Remainers March Fills London

Although the front of the People’s Vote March for the Future was at the Hyde Park Corner end of Park Lane, several thousand people were in front of the banner when the march was due to begin, stretching some way down Piccadilly.

Among them and right at the front were a group of protesters from Movement for Justice who clearly see Brexit as motivated by xenophobia and racism. They called noisily for Brexit to be stopped and for free movement and an end to the UK’s racist immigration policies. Among them were many who have suffered long periods of indefinite detention in Britain’s immigration detention centres, where MfJ has held numerous protests calling for these prisons to be closed, as well as campaigning and giving assistance to those held inside .

Piccadilly behind the MfJ was fairly densely crowded and it took me some minutes to make my way back to the official head of the march with its banners and placards, where I think stewards were waiting hoping that the road ahead would be miracuolously cleared, but there were just too many people for this to happen.

The march began and I stood on Piccadilly taking pictures of the marchers (some of which are in People’s Vote March – Start on My London Diary.) When people were still walking past me half an hour later I got on the tube at Green Park and went to Westminster, where I found that before any marchers had reached Parliament Square it was already fairly full.

I walked around the edge of the square, then decided to walk up Parliament St towards Downing St to be around there when the marchers arrived, stopping there for a few minutes to photograph anopther protest taking place by the People’s Mujahedin of Iran against executions of the political opposition in Iran.  Political artist Kaya Ma was standing there with paintings of Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees Mogg.

Among the first to arrive was Elvis, riding a tricycle, coming to sing and play with others who were already opposite Downing St, and soon Theresa May turned up holding a rope, with which she was leading a captive Britain.

At the end of the rope tying his wrists together was a man dressed up in a Union Flag, his mouth gagged and wearing a blindfold, carrying a small poster ‘No Influence’.

The whole width of the road was filled with people walking slowly towards Parliament Square, though after a while this was full and Whitehall also began to fill up. Some friends at the back of the march told me that they never managed to leave Park Lane, and there were reports of a large overfill in Green Park, unable to make further progress.

Eventually I decided I’d been standing on my feet too long and decided to try and make my way to Charing Cross – the crowd towards Westminster station which was closer looked too dense to make much progress. There was a single Brexiteer with a megaphone taking on a small crowd who gathered around him, but failing to make much sense, and a line of police across the entrance to Horseguards Avenue where a small protest was taking place in front of the Ministry of Defence.

I wandered down briefly to find it was Veterans United Against Suicide, who as well as calling for more to be done to help service men and veterans in the fight against their developing PTSD and eventually committing suicide were also supporting a soldier discharged for being photographed in  uniform with extreme right figure Tommy Robinson.

I returned to Whitehall and walked up towards Trafalgar Square, but was soon brought to a halt by a densely packed crowd now also trying to leave. People were partying in Trafalgar Square and it took me around 15 minutes to get to Charing Cross station for a train.

MfJ at People’s Vote March
People’s Vote March – End
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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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Cuban Revolution 60th

On the Magnum web site you can read ‘The Day Havana Fell‘, with Burt Glinn‘s story of how he rushed to Cuba from a New York party where he heard the news and how he covered the story – along of course with his pictures.

Although the Cuban revolution had started on 26 July 1953, it took 5 years, 5 months and 6 days before on 1 January 1959, Batista fled Cuba by air for the Dominican Republic 60 years ago today.

AP was there too, and have just re-published their film of the event on You-Tube.

President Kennedy a few years later in 1963 spoke of his sympathy with Castro and his fight:

“I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption.

I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States.  Now we shall to have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries.”

Though that sympathy hadn’t stopped him authorising the diastrous ‘Bay of Pigs ‘ invasion two years earlier in 1951, nor did it stop the various other plots by the CIA to assassinate Castro, some extremely bizarre, revealed by a senate committe in the 1970s.

Cuba of course had its own photographers, best-knoown of whom was Alberto Korda, and you can read about some of them in the Daily Telegraph travel feature, Meet the front-line Cuban photographers who captured Castro’s ragtag rebellion. A rather better introduction is Shifting Tides – Cuban Photography after the Revolution, with text and pictures from a Grey Art Gallery, New York University 2002 show.

Time’s Lightbox features Cuban Evolution: Photographs by Joakim Eskildsen from 2013 by the Danish photographer, and the Huffington Post has 10 Cuban Photographers You Should Know.

Cuba remains a a country that divides opinion, with a socialist regime which is lauded by some for its healthcare and some other social provisions, while denigrated by others for its restrictions on private property and political opposition and for human rights abuses. It has suffered greatly from US sanctions over the years, though under President Obama there were some relaxation in these, including the re-establishment of diplomatic relations in 2015.

Rob Bremner’s Liverpool

Liverpool publisher Bluecoat Press are building up a great collection of titles showcasing British photography, particularly “books about photojournalism and documentary photography, with a particular emphasis on British identity“.

One I know I’ve written about in the past was Paul Trevor‘s Like You’ve Never Been Away and I also mentioned Trish Murtha‘s Elswick Kids and her Youth Unemployment.

Another volume, not yet listed on the Bluecoat Press site, but like these funded by a succesful ‘Kickstarter’ campaign (it ended in September 2018) is Rob Bremner‘s ‘The Dash Between‘, with portraits he took on the streets of Liverpool in the 1980s, which, as the Liverpool Echo headline says “captured the true heart of 80s Liverpool“.

You can see a fine collection of Bremner’s images on his Instagram page.

People’s Vote

The march calling for a ‘People’s Vote’ now that the issues around Brexit are clearer was one of London’s largest, although the actual numbers present are disputed. But while the rally was going on in a packed Parliament Square there were still people waiting to leave Park Lane, around 3km away, with others in Green Park, and the march still sttretching along the entire route.

Noticeable as well as the sheer numbers was the huge range of posters and placards that people had made for the event, some short and direct, others considerably more creative, but overwhelmingly individual, father than the uniformity of some political protests.

In this post are a few of my favourites, which I’ll let speak for themselves.

You can find many more in my pictures on My London Diary at:
People’s Vote March – Start


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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
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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

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______________________________________________________

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.
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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

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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!

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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

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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

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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

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