Christmas Displays – Back in December 2003 I walked and cycled over much of the outer areas of London to photograph the Christmas displays that people had put on the outside of their houses, sometimes collecting large amounts for charities. Twenty years ago I was of course 20 years younger and considerably fitter – and had been told by my doctor to get a lot of exercise after a rather minor heart op at the start of the year.
My heart attack had coincided with a couple of other important events in my life at the end of 2002, the start of my change to digital photography with the purchase of a Nikon D100, one of the first affordable digital SLR cameras capable of professional quality, and of a folding bicycle. This camera and the Brompton were both essential to this project, as was the Internet, where I appealed for details of where the more interesting displays could be found.
Cameras have improved considerably over that 20 years and photographically it would be much easier to take pictures like this now, with cameras having a greater dynamic range and also many incorporating easy to use HDR modes. This was one of the few projects I’ve carried out where the use of a tripod – a sturdy Manfrotto – was essential, and for some images I was able to combine two different exposures.
Here with minor corrections is what I wrote about these pictures 20 years ago:
Christmas is on its way, and houses all over Britain are beginning to display the signs, some more tastefully than others. Some I’ve found are rather impressive, others I find amusing, but your opinions may well differ.
Christmas has almost completely lost the connection it had to the nativity, and the ‘Christmas Story’ is now one of cash registers and a Santa Claus who owes as much to advertising as to Saint Nicholas. Originally of course this was a pagan festival, from over 4000 years ago, the feast of the goddess of nature, an occasion for drinking, gluttony and gifts, so perhaps we really are getting down to our roots for once.
Many celebrations, especially those for Yule (the ‘wheel’ or sun) were on the winter solstice – the shortest daylight, usually on Dec 21 or 22, when the rebirth of the sun was celebrated. Pope julius I decided it would be a good idea for Christians to celebrate the birth of Jesus on Dec 25th back in 350AD, so that Christians could go on celebrating Yule and not feel bad about it, celebrating the birth of the son while others were celebrating the birth of the sun.
Christmas as we know it only came in around the 1500s in Germany, many of its customs only arriving here when Victoria married Albert. Our modern picture of Santa developed in the USA in the mid nineteenth century, particularly in the drawings of Thomas Nast for ‘Harpers’, and the jovial fat bearded man in red and white was well-established before Haddon Sundbloom annexed him for his fantastically successful coke adverts. Although Coca-Cola didn’t invent Santa, it was largely the power of their advertising that sold him around the world.
These decorated houses, often an attempt to go one better than the Joneses, have become an urban folk art; one of the glories of folk art is that it is seldom polite or tasteful, sometimes incredibly kitsch and over the top. Despite my misgivings on grounds of religion, ecology, upbringing and reserve I love them. At the very least they add a little colour to our lives.
Some of the better pictures are on the page linked above, which also has some more about my travels around London in search of them, but others are rather scattered around on other pages from the month.
Now I’m out to get a little exercise, with a five mile walk to a meal with relatives which has become a tradition with us on Boxing Days. Last year I wrote a little about this on >Re:Photo in the post Boxing Day Walks (and Rides) with pictures from 2005.
Christmas Greetings From My Flickr Albums – There are only 17 pictures out of the roughly 30,000 on my Flickr account which have the tag ‘Christmas‘, and some of those are only because I’ve mentioned the festival in my description rather than for anything in the picture. Although I’ve taken many pictures of Santas on the streets of London, almost all of these have been in the last 25 years, and so far I’ve mainly put pictures from earlier times onto Flickr – mostly from 1970-1994 and mainly of London. Wishing you all a happy Christmas. But if you get too fed up with the nonsense on TV or even with family and friends there are plenty of pictures on-line to look at!
Former Cobblers, Hackney Road, Cambridge Heath, Tower Hamlets, 1983 36u-62
I took this in 1983, looking through the window of a cobblers shop which had recently closed but still had posters with the message ‘It wouldn’t be Christmas without Pirelli’. Santa Claus wasn’t entirely the invention of Coca-Cola though his popularity and appearance owes much to their Christmas advertising from the 1930s. The article on the link to Wikipedia above has more about Santa than you will ever want to know. This year I produced a short run of poorly printed versions of this picture as Christmas cards for selected personal friends, mainly photographers. This picture is in my album London 1983 and also appears in Tower Hamlets – Black and White.
