>Re-PHOTO

It saddens me a little now to walk on the Greenway across Stratford Marsh to remember what has been lost. The business estates and small works etc of course were not to everyone’s taste, although there were some modest but pleasing buildings among them, but there were some invigorating areas of minor wilderness, and some lush willow trees along the Pudding Mill River, along with some nice little touches of the picturesque.

Willow trees by the Pudding Mill River on Marshgate Lane, 2005

The trees were at the left of this scene – June 2009

So much has now gone, and so many areas are now inaccessible – as for example:

Bridge over Pudding Mill River at junction with Old River Lea, 2006

You can see many more pictures of the Olympic area, including Stratford Marsh on my River Lea site, including some from the 1980s as well as since 2000. When I get time I’ll add more from the 1990s, when the waterways and footpaths in the area were all cleaned up and neatly signposted for walkers.

Saturday I went to take pictures to show the progress being made in covering the area with concrete for the Olympics, and made some more panoramas:

The opposite side of the Greenway to the Olympic stadium

You can see this rather larger, and also panoramas including the growing Olympic stadium and other pictures of the site on My London Diary.

Unfortunately the section of the Greenway south of the main railway line to Stratford High St is closed until Spring 2010, with a detour in place across to Pudding Mill Lane at Pudding Mill Station and down this to Marshgate Lane and Stratford High Street. This is to allow the roadway under the railway to be dug out to allow double-decker buses to pass under.

Poplar isn’t an area of London I know particularly well, although I’ve walked around it a few times and taken some photographs. I’ve found more to interest me just down the road in the Isle of Dogs, to the west in Limehouse, or along the Lea and Bow Creek  to the east and north.

But it was very pleasant to take a walk around on Saturday afternoon in the company of around 18 other people and be led around by Bridget Cherry, who together with Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner wrote the definitive volume on the architecture of East London in the ‘Buildings of England‘ series – she started work with Pevsner in 1968  and was editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides from 1971-2002.

The walk was one of half a dozen ‘Story of London’ trails organised by the Heritage of London Trust in association with Pevsner Architectural Guides, and although you’ve missed the chance to be guided personally by the experts you can still download a copy of the walk from the web site. (Or you can instead use the book, which includes rather more buildings and generally more detal than the walk, but is a little less convenient to carry than an A4 sheet.)

I thought I needed some people on these stairs – and one
of them turned out to be Bridget Cherry

The walk started just below the stairs in this picture and related the buildings around Poplar High St and the East India Dock Road to the development of the area from the 17th century to the current day.

The most recent building mentioned on the walk is also one of the more controversial. Robin Hood Gardens, completed in 1972, has been encouraged by the council to get into very poor condition, partly by simple neglect but also by using it as a sink estate and permitting overcrowding. They want to demolish it and rebuild on the rather large site (and some people would undoubtedly make large amounts of money from doing so.)

Narrow balconies overlook the park in the centre of the development; the outer side has wider ‘streets in the sky’ for access

Many tenants like the estate (though some hate it) and it still seems basically an excellent solution to a difficult problem, and a unique one. I was more than surprised to find it was not a listed building – it is a major work by two of our best-known architects – and shocked to hear that it was turned down. I’m sure the grounds must have been more to do with the politics of the situation than architecture.

Almost a country park in the middle of a city

Growing salad crops

You can read more about the area and the walk and see more pictures on ‘My London Diary‘

On Sunday Sikhs marched through London on the 25th anniversary of the storming by the Indian Army of their holiest site, the Golden Temple at Amritsar. Indira Ghandi had ordered the assault to capture or kill Sikh separatists who were in the compound at a time of year when it was also full of pilgrims.

It’s hard to be sure how many people were killed by the attack, but independent estimates suggest around 5,000, including many women and children, as well as hundreds of Indian soldiers and a relatively small number of Sikh militants.

A few months later, Mrs Ghandi’s Sikh bodyguards killed her. Following the assassination, high-ranking Indian politicians from her Congress Party incited mobs to indiscrimately attack and murder Sikhs, and thousands were massacred.  Sikhs continue to fight for a nation of their own, Khalistan, through groups such as Babbar Khalsa International, and repression against them has also continued; Sikhs allege that  “over 250,000 Sikhs have been killed by in an orchestrated genocide by the Indian government.”

You can see more about the march and rally before the march on My London Diary, where there are many more pictures.

One aspect that worried me was an attempt by the police to censor the placards before the start of the march. The officer in charge, Superintendent Raj Kohli, the Met’s highest-ranking Sikh officer, objected to a number of them because of the images on them, and a woman officer said that some might cause offence, particularly because they might be seen by children.

I didn’t think that the arguments the police put forward were in fact valid. Children would be unlikely to be able to interpret the images in any detail when they were being carried on placards in a demonstration, and I think they would have rather less impact on children than on adults. The placard that Kohli was most insistent about was different, showing a simple graphic of a person’s head seen in a gun sight, and the name of a prominent Indian politician who was implicated in the massacres of Sikhs.  He saw this a clearly a provocation to violence, while I would see it more as an expression of what should the persons concerned deserve.

Although some agreement seemed to have been reached between Kohli and the protesters, many if not all of the disputed placards were carried in the march and can be seen in the pictures on My London Diary.

Kohli was carrying an A4 printout of the symbol of Babbar Khalsa International, a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act, 2000.  This was present, along with the name Babbar, on many of the placards and banners that people carried in the march. So far as I saw the police took no action over this, perhaps because it would have involved dealing with thousands among those marching.

BKI and attempt to establish Khalistan certainly appears to have the support of a large fraction of British Sikhs, and more obviously so than when I started photographing Sikh events, perhaps around ten years ago.  It’s only aim appears to be self-determination for the Sikh nation and I can see little reason why our government should feel a need to include it on the list of banned organisations. Though of course I wouldn’t want to express any approval or support for it, as that would almost certainly be an offence.

It’s hard not to agree that America is the root cause of much of the current troubles in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, but while it may be an ‘American War’ that Pakistan is currently fighting, it is rather harder to see what the solution should be.

The placards say ‘Khilafah – only way to stop America and Terror’  but at the moment a Caliphate isn’t on offer from any of the sides in Pakistan, and Muslims are capable of killing Muslims without the encouragement of the USA.

It’s also hard to disagree with Hizb ut-Tahrir when they talk about many (if not all) Muslim regimes as corrupt. But those areas under attack by Pakistani and US forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan have seen terrible repression, particularly of women, under Taliban rule. If any of the speakers mentioned this, I missed it.

I missed too hearing what the women who made up almost half the march thought, as none were called to speak. At the two rallies they stood apart, some way from the speakers – the party insists on the segregation of sexes in public activities, insists on the covering of women’s bodies except for face and hands, forbids women ot be in private with men except immediate family, bans them from important public office and insists on their duty to obey their husbands.

More about the march and more pictures on My London Diary.