A Day At The Seaside: It was Saturday 14th August 2004 and a day at the seaside seemed appropriate, and where better than Hastings where the Old Town Carnival was taking place.
Rather than mine my ageing and probably false memories, I’ll here resurrect the text hidden away on the August 2004 page of My London Diary, with a few minor corrections. Since then I have decided that it makes sense and greatly improves legibility to make appropriate use of the Shift key and upper case characters. So here it is, along with just a few of the pictures I made that day.
OK, so Hastings isn’t London, but it is only a short day trip down to the coast, and many of the people down there with me to watch the carnival were from London. Hastings Old Town Carnival was once a traditional English Carnival, but now is more eclectic, though still with relatively little input from our more recently arrived ethnic groups.
Being Hastings there were a few references to the events of 1066 (though not in the pictures I put on line.)
There was a well-supported float for the Hastings/Sierra Leone Friendship Group, but we also had King Henry VIII, Noahs Ark, Pirates, a Tropical Island, Fairy Tales, Chicago-Style Gangsters and more.
I’m not a great fan of majorettes, but there was certainly some virtuoso baton twirling on display, including one lady who needed a lorry to carry her prizes.
Judging from the pictures of previous years there was perhaps a little less zany invention this year than before, but it was a good-natured event, and the centre of the Old Town was crowded to watch it.
Rather than battle it out through the streets I adjourned to the Kings Head for a couple of pints, only to find the carnival was still making its way round as I made mine to the station.
I wasn’t entirely happy with the pictures I made that day; too many were of people posing for the camera and I would have liked more spontaneity. But the kind of things I was searching for just didn’t happen.
Carnaval Del Pueblo – 14 Aug 2004
The following day I photographed another very different carnival in London, the Carnaval Del Pueblo billed as the largest Latin-American festival in Europe, taking place around the Elephant and Castle in south London. We have few traditional English carnivals left in London, but others have taken their place, reflecting the changing population, adding colour and spice to our city. You can see more pictures here.
A Week In Iona: In August 2008 I stayed a week on the remote island of Iona, a small island of the southwest coast of Mull in the with a long and illustrious history.
St Oran’s Chapel, the oldest building on Iona (c 1150) is in the ancient graveyard of 48 Kings of Scotland
The island is well-known as ‘The Cradle of Christianity’ in Scotland, where Columba landed with his twelve companions in AD 563 and began to spread their Celtic Christianity through the islands and across Scotland.
St Columba founded an Abbey here, but later it was destroyed by Viking Raids. Benedictine monks came here around 1200 but after the Reformation their Abbey became a disused ruin.
The Abbey was still in ruins when the 8th Duke of Argyll gave it to the church of Scotland in 1899, and some rebuilding took place in the following years. But it was the Iona Community, a Christian group started in the 1930s in working class Glasgow by George MacLeod, who brought together unemployed craftsmen and young ministers which did most of the work, starting in 1938 and only completed around 1965.
The Abbey is now looked after by Historic Scotland, with the Iona Community now tenants who run various events here and in a more modern centre a couple of hundred yards away.
I was fortunate to be able to stay in the Abbey together with a group of friends as guests of the Iona community, and joined in with the daily services and had to take a part in the running of the centre, serving food and setting and clearing tables, as well as chopping vegetables in the kitchen – including more onions than you can imagine. As I commented, “although I enjoyed my stay, Iona to me will always be remembered as a place of tears!”
Iona is a small island – around 1.5 miles long and under a mile wide, with some isolated crofts and open ground with beautiful beaches and bays. Although its small permanent population – now stated as around 170 – is augmented by large numbers of tourists in the summer months, a short walk from the main street still took us away from it all.
This peace and quiet was only interrupted for a couple of hours during our week there, when a large cruise ship came up and anchored off the island, with small boats ferrying hundreds for a short visit. They set foot on the island, took pictures of the Abbey and left – without really experiencing the island at all.
We did something of the same on one day of our visit, taking a boat trip on a powerful fishing boat to the island of Staffa – around 8 miles away – on 13th August. Fortunately the sea was fairly smooth, though the small boat ploughed through the waves with enough motion to make some feel seasick.
On the journey we passed close to the shore of Mull where seals were basking, and a couple of sharks put on a display as we stood to look into the giant caves in the south cliffs from the sea.