Auto-Sparks Ltd, Electric Harness Manufacturers, Wincolmlee, Hull, 1982 33g21
In my Hull Black and White album you can find this picture and the long description below:
An unprepossessing 20th century industrial building on or close to Wincolmlee where electrical harnesses – bundles of cables and connectors – for various makes of cars and other vehicles were made. Apparently Auto-Sparks Ltd Hull dates back to an electrical business founded by Mr Henry Colomb on Beverley Rd in the 1920s. Auto-Sparks Ltd was incorporated in April 1942 and a history page on the web site of its successor company, Autosparks reproduces the original company logo from 1954 when it was registered as a trade mark.
After the original owner and manager retired in the 1980s Auto-Sparks got into difficulties and collapsed in 1991. It was bought and moved to Sandiacre Nottingham by R D Components who were specialists in classic motorbike and car harnesses and they took over the name as Autosparks, and in 2005 became Autosparks Ltd.
This picture was taken in December, and my attention was drawn to the building by the Christmas decorations drawn on its first-floor windows. And by wondering whatever an electric harness was.
The SI unit of electric charge is of course the Coulomb, named after Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, so this electical business founded by Mr Henry Colomb would appear to be a remarkable example of nominative determinism.
Father Christmas, High Rd, Willesden, Brent, 1990, 90-12c-55
In 1990 in Brent I took two Christmas pictures in 1990, one in black and white in the album 1990 London Photos of a Santa holding a number of figures and with a Harrods tag ‘£22’ standing on a box containing a caravan TV aerial kit.
The second picture from 1990 Brent was a café window in colour with Christmas decorations and an advert posted in it for flats to let in Station Road. Also in the window is a poster for Sickle Cell Awareness Day, 15th December 1990, to the left of which you can see part of me reflected as I made the image, along with reflections of a parked van and the shops and flats on the opposite side of the road. This is one of many pictures in my album 1990 London Colour.
Christmas, Car Sales, High St, Norwood, Croydon, 1991, 91-1b-22
From a South London used car showroom in the album 1991 London Photos is a 1987 car with its features and price described in notices on the windscreen complete with Christmas decorations. Usually when photographing interiors through windows I tried to work close to the glass and eliminate reflections so far as possible, but here I deliberately moved the black glove I was wearing to include the church across the road.
Christmas Lights, West End, Westminster, London, 1986, 86c123-32
Pictures at night are so much easier now with digital cameras as you can work with much shorter exposures – this was probably taken on ISO400 film, while now at night I often work and get better results at 4 stops faster – the ISO6400 setting on my camera. Also being able to see what you have taken immediately makes it much easier than having to wait until the film was processed and printed.
In the same albums and taken within a minute or two of the previous picture was this picture of Eros and the advertising display. The clock tells us that I made this at 16.06, around 15 minutes after sunset. Of course Eros isn’t really Eros, but Anteros, designed by Sir Alfred Gilbert to commemorate the philanthropic work of Lord Shaftesbury and called by him ‘The God of Selfless Love‘ – “as opposed to Eros or Cupid, the frivolous tyrant.”
But Piccadilly is a place at Christmas where some like to come and celebrate drunkenly and Anteros needs boarding up for protection and instead of seeing the fountain we see the hoardings with vintage Christmas images and greetings from The London Standard which featured Eros on its masthead.
Finally in 1988 in Shepherds Bush and now the first image in my album 1988 London Colour. This shop was a pet shop and the window is full of Christmas Stockings for cats and dogs and boxes of ‘Good Boy’ treats. Even the scratching post has some green ribbon attached. Along with some rather horrible artificial tree-like objects complete with blue and silver hanging balls. It seemed a particularly bleak image of the capitalist commercialisation of a religious festival.
Marco Polo House, The Observer, Queenstown Rd, Battersea, Wandsworth, 1989 89-7l-13
One of few interesting postmodern buildings in London, Marco Polo House, designed by architect Ian Pollard for The Observer and British Satellite Broadcasting this was completed in 1989. It was demolished in 2014, probably to prevent it being listed and replaced by the rather anodyne flats now on the site.
Marco Polo House, The Observer, Queenstown Rd, Battersea, Wandsworth, 1989 89-7l-12
Another picture of Marco Polo House with cars parked giving a good impression of the impressive scale. At right is the railway viaduct with a train passing on the line from Victoria Station. This is the southern end of the building with a fairy mature tree newly planted in the foreground; it only briefly survived the demolition of the building.
