March for Peace and Liberty – 2005 Eighteen years ago on Saturday 24th September around 50,000 of us were marching through London for peace and calling for the withdrawal of forces from Iraq.
The protest, called by Stop the War Coalition, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) coincided with an even larger protest in Washington close to the White House.
Organisers of the Washington protest claimed that around 300,000 took part, while US police said the half that number was “as good a guess as any.” Police estimates of the London march were, as usual more political than based on any reality, and their figure of 10,000 was laughably low.
I had developed my own simple methods to assess numbers. For smaller protests I’d simply stop at a suitable point and count those passing. When numbers got a little larger I’d count in groups of roughly ten, larger still groups of hundreds. Though sometimes that hundred might only have been 80 or sometimes 125 the overall figure was probably within around ten percent of the actual total.
But with really large protests such as this, well over the police figure of 10,000, any form of counting is too time-consuming and tedious. I’d often still try to get a rough figure by counting for a minute where I was taking photographs a few times as the protest went part, and then make a rough estimate using the time the whole protest took to pass me. Typically the answer this gave me was around half the number claimed by the march organisers and anything around four to ten times the figure release by the police and often quoted by news media.
It’s a little difficult to find the text I wrote about the protest on My London Diary in 2005 as there are no headings in the text column on the September page, with headings and images in a separate unlinked column to the right – later I improved the site design to unite text and pictures and provided a list of links to stories which remains at the top of the monthly pages. Back in 2005 you simply had to scroll down a long page, and while the headings and text were simple to find, many viewers never managed to find the of text, which ends with a little art criticism. So here it is, with a few minor corrections:
“What a fine mess you’ve got us into” is probably the conclusion of most of the British people about Blair’s decision to join in with Bush’s Iraq invasion in 2003. Quite how many of them turned up on the 24th to march for a British pull-out is a matter of contention. Both police and organisers estimates – ten and a hundred thousand respectively – seem to me extremely unlikely.
So I was there with probably between twenty-five and fifty thousand people, walking across Parliament Square in front of the Houses of Parliament, despite it being a Saturday afternoon, with no business taking place inside, the ban on the use of amplification within a kilometre of parliament was still in force, so the event was a little quieter than usual. Some did choose to defy the ban and the police appeared not to notice.
Gate Gourmet supply in-flight meals for British Airways. It used to be a part of the company, but was separated out, then sold to American management. Rather like what is starting to happen in our National Health Service, and of course British Airways was also originally owned by the nation.
The company takes advantage of a largely Asian labour force living around the edge of the airport, paying them relatively low wages. The new management decided to cut labour costs even more by bringing in casual labour to do much of the work (while apparently employing more managers!) and when the employees held a meeting to protest, they were sacked.
Pressure from both BA and the union (TGWU) led to the company offering to take back some of the sacked workers, but not all, and the strike continues. Some of the strikers came to take part in the rally, to publicise their case as well as call for a withdrawal from Iraq.
Most of the usual people were there at the march, and I took their pictures again – and some are on the site. When the march started I hung around in Parliament Square to watch it go past before walking rather faster than the marchers up Whitehall.
By the time I’d reached Trafalgar Square and waited again for the end of the march to pass, my knee [I’d injured it earlier in the month] was beginning to ache and I didn’t feel up to walking to Hyde Park. I sat down and ate my sandwiches contemplating the new sculpture on the ‘fourth plinth’, ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ by Marc Quinn. This 15ft white marble shows Lapper, an artist born without arms, sitting naked and eight months pregnant, and will stay on the plinth until April 2007.
It is a striking piece of work and was obviously attracting a great deal of attention from the tourists in the square. I took my time sitting and looking at it while I was eating, and then walking round it from all sides (slightly impeded by the preparations for a juvenile TV show to be broadcast from the square the following day.) Lapper herself works with photographs of her body, and this statue is perhaps too like her black and white photographs, with a rather unpleasant surface, sometimes more soap than marble. I found myself thinking thank goodness for the pigeons who were perching on it and doubtless adding their contributions to it.