The largest of these, as I wrote in 2008, was named by “the great naturalist, Sir Joseph Banks, whose former house in Spring Grove I used to cycle past daily on my way to school who named the largest of these Fingal’s Cave, linking them with the Irish giant who in legend constructed a causeway starting from similar hexagonal basalt columns in Ireland across to Scotland.”
“Previously it had been known in Gaelic as ‘the melodius cave‘ (Uamh Bhin) from the sounds made by the waves lapping in its 150 foot channel, echoed by the roof like a giant natural cathedral. Later as I approached the cave on foot, the melodies I heard were distinctly female, but it was truly disappointing to find they came not from mermaids but the a cappella singing of my fully dressed wife and a few women friends.”
A weekly event we were able to take part in was the weekly pilgrimage around the island organised by the Iona Community which goes from the Abbey and around the island to various key sites, including the marble quarry, the beach on Columba’s Bay where he landed and the Hermit’s Cell, one of the few places on the island where midges were very much more than troublesome.
Visitors are generally not allowed to bring vehicles to the island – and there is very little in the way of roads outside the village where the ferry lands. It was good to get away from traffic and have a week of peace and quiet.
Edinburgh And the Festival: We came by train to Edinburgh and the following day, Monday 12th August 2013 was the first of a full week we spent in the city and the first week of that year’s Edinburgh Festival.
Ten years before this we had spent an enjoyable week in the city, three of my family staying in a very comfortable flat close to Haymarket station, and had spent a very full week exploring the city and some of the surrounding area – including Leith and walking a little of the Fife coastal path. That year we left just as the festival was about to start.
2013 was very different. Linda and I were invited to join a group of friends to stay in a large flat in Bruntsfield a short walk from the city centre who were there for the Edinburgh Festival, and although we didn’t have a great interest in many of the festival events had found a number which seemed worth attending over the week.
Between these and our share of the housekeeping for the dozen or so of us – including taking our turn at preparing an evening meal for the group – we managed to fit in quite a few other things during the week, including another climb up Arthur’s Seat, and I even managed to do a little work, covering a protest by the Scottish Defence League and a counter-protest by Unite Against Fascism on the Saturday.
But unlike on our previous visit we stayed inside the city, and spent most of the time in the central area where most of the festival takes place around the Royal Mile.
A few of the events were very much to my taste – such as a guided tour around the elegant Georgian New Town, which took us to a few places I’d not been before, and the City of the Dead tour turned out to be rather more interesting than we had anticipated.
And there were some interesting poetry and threatre performances as well as several talks. We also bumped briefly into a few old friends at some of them or on the streets, though usually then we were going different ways to other events.
On My London Diary you can read more about our packed week. It was tiring but largely enjoyable, but we left feeling going there once was probably enough and we’ve not gone back. We might return to Edinburgh but not to the festival.
There are also pictures from the other days – all of those here are from Monday 12th August 2013. I had travelled light and they were all taken with a fairly compact Fuji X-E1 using either a 35mm standard lens of the XF18-55mmF2.8-4, equivalent to 27-83mm on full-frame.
Seven Sisters Road: on Sunday 1st October 1989 I took the Victoria Line tube to Finsbury Park (a couple of pictures here) and walked through the park to its most easterly corner, the junction between Green Lanes and Seven Sisters Road at Manor House.
Finsbury Park, The Manor House, Manor House, Haringey, Hackney, 1989 89-10a-53
A view from beside the wall to Finsbury Park by the gate. This area was know as Woodberry Down before the Manor House Tavern was first built here on 1830-4 at the crossroads with Green Lanes, a turnpike or toll road, after a 1829 Act of Parliament had allowed the building of Seven Sisters Road. Local builder Thomas Widdows had owned and lived in a cottage on the site and saw a business opportunity, though it is unclear why it was given the name Manor House – probably because it sounded posh.
It opened as a ‘public house and tea-gardens’ in 1834 and its first landlord advertised it, writing “The Grounds adjoining are admirably calculated for Cricket, Trap-ball, or any other amusement requiring space. There is likewise a large Garden and Bowling green, good Stabling, lock-up Coach-houses, &c. Dinners for Public and Private Parties.
The original pub was demolished in 1930 when the road was widened and the Piccadilly line Manor House station built here, and replaced by this attractive Flemish style building with just a hint of Art Deco. The pub and tube station led to the area becoming known as Manor House, with the name Woodberry Down being revived for the large post-war housing estate built a little to the east by the LCC from 1948-62.