Marco Polo House, The Observer, Queenstown Rd, Battersea, Wandsworth, 1989 89-7l-14
This giant stone carried the name of the building and I think was at the north end of the building on the corner of Sopwith Way or perhaps a little down that minor side-street. At right you can see a little of Marco Polo House and above it the unmistakable chimneys of Battersea Power Station, with the cranes with which McAlpine had removed the roof in the then recently abandoned scheme to convert it into a theme park.
Chelsea Bridge, River Thames, Battersea, Wandsworth, 1989 89-7m-64
I walked up Queenstown Road to the foot of Chelsea Bridge and went a few yards down the path into Battersea Park to take this picture looking across the Thames to Pimlico.
Although this was the side of an ancient river crossing fordable when the tide was low, the first bridge here was only opened in 1858 to provide access from north of the river to the new Battersea Park opened in the same year. This was a rather narrow and flimsy looking structure was named Victoria Bridge – and at the other end of the park Albert Bridge was built a few years later. Both were originally toll bridges but failed to be a commercial success and were taken over by the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1877 with the tolls being abolished in 1879.
It was renamed Chelsea Bridge when it was found to be structurally unsound to avoid any embarrassment to the Queen should it collapse but it was not until 1926 that a replacement was proposed. In the meantime the old bridge had appeared in many paintings, drawings and photographs, although the bridge that inspired Billy Strayhorn – probably from the painting by Whistler or Turner to name his impressionist composition Chelsea Bridge, was almost certainly of Battersea Bridge. The jazz standard was first recorded by the Ellington orchestra in 1941, after both had been replaced by more modern structures. Somehow I think the tune would have been less successful had it been named Battersea Bridge.
The current bridge opened in 1937 and “was the first self-anchored suspension bridge in Britain, and was built entirely with materials sourced from within the British Empire.” The main cables attach to the end of the bridge deck rather than onto the bank.
Marco Polo House, The Observer, Queenstown Rd, Battersea, Wandsworth, 1989 89-7m-66
I turned around and walked back down Queenstown Road, and could not resist taking more pictures of Marco Polo House from the opposite side of the road.
Towering above it was the giant gasholder and I carefully chose my position to make this into an unlikely addition to the post-modern building. This was the largest and seventh gasholder to be built on the site for the Nine Elms gas works which was further down Nine Elms Lane and was built in 1932 to the innovative designs of the German company Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg and so was the MAN holder. It and the other remaining holders were finally demolished in 2015.
Marco Polo House, The Observer, Queenstown Rd, Battersea, Wandsworth, 1989 89-7m-51
And this was the final picture I took of Marco Polo House on the walk, showing the south end of the building and attaching to it at right two of the Battersea Power Station chimneys.
Convent of Notre Dame, School, Battersea Park Rd, Battersea, Wandsworth, 1989 89-7m-53
I turned back onto Battersea Park Road to make this photograph of the former convent school, with the MAN gasholder appearing on the right edge of the picture. The Sisters of Notre Dame came to Battersea in 1870 to provide Catholic education for the poor children of the area with a public elementary school and also a private day school. In 1901 it reopened as Notre Dame High school for Young Ladies and in 1906 increased in size as it began to admit girls on LCC County Scholarships and a new wing was opened in 1907. Until 1919 there were some dormitories for boarders which were then converted to more classrooms and a library.
The grammar school expanded further after the Second World War and became a comprehensive in 1972, closing in 1982 when the building was sold. It was later converted into flats as The Cloisters.
Free Palestine, Free Ahad Tamimi – Six years ago Palestine was also in the news and on Saturday 23rd December 2017 I photographed three protests in London related to the country and its occupation by Israel. These were protests called at short notice and there were larger protests in the New Year.
Jerusalem, Capital of Palestine – US Embassy
Outside the US Embassy – still then in Grosvenor Square – a rally by Palestinians and their supporters condemned the decision by US President Trump’s announcement that the US Embassy in Israel will move to Jerusalem.
Jerusalem is one of the oldest of world cities and is of great significance to three major world religions. It was where Soloman built the first temple after the city had been captured by his father, King David around three thousand years ago. Here Jesus was tried and crucified around 30AD, and here that the prophet Mohammed died and ascended into heaven in 632AD, and the Temple Mount is the third holiest site in Islam with the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque.