Its position up there on a plinth is not ideal. This is work that would be best seen from roughly the same level as its base. The other plinths in the square are occupied by men on horses, which raise their figures more suitably above the plinths. Perhaps when it leaves the square a more suitable display place can be found, but its present placing is a great for catalysing debate about disability. Of course another disabled figure dominates the square; Nelson has his back to her and does not need to call upon his blind eye not to see her.
Back in Stockwell: It was the 17th July 1989 before I was able to return to Stockwell and take up my wanderings around south London where I had left off on 4th June.
Stockwell War Memorial, South Lambeth Rd, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-7c-26
Coming out from Stockwell Underground I turned left and came to the war memorial, then on a rather scruffy triangle of grass and litter between the South Lambeth Road and the A3 Clapham Road. This has since been tidied up as Stockwell Memorial Gardens with a mural celebrating others who died in WW2 including war hero Violette Szabó, GC and a the Bronze Woman statue by Aleix Barbat, a tribute to all black Caribbean women.
The Stockwell War Memorial was erected in 1922 to the design of Frank Twydals Dear which attracted praise at the time for its excellent proportion, refined detail and simple lines.
The figure of Remembrance is by sculptor Benjamin Clemens and the clock with a face on all four sides of the tower was donated by the father of one of the 574 men named on the memorial who died on the Somme on 9th August 1916, aged 19, Frederick H S Caiger. He was the only son of Dr Caiger, superintendent of South Western Fever Hospital.
The mural is on the Security Archives in my picture, one of eight deep level shelters built for WW2. Stockwell was used to house US troops. The bunkers were 100ft underground and had 8000 bunks, canteen and hospital facilities.
Scallywag was a pine furniture showroom which had started in an old church in Camberwell in 1970 and moved here in 1985 becoming the largest pine showroom in Europe. It is now based in a rural location in East Sussex as well as in the USA.
Opposite the war memorial on Clapham Road were these two architecturally very different buildings, TDA House and Mecca Bookmakers.
TDA House at 211 was built as the Stockwell Palladium cinema which opened in 1915 but was rebuilt as the Ritz Cinema in 1937. In 1954 it became Classic Cinema and in 1969 the Tatler Film Club showing uncensored blue movies, reverting to the Classic for a couple of years before closing in 1981. A snooker club for some years it then became TDA House for the Tigray Development Association supporting Ethiopian refugees and in 2017 became an Ethiopian restaurant.
Next door at 213 Mecca is now Ladbrokes.
Stockwell Lane, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-7d-53
I didn’t go up Clapham Road but turned into Stockwell Road, walking along her and making this picture just after I had turned into the narrow Stockwell Lane. It shows quite a mixture of buildings, with a recent house close to where I was standing, the back of a row of shops on Stockwell Road and a white building on the opposite side of the road which then had shops on its ground floor, but which is where Stockwell Green United Reform Church moved to after selling its premises on Stockwell Green.
The tower beyond is Birrell House, with an address on Stockwell Road but set well back from it, now managed by Hyde Housing, who took it over from Lambeth council after a vote by residents in 1999. The block, approved by the London County Council in 1964 was an addition to the Stockwell Gardens estate with 68 flats on 18 floors was named after Miss Elsie Birrell, London Undergroud’s first female porter who worked at Stockwell Station during the Second World War.
Garden, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-7d-56
Stockwell in the past was noted for its gardens, particularly the botanical gardens of the Tradescant family and I could resist these fine specimens (certainly not Tradescantia) filling a fairly small front garden near Stockwell Park Crescent.
Villas, 2-4, Stockwell Park Crescent, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-7d-46
Stockwell Park Crescent was laid out in the late 1830s and many of the houses in it date from the 1840s. These were large houses for the middle classes many of whose heads will have worked in the city but wanted to live in the ‘country’ in places such as Stockwell. The small attic rooms will have been for the servants. These were villas rather than the terraces common in urban London and on a crescent which aimed for a more informal and romantic landscape.
Although basically plain, there are classical details on the frontage rather than actual columns, extending to the eaves which give a classical facade. The pair is Grade II listed.
Autumn Equinox & Druids: In 2023 the Autumn Equinox is at 6.50am Greenwich Mean Time on 23rd September (7.50am British Summer Time.) The exact timing timing is when the sun’s path crosses the Equator and it happens at slightly different time each year between the 21st and 24th of September, though mainly on the 22nd or 23rd.