You can learn more about its interesting history and varying clientele – including its time as a major Blues venue in the 1960s – in the Wikipedia article cited. The pub closed around 2000 and its ground floor became a supermarket in 2004.
Shops, Seven Sisters Rd, Finsbury Park, Islington, 1989 89-10a-42
Finsbury Park was a rather run-down area in 1989 and some friends were worried about my safety as I walked around the area carrying a bag full of expensive camera equipment, but I had no problems. People were friendly though sometimes clearly thought I was mad to be taking photographs of their streets and shops.
At left is KYPRIAKON KAFENEION, shown more clearly in my next picture. Between the shops are decorated pillars and above them rather odd decorated stone balls. I think the shops were probably added a few years later to the mid-Victorian houses behind.
Cypriot Social Club, Seven Sisters Rd, Finsbury Park, Islington, 1989 89-10a-43
You can still see this row of shops on Seven Sisters Road, in the parade between Yonge Park and Medina Road*, and I think this Cypriot cafe is now a dentists. In 1989 there were many Cypriot businesses in the area, but the area is now more diverse and has a large Muslim community. None of the businesses in my previous picture are still present.
* I have now decided that these shops are those at 218-230 Seven Sisters Road which can clearly be seen in a photograph I took later on this walk. They were very similar to those further down the street but have been more altered since 1989, and some demolished.
Sisters Gowns, a few yards down Coleridge Road was also clearly a Cypriot business, and one of many clothing manufacturers in the area, which has now become one of London’s most vibrant fashion areas, particularly around nearby Fonthill Road.
This doorway could still be seen iin a derelict building n 2008, but the whole corner site was demolished soon after, although the site was still empty in 2022.
Shop Interior, Seven Sisters Rd, Finsbury Park, Islington, 1989 89-10a-31
I think this busts and bodies were for wale along with other pieces of equipment for use in shop displays, but it looked to me like some kind of kinky torture chamber. Though shopping for clothes is often a torture, particularly when accompanying others who are looking for them. I’m not sure what the football is doing here.
Shops, Seven Sisters Rd, Finsbury Park, Islington, 1989 89-10a-32
An extremely motley assortment of buildings from different periods, including BANGS, established in 1907, but I think the frontage at least is from the 1930s.
Rather to my surprise, these buildings are still there, though the shops have changed and below BANGS rather than JANE CAST LTD is now a Tesco. Even the building at the right of the row which appeared in my photograph to have no visible support is still there as well as the pub surrounded by scaffolding have survived. The Eaglet, built in 1869, was apparently badly damaged by a Zeppelin in 1917 but recovered and is still open.
North London Drapery Store, Axminster Rd, Seven Sisters Rd, Holloway, Islington, 1989
Built in 1938 as North London Drapery Store this Art Deco store was damaged in the war. In 1989 it was used by a variety of businesses including London International College. It has recently been converted to provide 118 expensive flats, with shops on the ground floor.
According to ‘Streets With A Story‘, “Robert Enkel from 1830-49 owned property and occupied the nursery until 1834 when Cornelius Crastin and his family took over and continued as nurserymen until at least 1890. The street name disappears by 1975.” Enkel’s family came from Holland and his name was given to the street which dated from around 1875-6. As you can see the street name was actually still there in 1989.
There is still an Enkel Arms pub a few yards away on Seven Sisters Roadm but Enkel Street disappeared with the development of the Nags Head Shopping Centre in 1992. And there is a Nags Head Market indoors at 22 Seven Sisters Road, apparently since 1975.
Kashmiris and Cows: On Saturday 10th August 2019 I photographed three events, two of them by Kashmiris after the article of the Indian Constitution which guaranteed some autonomy for their state was revoked. Completely unrelated was a small protest by vegans against diary farming.
Kashmiris protest at India House and Trafalgar Square
When the partition of India took place at independence from Britain in 1947, the state of Kashmir was an anomaly. Although this was a majority Muslim state it was not included in Pakistan as the then ruler decided it should become a part of India.
Kashmir has three regions, Jammu and Kashmir the largest, became a part of India, the Northern areas are under Pakistani administration and a smaller region on the east is controlled by China. The whole area has been disputed by India, Pakistan and China since 1947.