Jerusalem was from 1923 until 1948 the capital of Palestine, and in 1948 was declared by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 to be an international city. After the 1967 Six Day War Israel gained control of the whole of the city and in 1980 Israel passed its Jerusalem Law declaring it the “complete and united” capital of Israel. The United Nations Security Council responded with ‘Resolution 478 on 20 August 1980, which declared that the Jerusalem Law is “a violation of international law“, is “null and void and must be rescinded forthwith“. Member states were called upon to withdraw their diplomatic representation from Jerusalem.’
Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem was a clear dismissal of this UN resolution and was condemned by those who spoke at the rally. They called for peace and freedom for Palestine and also condemned the increase in hate crimes following Trump’s announcements and the brutal repression of protests against it in Palestine, including the shooting of peaceful protesters, one in a wheelchair by Israeli forces, and the beating up and detention of 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi and members of her family.
The protest invited people to “discover more” about M&S and to boycott the Israeli goods they sell
The Revolutionary Communist Group held a weekly protest outside Marks & Spencer’s flagship store on Oxford Street for 13 years as a part of their ‘Victory to the Intifada‘ campaign in support of freedom for Palestine and an end to the Israeli military occupation of Palestine.
They point out that M&S support Israel by selling goods produced their including the illegal sale of some items produced in the occupied territories and urge shoppers to boycott M&S and support the growing BDS campaign – Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions.
They say many British companies including Marks and Spencer are collaborators with the apartheid regime in Israel and call for the release of all Palestinian political prisoners, many of whom are being held effectively indefinitely without trial or have been sentenced in unfair trials. Israel has reacted to the BDS campaign with a number of schemes including campaigns in both the Tory and Labour parties. Many of the controversies about anti-Semitism in the Labour party and elsewhere are a part of this orchestrated anti-BDS campaign, particularly directed against Jeremy Corbyn for his very public support for freedom for Palestine.
Today’s protest was a special one called to demand the immediate release of 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi, beaten up and arrested by Israeli soldiers at her home in the village of Nabi Saleh in the occupied West Bank at 4am on Tuesday 19 December.
Another group of protesters calling for the release of Ahed Tamimi were in Trafalgar Square to condemn the kidnap, beating up and arrest of 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi by Israeli soldiers at 4am on Tuesday 19 December, and the later arrest of her mother Nariman Tamimi and cousin Nour Tamimi, and called for their immediate release.
The two younger women had earlier slapped Israeli soldiers in their occupied village of Nabi Saleh when their 14 year old male cousin was shot in the face by Israeli soldiers. Among those taking part in the protest were some who knew Ahed and her family personally and had visited them in their village of Nabi Saleh where regular protests are brutally repressed by the Israeli army.
Ahed’s father Bassem Tamini was also in some of the photographs the protesters held and he has been detained by the military many times in the past.
This was a fairly small protest in front of the National Gallery and had been going for some time when two men turned up to shout at the protesters and disrupt it.
They tell the protesters that Palestine will never be free and that Israel has offered peace, but the protesters reply that Israel has never been prepared to make a serious offer of peace with justice. When a two state solution seemed possible following the Oslo accords, Israel prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated for having signed them and Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, both opposed to the peace, took power in Israel, and the building of settlements on occupied land tripled.
The two men told the protesters they should “go home” which seemed a peculiarly stupid and insensitive comment as some of those present had lost their homes in Palestine when they were forced out of them by Israel.
Both of the men were well-known Zionists who have attempted to disrupt other protests calling for boycotts of Israel and supporting Palestine. Their shouting and disruption had the effect of calling more attention to the protest calling for the release of Ahed Tamini. After some minutes they were joined by a third Zionist, and angry woman who joined them to scream a message of hate and then left.
Eventually police arrived and told two men that they should behave themselves and suggested they leave. They didn’t go but quietened down considerably. The following year after even more aggressively disruptive behaviour at a pro-Palestine protest one of the two was fined and issued with a restraining order under the Public Order Act.
One of the protesters complained to the officers about the racist comments the two had made to him, but the police showed no interest. The protest continued but it was soon time for me to catch my train home.