In 2009 the Equinox was at 10.19pm BST on September 22nd, and nine hours earlier I was photographing the Druid Order celebrating the event with their annual ceremony at Primrose Hill in London.
I’ve photographed the Druid Order on a number of occasions both at Primrose Hill and also for the Spring Solstice at Tower Hill in March. I think 2009 was my first visit to the autumn ceremony and probably my best attempt to cover it as a whole, though I did take one or two striking images in a later year.
The ceremony follows closely the pattern laid out possibly a hundred years ago. The Druid Order dates from around 1909 or 1912, though it claims to be a continuation of much older druidry. You can read more about its founder in a lecture by Dr Adam Stout.
All we know about the ancient druids who worshipped in these islands for thousands of years before the Romans came is from their monumental structures such as Stonehenge and the brief and probably rather biased comments of Roman historians which described them as wise but bloodthirsty and given to human sacrifice, staining the altars of Angelsey with blood.
As I commented on My London Diary, “Fortunately today the members of The Druid Order are peace loving. free-thinking and rather photogenic in their white robes, and their main aim is to develop themselves through being rather than through intellectual learning.”
My post on My London Diary describes the Alban Elued (Autumn Equinox) ceremony in some detail both through the text and my photographs, and I won’t repeat myself here. You can read various versions of the ceremony on-line (also called Alban Elfed) and also watch a 49 minute video on the Druid Order website which also has a reflection on the Autumn Equinox.
Before the ceremony I also photographed a memorial plaque to Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826) unveiled in June 2009 at the top of the hill which had been unveiled earlier in the year, marking the site of the first meeting of the Gorsedd of the Bards of the Isle of Britain on Midsummer’s day 1792.
The start of the 18th century saw a revival of interest in druidry by people including Irish freethinker and philosopher John Toland (1670-1722). Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826) invented descriptions of Druid ceremonies and added these, together with some of his poems, into the translations he made of medieval Welsh manuscripts. He also introduced the ‘Awen’ symbol with its three ‘rays’ still used by the Druid Order.
The Druid Order are not the only druids who celebrate the Autumn Equinox on Primrose Hill. A little further west down the hill in a small hawthorn grove you may see the celebration of a smaller group of the Loose Association of Druids of Primrose Hill.
Climate March & Open House: On Sunday 21st September 2014 I photographed the so-called ‘Peoples Climate March’ in central London before going to party with Focus E15 Mothers on the Carpenters Estate where they celebrated a year of their fight to be rehoused in the area.
Peoples Climate March – Embankment
As in this week in 2023, a Climate Summit was taking place in New York in September 2014 and marches were taking place in London and elsewhere to demand divestment in fossil fuels and an end to the domination of politics by the fossil fuel industry which has blocked action against climate change.
Little has actually changed in the 9 years since then. More empty words and promises but too many governments including our own in the UK continuing to encourage exploration for more gas and oil and even approving new coal mines. And carbon levels continue to rise, with at least a 2 degree rise in global temperature now seeming inevitable.
What has changed is that we are all much more aware that climate change is real and are feeling its effects. While many in the Global South have been suffering for years, we in Europe and North America have now felt the new record high temperatures and seen the increasing wild fires and unstable weather caused by global temperature rise.
Last Saturday I photographed another Climate March in London, and it had a rather more serious and committed air than the 2014 event, not just because it was organised by Extinction Rebellion, but because the global situation has worsened, with new an disturbing reports coming out almost weekly.
Back in 2014 I wrote about some length about the march and how it “seemed to have been rather taken over by various slick and rather corporate organisations rather than being a ‘people’s march’ and seemed to lack any real focus.”
Then I commented that “There was one block – the ‘‘Fossil Free Block’ that I felt was worth supporting, and what the whole march should have been about. We have to stop burning oil, coal, gas. We are certainly on our way to disastrous climate change if we fail to severely cut carbon emissions, and probably need to actually reverse some of the rise that has already occurred. Drastic action really is needed.”
The 2023 march was behind a banner ‘NO NEW FOSSIL FUELS’ and another read ‘BIG OIL HAS FRIED US ALL’. But it didn’t get the kind of corporate support of the 2014 event and I don’t think there were any celebrities on the march, though I think some spoke at the rally afterwards, but I had left before this.