The special status of Jammu and Kashmir was recognised by Article 370 of the Indian constitution. This gave it “the power to have a separate constitution, a state flag, and autonomy of internal administration.“
Many Kashmiris objected to becoming a part of India and campaigned for independence with a brief rebellion leading to war between India and Pakistan in 1948-9. Various other conflicts came in later years and in 1989 an armed insurgency began, at first calling for independence but soon taken over by groups calling for merger with Pakistan.
The uprising has been suppressed over the years by a huge Indian military presence in Kashmir with an occupying force of around 800,000 military and paramilitary personnel and extreme levels of human rights abuses, including torture, deliberate blinding and killings.
In August 2019, under the government of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Presidential Orders were made revoking Article 370, making Jammu and Kashmir a part of India on exactly the same basis as the rest of the country. They also split Jammu and Kashmir into two different areas, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Like many, the Kashmiris say Modi is a Hindu fascist and his action has united the country against India.
A large and noisy protest took place on the pavement in front of the Indian High Commission, after which the protesters marched to continue their protest in Trafalgar Square.
Protesters stood in a small block wearing cow masks in Trafalgar Square calling for an end to diary farming which they claim is inherently cruel, with milk being stolen from cows and male calves being slaughtered soon after birth.
Vegan protesters call cows ‘mothers‘ and calves ‘babies‘, and they say that we ‘steal‘ the milk that the cows produce for their calves, failing to tell people that dairy cows have been bred to produce far more milk than their calves can consume, perhaps 7-10 times as much. And we only have cows in our fields because farmers breed them to produce milk for us to drink. We need to get away from emotional arguments and concentrate on the facts.
Traditional farming treated animals with care and respect – they were (and are) important assets. Some modern intensive practices are certainly cruel and should be condemned, both here and in other countries which mainly have even less strict animal welfare regulations. We could have a dairy industry which treated animals better and many of us would be prepared to pay more for the milk it produced.
There are good reasons to eat less meat and less diary products, but protests like this trivialise the issue. Good reasons why some people become vegans, but also good reasons why we should farm some animals to produce milk and meat. It would be a disaster for the environment if we all became vegan.
Ministry of Justice cleaners protest: On Thursday 9th August 2018 United Voices of the World (UVW) cleaners and supporters celebrated the end of their 3-day strike with a rally outside the Ministry of Justice in Petty France with a lively protest despite pouring rain.
Cleaners from the UVW had also been taking part in the 3-day strike at Kensington & Chelsea Council and hospitals and outpatient clinics in London run by Health Care America. They were all demanding the London living wage and better conditions of employment.
I’d been with them a couple of days earlier at Kensington Town Hall where, after the council had withdrawn a promise made to the cleaners earlier in the day to take them into direct employment, they interrupted a council planning committee public meeting to state their case.
The cleaners and supporters left the council offices then after they had been promised further talks the following morning, but their strike continued.
All these cleaners – like many others across the country – are not employed by the companies and organisations whose premises they clean. Instead the cleaning is outsourced to contracting companies who generally pay the minimum wage and fail to provide the kind of sick pay, pensions and other conditions of service that directly employed workers normally get. Often they are bullied by management and not treated with the dignity and respect we all deserve.
It was raining as the protesters gathered outside the Ministry of Justice, but there was a yard or so of shelter at the front of the overhanging building where people lined up with banners. But soon it was really pouring down and everybody was getting wet.
Among those coming to support the UVW were another union which fights for low-paid workers, the Independent Workers Union, IWGB, Class War and other trade unionists.
Austin Hearney of the PCS came out to give support from his members working in the Ministry of Justice, and Shadow Justice minister Richard Burgon arrived to give the Labour Party’s support.
Workers were entering and leaving the building for lunch, and most took the flyers the protesters were offering with some expressing support, though a few seemed to be angered by the protest.
At one point when people were getting really wet, Petros Elia, co-founder and General Secretary of the UVW tried to lead the protesters into the building, but was stopped by security and police officers and the protest continued in driving rain.
I was getting very wet, and my cameras too. One of the protesters kindly held an umbrella over me for some minutes so I could continue to work. While there was space for some protesters to keep out of the worst of the rain, I had to stand in it to photograph them.
The rain eased off a little towards the end of the protest and people moved further out into the street – most of them were pretty wet already.