Kirtling Street to Battersea Power Station & the Dogs continues my walk which began at Vauxhall on Friday 28th July 1989 with Nine Elms Riverside. The previous post was More from Nine Elms Riverside.
Works, Kirtling St, Nine Elms, Wandsworth, 1989 89-7l-36
The riverside path still ends at Kirtling Street but Greenham’s aggregate wharf has now been replaced by the central site of the Tideway 25km London super sewer project underneath the River Thames due for completion in 2025, when it should prevent 95% of sewage spills in London entering the river. It was here that the two tunnel boring machines were lowered 50 metres below ground to make their way east and west to produce the central section of the tunnel between Fulham and Bermondsey.
T & W Farmiloe, paint factory, Cringle St, Nine Elms, Wandsworth, 1989 89-7l-21
This bricked up entry in a tall brick wall on the corner of Cringle Street was for many years all that remained of the 50-year-old glass, lead, paint and sanitary ware manufacturing company which had opened a large 4-storey factory here in 1884 with a frontage on Nine Elms Lane. The Farmiloe brothers had set up in business in Westminster in the 1840s as glass cutters and taken over the Island Lead Mills in Limehouse in 1885, and expanded with a brass foundry on Horseferry Road, a varnish works in Mitcham and this large warehouse in Nine Elms, producing everything a plumber could need. In the twentieth century their main business moved to sanitary ware and paint, including ‘Nine Elms’ white lead paint which was made at this white-lead factory built around 1910. I think the company which had trademarked ‘Nine Elms’ had long vacated the site before it was dissolved in 1988. The trademark passed to Akzo Nobel and expired in 2005.
Works, Sleaford St, Nine Elms, Wandsworth, 1989 89-7l-23
Sleaford Street was on the eastern side of one of the earliest developments in the area, Battersea New Town, begun in the 1790s and was first developed on its west side the by Southwark butcher William Sleford. Apparently later “One side of Sleaford Street was formerly derided as Ginbottle Row, while the other was called Soapsuds Bay, presumably because it accommodated laundresses.”
I can find no signs of the building in this picture and most of the west side of Sleaford Street is now occupied by a large block of flats extending back from the corner with Nine Elms Lane completed around 2008. John Oswald and Sons had a foundry in the street from 1871 and this may be their building.
At the left of the picture you can see the Battersea gasholder, demolished 2014-7 and at right Battersea Power Station.
Battersea Power Station, Battersea Park Rd, Nine Elms, Wandsworth, 1989 89-7l-24
A slightly unusual view of the power station six years after its final closure. Planning permission was obtained for it conversion to a theme park, but the scheme was halted when money ran out in March 1989. By this time the roof had been removed, presumably by McAlpine whose name adorns the building, which led to considerable subsequent deterioration of the steelwork and foundations.
After various failed redevelopment plans the power station was eventually refurbished as an expensive tourist destination surrounded by new homes, a hotel, shops and restaurants and a new London Underground station. McAlpine was the construction manager for the final phase three of the development.
Battersea Power Station, Battersea Park Rd, Nine Elms, Wandsworth, 1989 89-7l-25
Another view of the wrecked power station, along with a rather unconvincing double at the right with a view of the abandoned scheme.
Battersea Dogs Home, Battersea Park Rd, Battersea, Wandsworth, 1989 89-7l-11
Then there was no way back to the riverside before reaching Chelsea Bridge at the north end of Queenstown Road. A long detour away from the river around the power station and gas works site took me past Battersea Dogs Home where I took this picture with one dog begging on the top of the wall and another emerging from the Exit to the building. There is now a rather larger building on the site and it has added ‘and Cats’ to its remit.
The description of my walk will continue in a later post.
A Murky Solstice in Bethnal Green – Quite a few years earlier I’d photographed some of the panels on the south side of the Museum of Childhood next to Museum Gardens on Cambridge Heath Road.
The Grade II listed iron-framed building was originally part of the extensive museum complex in South Kensington built in South Kensington in 1856-7, but was taken down in 1865-7 when the V&A building there was extended and reassembled in Bethnal Green where it opened as Bethnal Green Museum in 1872.
Since then it has gone through a number of identities as a museum, housing agricultural products and works of art, then an art museum with a growing children’s collection, and in 1974 it became the Museum of Childhood. Renovated and extended in 2005-6 it work on this was just finishing though it had reopend when I took these pictures. It closed again in 2019 to be transformed into ‘Young V&A’.
