls for a large investment in  safer facilities for cyclists, but it would be an investment that would bring dividends both financially and in terms of well-being, particularly for those new cyclists it would bring onto our streets but also for the rest of us, pedestrians, cyclists and drivers.

Of course there are other things that are also needed to improve safety for all road users, but particularly for pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists who do not have a large metal box to keep them safe.  Better road design with safety rather than vehicle speed at its heart, better vehicle design, particularly in terms of all-round visibility, lower (and enforced) speed limits particularly on minor roads and backstreets…

And education and some changes in the laws. We have a Highway Code – and it is being revised, hopefully to make it safer for pedestrians and cyclists, but there are many areas that are either widely unknown or widely ignored by many drivers (and of course by some cyclists.)

Getting more people to use bikes would hopefully improve driver attitudes to cyclists, who too many drivers seem to see as obstacles to overcome rather than fellow road users with the same right to be on the highway as they have. Too many drivers pass cyclists where there is not safe room to do so:

(Rule 163: give motorcyclists, cyclists and horse riders at least as much room as you would when overtaking a car)

Many speed past me only a few inches away, often breaking the speed limit to do so, only to have to brake a few yards on when they catch up with other cars or to turn left ahead of me, slowing so I have to brake. Of course this kind of competitive attitude to driving also extends to their behaviour to other drivers, encouraged by advertising, car magazines and petrolhead TV programmes. Somehow we need to move away from a steering wheel inspiring too many to think they are Lewis Hamilton.

Oh yes, the protest.  The ‘National Funeral for the Unknown Cyclist’ organised by Stop Killing Cyclists started its procession in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, marching behind a very smart horse-drawn hearse to a die-in in front of the Houses of Parliament.

It had to change its planned route to Parliament as right-wing ‘football lads’ were holding a rally in Whitehall supporting ‘Tommy Robinson’ over his contempt of court which could have led to a trial of pedophiles being abandoned, and there was also a protest against them, so Whitehall was blocked. These rival protests meant  the ‘funeral’ it was seen by far fewer people and greatly diminished its chances of any coverage in the media. And it also meant that I left it before the rally in Smith Square.

You can see more pictures and text at
National Funeral for the Unknown Cyclist

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : 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

________________________________________________________