Worryingly in 2023 it was much smaller than the 2014 March. Back in 2014 I still felt there was time to avert catastrophe, but now I’m rather less optimistic. It may be too late. I have a feeling that in another nine years time we will be marching again, world leaders will still be talking and doing little and the world will be descending into chaos. Given my age it may still see me out but I worry about those younger.
I left well before the end of the march in 2014 too, catching the Underground to Stratford to get to the Carpenters Estate in Stratford where Focus E15 Mothers were celebrating the first anniversary of their fight against LB Newham’s failure to provide local housing for local people.
It was a year since Newham Council had cut funding for their hostel in Stratford run by East Thames Housing and they had been given eviction notices. Newham, which had a statutory duty to rehouse them told them it would be in private rental property miles away in Birmingham or Hastings or Wales but they wanted to stay within reach of families, jobs support services and friends in London.
Unlike many others they decided to fight the council, and launched an active and successful campaign, later widening their personal fight into “a wider campaign for housing for all, for social housing in London and an end to the displacement of low income households from the capital, with the slogan ‘Social Housing not Social Cleansing’.”
Despite the desperate shortage of social housing in Newham, the council led by Mayor Robin Wales had been trying to sell off its Carpenters Estate for ten years, moving people out and leaving good homes empty. The estate is next door to Stratford Station and Bus Station and so has excellent transport links making it very desirable for development. It is a post-war estate with large numbers of good quality low-rise housing along with three tower blocks. By 2014, most of the properties had “been boarded up for years, empty while thousands wait on the council’s housing list.“
Carpenters Estate June 2014
In June 2014 I’d come with Focus E15 to the estate and had photographed them pasting up large photographs of themselves on some boarded up flats with slogans such as ‘This home needs a family‘ and ‘This family needs a home‘ and ‘These homes need people‘. I’d been told something intersting might happen at the party and wasn’t surprised when after a noisy session by a samba band to mask the sounds of removing some of the metal shutters at the rear of the flats we saw some of the E15 mums and supporters waving at us from a first floor window.
“It was Open House Day in London and courtesy of the Focus E15 Mums, 80-86 Dorian Walk was now one of the houses open to the public, even if not on the official lists, and we formed an orderly queue in best Open House tradition to go in and look at the four flats. “
I was surprised to see what good conditions the flats were in, “fitted kitchens and bathrooms still in good working order – with running water, wallpaper and carpets almost pristine, and the odd piece of abandoned furniture. In one of kitchens, the calendar from 2004 was still on the wall, a reminder that while Londoners are desperate for housing, Newham council has kept this and other perfectly habitable properties empty for ten years.”
Focus E15 occupied the flats for a couple of weeks, leaving after the the Council issued legal eviction notices but their fight continued. Most of them have been rehoused in London and they have supported many others in Newham and neighbouring boroughs to get proper treatment from the council and prevent evictions. Their actions saved the Carpenters Estate and it is now being regenerated, although the plans don’t satisfy many of the groups demands. Their campaigns for housing for people in Newham continue.
Girls, Houses and St John: The second and final set of missing pictures from my walk on June 4th June 1989 – continuing from Stockwell- Chapel, Church, Jazz & Housing
Two girls, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-6b-23
These two feisty young girls demanded to know what I was doing taking pictures in their manor, outside Cassell House close to the corner of Stockwell Rd and insisted that I take their picture. I think that probably they were sisters although they are dressed rather differently. The older of the two is wearing earrings. They are now 34 years older and if they see their picture I hope they like it.
Across the road you can make out Joseph Yates Timber Merchants at 17-19 Stockwell Road, whose shop was still there though boarded up in 2008. Together with the house behind it was replace by a new block shortly after, the shop becoming EZ Homeware and around 2018 a vape shop, Ez Cloudz.
I turned left around the corner into Clapham Road, walking down towards Clapham, crossing Mayflower Road to a group of impressive Queen Anne style red-brick houses – I think this was number 349.