My interest was in the mosaic panel in each bay facing the park illustrating agriculture and the arts and sciences which had been designed by F.W. Moody, the Instructor in Decorative Art at the National Art Training School and responsible for much decoration at the V&A and elsewhere in South Kensington and assembled by his female students in the South Kensington Museum mosaic class.
I’d been asked to supply a picture of these mosaics to be used in the book ‘The Romance of Bethnal Green’ by Cathy Ross, ISBN 978-1-901992-74-8 along with some of my other pictures I’d taken on film in the 1980s and 90s, but I wasn’t happy with the quality of the film image.
So after lunch on Thursday 21st December 2006 I set out for Bethnal Green to make a replacement digital image using my Nikon D200. But I hadn’t really worked out how long it would take me to get there across London and that the sunset was at 15.53. Nor that it was a rather dull day with some slight fog in the city. By the time I was on site it was decidedly gloomy.
But there was enough light for me to made a decent job of it with the digital camera, taking the colour images in this post (and more) which I later converted to black and white for publication. And after taking these pictures I took a walk up Cambridge Heath Road to the Regents Canal and made a few more pictures around there before
Here’s the paragraph I wrote at the time:
Thursday was a cold dark day, the mercury hanging on zero and grey in the air, a fog which never quite cleared. I needed just one more picture for the project on Bethnal Green and emerged from the Underground half an bour before the shortest day of the year officially turned to night. Having done what I had to do, I kept walking as it got darker still, and more lights came on.
End BP’s British Museum Greenwash – On Sunday 20th December 2015 I went with ‘actor-vists’ from ‘BP or Not BP?’ to photograph the play they were staging uninvited in the British Museum’s Great Court depicting ‘BP executives’ giving a farewell party to departing Museum director ‘Neil MacGregor’.
Climate activists were calling on the British Museum and other art institutions to stop accepting sponsorship from BP and other companies whose activities are accelerating global warming. This protest came just a few days after the Paris climate talks in which some were arrested for protesting inside the Louvre over its sponsorship by major oil companies Total and Eni.
It was a part of a whole series of protests in the UK which eventually led the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, National Galleries Scotland, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Opera House all to end sponsorship by BP. Their protests continued later in the British Museum, which in June this year (2023) finally appears to have decided to end its agreements with BP after 27 years. The only major cultural institution still partnering with BP is now the Science Museum’s education academy.
BP’s contribution to the Museum’s budget was relatively small, a fraction of a percent, but on my first visit for some years around ten years ago I was surprised and rather shocked by the engraved message on the wall of the rotunda in the Great Court and the many times the BP logo appeared on display texts. It also featured prominently on the publicity for the museum’s major exhibitions, including Vikings, Ming, Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation, the Mexican Day of the Dead and Sunken Cities, the last two perhaps particularly unfortunate as BP has been given the largest corporate criminal fine in history of $18.7 billion for the underwater Deepwater Horizon oil spill which caused huge pollution of the ocean around the coast of Mexico.
I’d got to know the British Museum quite well in the 1970s when my wife worked for a couple of years in the British Library which was then based there, writing entries for the catalogue and serving readers at the desk there. What had been rather dark lobbies around the central hall had been transformed into a large open area, but also the Museum had become very much a space promoting the “World’s Biggest CORPORATE CRIMINAL.’ The open space did however in December 2015 provide a great theatre for ‘BP or Not BP?’
Around 20 performers had made their way into the museum carrying props and banners in bags, under coats and in pockets, and grouped in the Great Court in front of the Rotunda, close to where the message of thanks to BP is engraved in the wall. I think there was not a great deal of security although the performance had been quite widely advertised probably because many Museum staff are also opposed to or embarrassed by BP sponsorship.
The play then began with the cast, dressed as BP executives, having a party and singing a song about departing director Neil MacGregor giving BP “cheap branding and a social license to operate through all the oil spills” to the tune of Robbie Williams’s ‘Angels’, then leaving the stage to three ‘BP executives’ who were shortly joined by the actor playing Neil MacGregor, who they thanked effusively for his support, listing and commenting about some of their activities including the various exhibitions.