The had brought a pink pinata, a pig labelled with the initials of employers RBKC and MoJ and began hitting it with folded umbrellas and fists until it burst open releasing its multi-coloured contents onto the pavement.
There were celebrations and several coloured flares were set off, though the effect was rather dampened by the rain. There were more speeches and more flares and poetry from one of the Poetry on the Picket Line.
By no the rain had stopped and the protesters were dancing on the pavement and in the road as the protest came to an end.
Glasgow Visit 2008: In August 2008 with my wife and elder son and friends I went to Iona. The journey up from London is a long one and we decided that rather than try to do it in one day we would take the opportunity to spend a few days in Glasgow on our way, staying in a hotel close to the School of Art in the centre of the city, named after Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
We were in Glasgow for only five days but managed to see quite a lot of the city and some of its surroundings as my pictures show. Looking back I’m surprised at the variety of subjects in the roughly 2000 images I took, working over a 12 hour day on most of the 5 days we were there.
Only a fairly small fraction of the pictures are on My London Diary – partly because this wasn’t London and I then felt a bit embarrassed about posting work from another city. But the web site – which I updated regularly from around 2000 to the start of 2022 except during the lockdown and is still on line was very much my personal diary and so does include at least some of my pictures from outside London.
All were taken on the 12Mp Nikon D300, a DX format camera which I had bought earlier in the year. It was a very usable camera with decent autofocus and nothing that came later from Nikon was really much of an improvement, though the sensor size and pixel count increased. Should you want a good, cheap DSLR a secondhand D300 would still be a good choice, so long as the shutter count was well below the rated 150,000.
I think I had both a wide-angle and telephoto zoom with me. The Raw images I made have suffered a little from the processing to produce jpegs – software has improved significantly since 2008, and I think all of them could benefit from being made a little brighter. But life is too short to re-process them all.
For convenience I divided the pictures into eight rather arbitrary sections to post them on My London Diary, and I’ll include the direct links to these at the bottom of this post. But you can start at ‘My Pictures’ and click the link at the bottom of each page to go through the complete set I’ve posted.
This wasn’t my first visit to Glasgow, but I don’t think any pictures from my earlier visit when we spent a week there are online, and on the brief visit with friends back in around 1962 I took no pictures – I think I’d finished my holiday film on Skye, where my holiday also almost ended as I fell down a mountain.
Mmong other holidays in Scotland I’ve also spent a couple of weeks in Edinburgh – including once for the festival. And though I enjoyed both cities, I found Glasgow interested me more. If I ever return to Scotland it will be to Glasgow, as I now feel too old to walk the West Highland Way.
A Walk in the City: Take a walk around parts of the City of London with me and my camera five years ago on Wednesday 7 Aug 2019. The first part of the walk I was on my own, but later I met up with a couple of friends and we continued to walk around but visited several interesting City pubs before ending up with a meal at what must be the worst Wetherspoons in Greater London at Cannon Street Station. Though I suppose it’s handy if you want to catch the train.
I’d taken a bus from Waterloo to the City and got off at St Paul’s and walked down to St Andrew’s Hill where I wanted to retake digitally an image I had made on film over 30 years ago.
Taken from the steps of St Andrew’s by the Wardrobe Church, the view of St Andrew’s Hill and the Cockpit pub was a taxing subject on film with the foreground in Wardrobe Terrace, and I never quite managed what I wanted. Using digital gave me a rather better result with no problems.
I walked on down to the River Thames and made some views along the river with the Millennium footbridge and the Shard now rather dominating the scene.
The tide was very low and I went down the steps onto the foreshore, though I needed to be careful walking on the stones and mud as I was only wearing a light pair of shoes which were very much not waterproof. I walked along under the Millennium Bridge and on towards Queenhithe, taking quite a few pictures.
The foreshore can be dangerous and the tide comes in rapidly. Although anyone is free to visit it, searching in any way – metal detecting, ‘beachcombing’, scraping and digging etc requires a https://pla.co.uk/thames-foreshore-permits PLA permit. You are advised to wear sensible footwear and gloves – which of course I wasn’t – and to watch out for hazards including raw sewage, broken glass, hypodermic needles and wash from vessels. I stepped very carefully.