As you can see these houses have quite long front gardens which were then rather overgrown. I think the house had long been divided into flats. There is a broken window on the ground floor which looks as if it is boarded up. These buildings are locally listed
House, 357, Clapham Rd, Clapham, 1989 89-6b-11
This is a bay extension on 355 Clapham Road, which I found more interesting than the Grade II listed house at the left of the picture, the listing text of which begins “Substantial early C19 house, one of a pair of which the other is so much altered as not to be of special interest.” According to the Survey of London the house was first occupied in 1792.
Another view of 357 makes it clear that the two storey bay above a basement garage in the previous picture is indeed a part of this house.
I think its doorway with the two front doors is probably also a later addition, though again I found it of interest, though its listed neighbour retains its original and perhaps more common if still fine entrance. I think my taste in buildings allows rather more for eccentricity while those who make the listings are more concerned with age and consistency of style.
Listed as The Garden House with location ‘Union Mews, Lambeth, London SW9’ in 1981, this is an unusual house at 369 Clapham Road with no front door, though it does have a fairly plain Doric entrance around the side on the left. It was first occupied in 1815, and was built on land acquired by the Duke of Bedford in the early 18th century and let by him to Robert Robson. There is a fairly lengthy description of the house in the Survey of London volume orginally published by the LCC in 1956 which ends with “The premises are now occupied by Messrs. Ashton Brothers and a garden with seats extends from the pavement edge back to the house.”
My picture shows Ashton Funerals at the site in 1989 with ‘PRIVATE CHAPELS FUNERALS CREMATIONS’ and their name in large signage on rails on the frontage, and a well-kept garden, though I couldn’t resist including the Ad Hoc Wine Warehouse signs as well. The house is now flats and the Ashton signage has gone, and the wine warehouse having become car hire has now been demolished as a part of a new block of flats including and existing property at 363.
St John the Evangelist, Clapham Rd, Clapham, Lambeth, 1989 89-6b-14
Built 1840-42, architect Thomas Marsh Nelson the church is Grade II listed. A confined site led to an unusual orientation. It was truncated in 1986 and the Diocese of Southwark website comments “In short, this building has suffered due to a lack of clarity from its earliest day. First of all when the east-west axis was reversed and latterly the internal alterations described above. These changes plus the ravages of dry rot have left the interior merely as a jumble of ill-defined spaces without any overall cohesion.”
However the simple classical exterior is impressive, and rather unusual for the date of construction.
Various events and visits took me out of London for the next few weekends and it was July before I could return for my next walk around part of the city.
Gentrification, Life Jackets & Standing Rock: Three very different protests in London on Monday 19th September 2016
Save Brixton Railway Arches
Network Rail and Lambeth Council want to evict the small local businesses from the Railway arches, some of which have been serving the community for as long as anyone can remember. The sites will be refurbished and the rents trebled, so the new Atlantic Road ‘Village’ will be home to “loads of bland, overpriced, soulless branded shops that nobody wants“. This is clearly another disturbing step in the ongoing gentrification of Brixton being pursued by Lambeth Council.
When railways where built in London in the nineteenth century much of the land they ran across was already occupied by houses, shops and other businesses. Putting the rails on top of long viaducts was a cheaper and much less disruptive way of bringing the railways into the city then putting the lines at or below ground level.
This created long runs of arches below the viaducts as well as bridges over existing roads, and these arches were soon filled largely by small local businesses for which they provided relatively low rent premises. Many of them later became garages and other businesses connected with cars, lorries and taxis, but those in the centre of Brixton where the arches had frontages on Atlantic Road and Brixton Station Road were occupied by a whole range of shops.
Almost all of these were small businesses serving the local community – selling food, clothing, furniture, carpets, general stores, cafes, bars. Some well-known shops had been in the same arch since the 1930s.
Network Rail wanted to evict all these tenants so the arches could be refurbished and then re-let at hugely increased rents to increase their profits by replacing valued local businesses by the kind of bland high-price chains and franchises that have blighted high streets across the country. And Lambeth Council were backing them against a strong local ‘Save Brixton Arches’ campaign.
Few if any of the existing businesses could survive the long gap in trading for the revamping on the arches, and none would be viable at the increased rents. Many of them had decided to fight the evictions despite being threatened that if they legally challenged them they would not be offered leases after refurbishment.