‘MacGregor”s reply to their thanks included various revealing quotes from e-mails he had written to BP staff which had been revealed by Freedom Of Information requests, and he was plied with oily champagne and a cake representing the world until he collapsed drunk. The BP executives then discussed how they would “befriend and bribe” new director, Hartwig Fischer, with “even more lavish dinner parties! … Business meetings! … Opening nights! … VIP Previews! … Exhibitions! … Screenings! … Drinks!” before ending with a toast and singing together to the tune of Auld Lang Syne a song whose chorus was (with some slight variations):
For all the OIL and lies, my dears, For all the OIL and lies, We gave a tiny sum of cash Meanwhile the planet fries.
The group had been approached by a Museum security officer as they began the performance and had assured him it would be fairly short and they would then leave and I think the museum decided not to call the police. As the play ended they cleaned up the floor and marched out singing, pausing briefly in the foyer and then giving a second performance on the portico outside before we went to a nearby pub where I made a hasty edit and handed over pictures to them.
You can still see a video about the performance on the on the BP or NOT BP? web site, along with several of my pictures. I had taken a large number of pictures and those on My London Diary are largely the out-takes from the large set for the performers.
Hull Revisited December 2005: Usually I sit down to write these posts and tell some kind of story about the events or places that I photographed on a particular day or walk or project. And the pictures in this article were all taken on 17-19th December during a short visit to Hull.
But when I looked at them they didn’t look as you see them now, and my first thought was about the colour and quality of the 49 images that I’d posted to the web back in 2005, and rather than writing about them I decided to try and improve them a little. Going back to the original RAW images taken on a Nikon D200 would have been the best way to do this, but would have been very time-consuming and instead I simply worked on the 600×400 pixel jpeg images that I’d put on-line.
Back in 2005 the RAW conversion software available was pretty much in its infancy and often required considerable judgement to get anything like the most from the images. Using the current version of Lightroom would have enabled me to improve the images considerably.
But time was short, and instead I spent perhaps 30 seconds on each image, bringing them into Photoshop in batches and then using its auto-color and and auto curve correction on each. On a few I had to modify the auto settings, fading the correction or tweaking the curve a little, but most were done fully automatically, and the improvements in some cases were dramatic.
We’d gone to Hull mainly to celebrate the 60th birthday of an old friend, and stayed at the large and architecturally interesting home of another friend, as well as to visit my mother-in-law in her nursing home. But I found some time to get out and photograph parts of the city I’d first photographed in the 1970s and 1980s as well as find some new scenes to photograph. Here I’ll post a few of them, but you can see more on My London Diary.
Santas Protest For Justice: On Saturday 18th December 2004 I photographed a Christmas-themed protest with most of those taking part wearing Santa outfits.
Fathers4Justice Santas Protest, West End
Fathers4Justice had been in the news in recent months in 2004 with a number of high-profile protests including a couple of men dressed as Batman and Robin who got into the grounds of Buckingham Palace in September 2004. Robin was stopped by police, but Batman managed to shin up a drainpipe and sit on the roof for several hours.
Their protest didn’t get the results they desired, but did lead to a tightening of the law regarding trespass on royal property and other protected sites in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) 2005 and 16 royal, governmental and parliamentary sites were designated in 2007. Robin was charged for carrying a bladed weapon as he was found to have a bladed weapon – a Stanley Knife – in his pocket.
Family courts have a difficult job, and have to deal with some very bitter disputes after relationships have broken up. They do so behind closed doors to protect the children involved, and often the decisions they come to are hard to understand and impossible for some of those concerned to accept. At times they don’t appear to have the wisdom of Solomon!
Since 2004 there have been some changes in the family court system, with the Family Procedure Rules 2010 allowing accredited media representatives to attend – with some exceptions and subject to strict rules on what they can report. And in 2023 a pilot scheme was begun in court in Cardiff, Leeds and Carlisle allowing journalists and legal bloggers to report from Family Courts subject to rules of anonymity.
Fathers4Justice were campaigning for access rights for parents and grandparents to see children after the breakup of relationships. As I wrote in 2004 “although courts may grant this at the moment, where they feel it is in the best interests of the child, there is seldom any enforcement of such decisions. so currently access depends entirely on the cooperation of whichever parent was granted custody.”
Fathers4Justice (and they also include mothers, though fewer than fathers as courts largely award custody to the mothers) want access rights to be enforced and argue that there should be a permanent relationship between children and both parents.