Buried below the sand and mud at Queenhithe are the remains of part of London’s Roman harbour and the later medieval quay. A scheduled ancient monument, it is probably the only existing Saxon harbour in the world, presented by King Alfred the Great in 883 AD to his brother-in-law Ethelred. It got the name Queenhithe later when the harbour dues became the property of the wife of Henry I, Queen Matilda. The dock was still in use mainly by the fur trade in the early 20th century, and there were still fur shops in the area around in the 1970s.
I didn’t stay long on the foreshore and couldn’t remember where the next set of steps up from it were, so went back onto the Thames Path where I had come down and walked east towards Monument Station where I was meeting two photographer friends.
One of my friends had planned this walk and I was just a little surprised to find we were going back to one of the places I had visited earlier, St Andrew’s Hill, though less surprised when we went into the Cockpit pub.
The pub is on a historic site, originally part of one of the gatehouses of Blackfriars Monastery. There was a pub here when Shakespeare bought a house nearby. And undoubtedly there was somewhere here where cock fights took place until cockfighting was banned – along with dog fighting, bear baiting and badger baiting – in 1835. But this is a Victorian theme pub, rebuilt around 1865, though some at least of its interior decoration almost certainly came from actual cockfighting venues. But punters never stood in the closed galleries here to watch fights. Now firmly on the tourist circuit it is still worth a visit, if just for a pint of Harvey’s Sussex Best Bitter.
Our walk continued through more of the streets in this area and then across New Bridge Street and on to Bride Lane and St Bride’s Passage and The Old Bell Tavern, once very much part of Fleet Street, the Street of Shame. The Old Bell Tavern is on the site where it all started, when in 1500 Wynkyn de Worde who had worked with William Caxton set up the first print shop on Fleet Street. The building is apparently derived from one that Christopher Wren knocked up for his masons when they were building St Brides, the journalists’ church.
Our walk more or less finished there, though we took a bus to Cannon Street Station for cheap food at the Wetherspoons, though I found it very disappointing. Spoons do much better almost everywhere else. I caught a bus from St Paul’s Churchyard, sat in the front seat on the top desk and it had unusually clean windows so I took a few more picture on the way back to Waterloo.
Hiroshima Atomic Victims Remembered: Ten years ago today on Wednesday 6th August 2014 I was in Tavistock Square for a ceremony close to the Hiroshima Cherry Tree on the 69th anniversary of the first use of an atomic bomb remembering the victims past and present of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
I hope to be there again today, as I have been in most recent years. The roughly hour-long ceremony organised by London CND begins at noon and follows more or less the same pattern each year. Everyone is welcome to attend and if you missed it this year you can put a reminder in your diary for next. And if you are not in London, there are other events in other towns and cities across the world – and some also in other parts of London.
The dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the beginning of a new age where the USA showed it had the power to unleash unprecedented levels of death and destruction. Some other nations were quick to develop their own atomic weapons, including our own and of course the USSR, and all developed bombs of much greater power than the two which devastated the Japanese cities.
Currently nine countries have nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. When the USSR was split up, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine transferred the nuclear weapons on their territory to Russia, but apart from this only one country, South Africa has actually given them up.
Wikipedia quotes the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute as estimating in 2023 that the nuclear weapons states held a total of 12,119 total nuclear warheads. Far more than would be needed to destroy the planet, or at least human life on it.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was adopted by the UN in 2017 and came into force in 2021. By January 2024 of the 197 states recognised by the UN, 97 countries had signed the treaty although 27 had still to ratify their signatures. None of the states which hold nuclear weapons have signed.
In Tavistock Square there were songs, speeches, prayers and performances introduced by Islington MP Jeremy Corbyn and messages from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were read.
As well as remembering the many victims of the bombs we also were reminded of peace campaigner Hetty Bower, who became a pacifist during the First World War and attended many of these ceremonies and other peace events and had died earlier this year.
The event closed with two minutes of silence for the victims of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all victims of war, during which people came up to lay flowers and wreaths at the foot of the Hiroshima cherry tree.
Milking, Friern Manor Dairy Farm, Stroud Green Rd, Finsbury Park, Islington, 1989 89-9f-63
Cows, Cindy, Fonthill and Finsbury Park: I couldn’t resist posting another of those sgraffito panels from the former Friern Manor Dairy Farm on Stroud Green Rd, though I suspect even when these were made the conditions for both cows and milkmaids were very different from those enjoyed in the stalls behing the facade.