On this Monday Network Rail had been intending to evict another of the traders, Budget Carpets, and people including from the local Green Party and the party’s co-leader Jonathan Bartlett, local Labour councillor Rachel Heywood and Simon Elmer from ASH had come to oppose the eviction. Rachel Heywood, a Labour councillor since 2006, was opposed to this and other policies such as library closures and council estate demolitions being pursued by the right-wing Labour cabinet and in 2018 was banned from the Labour Party for 5 years after it was announced she would stand as an independent.
The protest led to Network Rail postponing the eviction. The protesters then went into Brixton Market for a meeting where traders talked about how they have been bullied and their decision to fight the evictions.
The International Rescue Commission laid out 2,500 life jackets previously worn by adults and children refugees to cross from Turkey to Greece in Parliament Square as a reminder of the continuing deaths by drowning there.
The protest urged the UK to do more to welcome refugees to the UK and to meet the promises already made, and was criticised by a few bigots on the extreme right. Unfortunately instead the UK government has listened increasingly to the bigots and brought in even more repressive anti-migrant laws while failing to provide safe passages for migrants except for some very limited special cases.
Everyone wearing this lifejackets and those who have arrived in Europe since then in similar circumstances is now a criminal under UK law should they manage to get to this country.
At the protest I met again Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley who I had photographed earlier in Brixton. He told me his tweet about refugees and this life-jacket protest had attracted many extremely racist comments.
Later in the day I went to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square where people attended a non-violent, prayerful act of solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe threatened by the construction of a huge oil pipeline close to their reservation in North Dakota and the Missouri River.
A protest at the pipeline which threatens the water supply of the tribe and 8 million people who live downstream has attracted several thousands from around 120 Native American tribes and their allies around the world and 70 have been arrested at gunpoint.
Although the protest has attracted many journalists who like the protesters have been harassed by police (and some protested) there has been very little press coverage. The pipeline had already resulted in the destruction of several sacred sites.
You can read more about the pipeline on Wikipedia. Legal injunctions on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe were denied. The Obama administration attempted to get some re-routing of the pipeline but one of the first things Trump did on coming to power was to approve its construction. It was completed later in 2017 and put into service. Despite various court rulings since that there had not been proper environmental reviews it remains in operation.
Stockwell – Chapel, Church, Jazz & Housing: I thought I had completed the pictures from my walk on 4th June 1989, but find there is a chunk I had left out. As those who have followed my various walks know I often wandered in circles. I think these pictures were taken following those in the post More Stockwell Green & Mary Seacole.
Khatme Nubuwwat Centre, 35 Stockwell Green, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-6b-46
The Khatme Nubuwwat Centre was previously known as Aalami Majlise Tahaffuze Khatme Nubuwwat and is also known as Stockwell Green Mosque. It was the subject of an investigation by the Charity Commission in 2016 over its links with Pakistani groups advocating the killing of Ahmadi Muslims. Its name means that Muhammad is the last of the prophets, while Ahmadis are a minority Muslim sect who believe the Prophet Mohammad is not the last and final messenger.
Khatme Nubuwwat Centre, 35 Stockwell Green, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-6b-31
Another picture of Stockwell Green Mosque with the number 35 and its name in 1989, Aalami Majlise Tahaffuze Khatme Nubuwwat, at the side of the door.
Confusingly this building still appears to be Grade II listed as Stockwell Green United Reformed Church, although it was sold to the mosque in 1988, when that church moved to smaller premises. It also gives the address as Union Mews. The listing text says it is a classical chapel dating from around 1830. It was known as Stockwell New Chapel and was where William Booth and Catherine Mumford the founders of The Salvation Army were married on 17th June 1855.
I’m surprised that when it was listed in 1981 a more exact date could not be given as most chapels have foundation stones with names and dates. It was built in 1798, but was extended and given this facade by architect Hames Wilson in 1850.
St Andrew’s, Church, CofE, Landor Rd, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-6b-33
I went back to Landor Road and made another picture of the Anglican St Andrew’s Church seen from the corner of Stockwell Green, showing the oversize circular window at its east end, doubtless part of H E Roe’s Romanesque rebuilding in 1867.
The house at the left, 22 Stockwell Green is early 19th century and Grade II listed.
Live Music, Stockwell Green, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-6b-34
I think this may have been an entrance to the Plough pub, on the corner of Stockwell Green and with the address 90 Stockwell Road, though nothing there resembles this now.