Many of the Santas carried placards with the message “PUT THE FATHER BACK INTO XMAS” and some carried photographs of the children they were being prevented from seeing. There was also a picture of David Blunkett in a Santa Hat, as the protest came four days after the then Home Secretary was forced to resign following revelations over his affair with Kimberly Quinn, then the publisher of The Spectator. He was forced to resign after having speeded up the visa application by her nanny. Their affair had ended but Blunkett had gone to court to demand access to her two-year-old child, claiming he was the father. He also claimed to be the father of a second child she was then expecting, but later DNA tests showed this was not the case.
Fathers4 Justice met in Green Park close to the Underground station and I was able to talk with them and take photographs before the march set off along Piccadilly. Along with the Santas there were also some elves and a Spiderman. I took some more pictures and left them at Piccadilly Circus.
Scroll down the December 2004 page on My London Diary for pictures and text.
Chelsea Manning, Kurdistan & Syria – Three protests in London on Saturday 17th December 2016.
Vigil on Chelsea Manning’s 29th birthday – Trafalgar Square
A silent vigil on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square marked the 29th birthday of trans-gender whistleblower Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, jailed for 35 years in 2013, whose courageous leaks revealed war crimes by US, UK and other governments.
A Queer Strike protester and veteran peace activist Bruce Kent
Working for the US Army as a specialist intelligence analyst as Bradley Manning she released almost 750,000 documents to Wikileaks in 2010 showing the US, UK and other governments’ war crimes and corruption in Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Israel & the Palestinian Authority, Peru, Venezuela and elsewhere. Some were classified and many others were highly sensitive and incriminating. In 2013 she was sentenced to 35 years and held in the maximum security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.
The London vigil was a part of an international day of action for her release. Since she came out as a trans woman in 2013 she had been repeatedly harassed by the military in prison and twice in 2016 had attempted suicide. Protesters around the world called on President Obama to release her on the basis of the prison time she had already served before he left office. The following month he commuted her sentence to around seven years and she was released from jail. She spent a further year in 2019-2020 after she refused to testify to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Kurds, many wearing or waving the flag of Free Kurdistan called on the civilised world to recognise the sacrifices made by the Peshmerga in fighting for freedom and against Islamic extremism in Iraq and Syria.
The Peshmerga is the army of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq, first formed in the18th century as border guards but more recently fighting for Kurdish autonomy, although it also includes Assyrian and Yazidi units. Iraqi Kurdistan is an autonomous region of Iraq, and under the Iraqi constitution the Pershmerga is responsible for the security of the region.
They played a key role in US missions against al-Qaeda after 9/11and were with other Kurdish forces now fighting against ISIS with some support from the USA. But the USA was refusing to directly supply any weapons except through the Iraqi government who were failing to pass any on the the Pershmerga as they feared they would be used to promote an independent Kurdistan. And in London people seemd to be clearly calling for a free Kurdistan.
The result of this failure to pass on weapons is that the force is poorly armed, mainly using Soviet-era weapons they captured in earlier Iraq uprisings and now weapons captured from ISIS in 2014. This protest called for greater support to provide them with modern weapons and other support they lack including ammunition, ambulances and military communications equipment.
Doctors & Nurses Die-in for Syria – Old Palace Yard, Westminster
A short walk away in front of the Houses of Parliament Healthcare workers held a die-in at Parliament in solidarity with the Syrian people.
They called for an end to the bombing of civilians, hospitals and schools by the Assad regime and for the UK government to put pressure on the Syrian government to allow the delivery of aid. They urged the UK to make airdrops of aid, provide safe passage to all those trapped and grant asylum to refugees.
The protest was organised by Medact’s Arms and Militarisation (MAM) group along with Syria solidarity activist groups and individuals including the Syrian British Medical Society.
Peter Tatchell holds a poster
Between 2014 and 2021 when the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme closed, the UK accepted around 20,000 Syrian refugees. When adjusted to reflect the population size of European countries this puts the UK well down among European countries. For the total number of resettled refugees from 2008-20021 the UK comes fifth behind Germany, Sweden, Norway and France but adjusted for population size we are in 10th position.
But along with the USA, Britain failed to take any effective action in support of the Syrian revolution and the crimes against the people committed by the Assad regime, and were severely outplayed by Russia who backed Assad.