Modern dairy practice is of course also very different as you can see in Andrea Arnold’s 2021 cinéma vérité-style film ‘Cow‘, not made as vegan propaganda but giving a very direct view of how we use animals to produce food for the masses. Watching it didn’t convert me to the vegan cause but I do think we need to have and enforce much stricter standards of animal welfare – though those in the UK are already firmer than in most countries. I already pay more for milk and would happily pay even more.
Cindy Trading Company, Hanley Rd, Finsbury Park, Islington,1989 89-9f-66
The Old Diary is on the corner of Hanley Road and I walked down here just a short distance and photographed this shopfront which appeared to be of a former travel agency, possibly the ‘Flight Line Cruise’ whose phone number is written large. The Cindy Trading Company whose name is on the door was later listed as a hardware store selling a range of DIY and home improvement items at 186 Stroud Green Road, a short distance away – and is now a dissolved company.
At right is an advertisement for Metposts and I may have been attracted by this as I had recently put in a fence on one side of my garden at home using these. It wasn’t quite as easy as the advert suggests and by the time I’d finished and put down the sledgehammer I’d decided digging and concrete might have been easier.
Shop, Fonthill Rd, Finsbury Park, Islington, 1989 89-9f-45
I’m unsure what route I took from Hanley Road to Fonthill Road, possibly going down Regina Road or Evershot Road. I took a couple of pictures – neither digitised – of an interesting yard with two rather strange bell towers in the background, nothing like anything that I can now see in satellite images of the area, possibly a long-demolished public building,
Fortunately the location of this picture is confirmed by the reflection of the street sign for Fonthill Road. Also reflected is a sign for John Rowan Bookmaker, the company which developed the well-known Rowans Tenpin Bowl opposite Finsbury Park Station on Stround Green Road in what had previouly been a tram shed, cinema and Bingo hall.
By 1989 this end of Fonthill Road was already beginning to become one of London’s major fashion centres – and a few pictures I’ve not yet digitised reflect this. A few from 1989 in colour start here.
My walk on 24th September was coming to an end, and I took just one more picture of a shopfront on Seven Sister Road before catching the Victoria Line on my way home. But I was back in Finsbury Park a week later and I’ll include a couple of pictures from the actual park, Finsbury Park to end this post.
Free Nelson Mandela, Finsbury Park, Islington, 1989 89-9f-31
Nelson Mandela was released unconditionally from Victor Verster Prison on 11th February 1990 following years of campaigning for his release. Most of the other graffiti on this wall is unintelligible black scribble at least to me, but I can also make out in white ‘PARANOID EYES’ -presumably from the song on Pink Floyd’s 1983 album The Final Cut.
New River, Finsbury Park, Islington, 1989 89-9f-21
The New River was dug in 1613 to supply fresh drinking water to London from Chadwell and Amwell Springs near Ware in Hertfordshire.
Finsbury Park is around three miles from Finsbury which is on the northern edge of the City of London. People in Finsbury in 1841 signed a petition calling for a park that the people living in poverty in the area could make use of, and this was one of four sites that were considered.
This was around the last remains of the old Hornsey Wood, and by around 1800 had been developed with tea rooms and later a pub, as well as an artificial boating lake using water pumped up from the New River, and it was a popular place for shooting and archery “and probably cock fighting and other blood sports.”
There was some local opposition to sharing the area with the poor of Finsbury but the plans for what was originally to be called Albert Park (after Queen Victoria’s husband) went ahead, and the renamed Finsbury Park was approved by an Act of Parliament in 1857, though only completed and opened by 1869.
New River, Finsbury Park, Manor House, Haringey, 1989 89-10a-02
Lack of finance meant the park had deteriorate significantly by the 1980s, and the situation – like much in London – was greatly worsened when the Greater London Council was terminated with extreme malice by Thatcher in 1986. Haringey Council became responsible for the park “but without sufficient funding or a statutory obligation for the park’s upkeep.”
More recently £5 million Lottery Funding has enabled significant renovation of the park and its facilities. I last went to the park in March 2023 for the planting of a tree in memory of peace campaigner Bruce Kent by local MP Jeremy Corbyn and Kent’s wife Valerie. Both Kent and Corbyn were members of the Friends of Finsbury Park, with Corbyn now being a patron.