The Plough had been on this site since brewery records began in 1666, but was rebuilt in the 1930s as a Truman pub designed by A E Sewell. It was a well-known jazz venue in the 1960s and 70s with performances by some of Britain’s best jazz musicians and some live recordings were made in the bar.
By the 1990s the audience for live jazz had declined and two letters of its name had fallen from the sign and it was relaunched as a garish bar, the Plug. But this was unsuccessful and closed in 2001. The upper floors are now residential but the ground floor seems to still be empty 22 years later.
King George’s House, 40 Stockwell Rd, Stockwell, Lambeth, 1989 89-6b-35
Built as Ingram House, architect Arthur T Bolton, it opened in 1905 as a residential club for young men and later was taken over the the YWCA for young ladies. In 1937 it became King George’s House, a home for working boys aged 14-18 run by the John Benn Boys’ Hostel Association. It is now run by Evolve Housing as “an 87 bed service for single homeless young people from 16 years of age with a range of support needs.“
The rather tall gates were firmly locked when I made this picture from the street.
Cassell House is in Stockwell Gardens West and has flat numbers 1-81. The estate was built by the London County Council from around 1930 on. Cassell House is a large complex with this curved block behind a group of buildings including the Swan pub on the corner of Clapham Road and Stockwell Road more or less opposite the Stockwell Underground Station.
Stockwell’s most famous gardens, the botanical gardens of John Tradescant lay a little to the north.
A few more of the ‘missing’ pictures in a later post.
Cinelli, Poppies and Music at Class War Poor Doors. I only photographed one event on Wednesday 17th September 2014, one of the long series of weekly protests by Class War over separate entrances for rich and poor occupants of the large block of flats at One Commercial St on Whitechapel High Street.
Music at Class War Poor Doors – Aldgate
One Commercial St is a 21 storey largely residential block occupying an extensive corner site on Whitechapel High St and Commercial St which includes 207 flats above lower floors of offices, shops and an entrance to Aldgate East Underground Station.
The building, opened in 2014, received strong criticism in architectural circles, and Wikipedia quotes Building Design as commenting on what was developer Redrow’s “first flagship development” with “First flagship development? Please God let it also be their last. No one who can liken this incoherent hulk of ill-fitting glass sheets to a blade of light deserves to build again in such a sensitive location” and it was nominated for the Carbuncle Cup for “the ugliest building in the United Kingdom completed in the last 12 months“.
But it became controversial for other reasons too. To meet planning regulations the block contains some flats at affordable rents. While those in the main part of the building enter through an impressive foyer with a concierge desk and seating from the High Street adjoining Aldgate East Station, tenants of the affordable section had to go down what was then a dirty and dingy alley at the side of building, Tyne Street, to a door with a card-entry reader leading to a long empty corridor. On 17th September the card reader had been broken for 3 weeks, leaving the building insecure and the building management had failed to repair it.
This difference in treatment for rich and poor was highlighted in an article in The Guardian which commented on the growing trend for London’s new housing developments to include separate entrances like this for the less wealthy, known as “poor doors” and which gave One Commercial Street among the examples.
Many people expressed their distaste at this social segregation, and in New York Mayor Bill De Blasio announced he planned to take action to prevent new developments having such separate doors for low-income residents after a single such block was built there. But it was becoming common in London.
Anarchist group Class War decided it was time to take some action, and from July 2014 organised a weekly series of evening protests outside One Commercial Street, continuing (with a few breaks) until the following May. I photographed all but a couple of these, and later published a zine with some of the pictures I made. This is still available, but carriage costs make buying single copies expensive, however there is a good preview online.
Others joined with Class War on various occasions, and on Wednesday 17th September 2014 Reggae band Different Moods from Tottenham came to perform their ‘Poor Doors’ song specially written for the protests.
The protests by Class War did raise the profile of the problem, and resulted in some minor changes – including better lighting and cleaning for the side alley. They probably also embarrassed the owners enough to make them sell the building, though the new owners proved no better and the social segregation remains. And it’s perhaps why the building was later renamed and is now the Relay Building.
On my way to Aldgate I stopped at the Tower of London and made a photograph of the Sea of Poppies, work of art remembering the ‘Great War’, the ceramic poppies, one for each of the British forces killed in the war. I commented that for me “it seems decorative but shallow” and “lacks any real sense of the numbers involved and is far less graphic than the war cemeteries with their seemingly endless rows of crosses.“
Earlier in the day I’d taken a picture showing the terrible state of my old bicycle, no longer ride able. It’s still in my shed, as several attempts to find a replacement chainwheel have failed. You can read more of the story about it at Vintage Cinelli in poor state. Perhaps I should try searching again.
Open House, Sewol, Iran, Sabah, Sarawak & Orange Order: Saturday 16th September 2017 was another busy and varied day for me in London, beginning with two visits on Open House Day and continuing with four protests.
Open House – Banqueting House – Whitehall
Though I’d often walked past the Banqueting House in Whithall, usually on my way to protests at Downing Street or Parliament Square, I’d never before been inside the building. But when I came past on Open House Day there was only a short queue and entrance was free. I had time to spare as a protest I’d hoped to photograph had failed to materialise, so in I went.
Inigo Jones designed (or copied from Andrea Palladio) the Banqueting House for the Palace of Whitehall, built 1619-22, and it is the only remaining building from the palace. It was the first neo-Classical building in England.
I went to Peckham to see a few things in the Peckham Festival including the Open House showing of the Old Waiting Room at Peckham Rye station which was housing a photographic exhibition of old pictures of Peckham.
The building itself turned out to be more interesting than the exhibition which lacked any real examination of the more recent past of Peckham. But there were other things to see in Peckham, and a short walk around Rye Lane and the Bussey Building is always interesting.
Back in Central London, my first protest was in Trafalgar Square where a small group mainly of SOuth Koreans was continuing their series of monthly vigils in memory of he Sewol victims, mainly school children who obeyed the order to ‘Stay Put’ on the lower decks as the ship went down.
They continue to demand the Korean government conduct a thorough inquiry into the disaster, recover all missing victims, punish those responsible and enact special anti-disaster regulations.
Overthrow the Islamic Regime of Iran – Trafalgar Square
Also in Trafalgar Square the 8 March Women’s Organisation (Iran-Afghanistan) were protesting on the 29th anniversary of the massacre of political prisoners in Iraq following a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini calling for the death of all Mojahedins and leftists as ‘fighters against God’ and ‘apostates from Islam.’
The fatwa led to over 30,000 political prisoners, mostly members of the main opposition People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) being executed, largely hanged in groups of six and buried in mass graves.
The protesters call for the overthrow of the Islamic regime as necessary for the ‘litigation movement’ can achieve justice and build a society where such executions cannot occur and no one is suppressed, imprisoned or tortured for their ideas.
A short distance down the road at Downing St, Sabahans and Sarawkians were protesting on Malaysia Day, which they say is a ‘Black Day for Sabah and Sarawak’, calling for a restoration of human rights and the repeal of the Sedition Act and and freedom for Sarawak and Sabah.
Among them was Doris Jones, the leader of the Sabah Sarawak Keluar Malaysia secessionist movement in London.
When Malaysia was founded on 16th September 1963 the two independent countries in North Borneo joined with the Federation of Malaya and Singapore and were given promises, assurances and undertakings for their future in the federation. These included ’20 points’ of an Inter-Governmental Committee (IGC) Report, which the prrotesters say have been cast aside, and anyone raising them is being detained under a draconian Internal Security Act.
The annual Lord Carson Memorial Parade, one of several annual parades by lodges of the Orange Order came to the Cenotaph for wreaths to be laid. As well as various lodges dedicated to the Apprentice Boys of Derry there were others remembering the Ulster regiments that fought on the Somme. As well as members of lodges in the Home Counties and London, these parades also include some who come from Ulster and Scotland.
Lord Carson (1854-1935) was a leading judge and politician in the UK becoming Solicitor General and First Lord of the Admiralty. He had joined the Orange Order at the age of 19, and in 1911 became the leader of the Ulster Unionists, determined to fight against home rule for Ireland by “all means which may be found necessary“, becoming one of the founders of a unionist militia that became the Ulster Volunteer Force.
But in later years he warned Unionists not to alienate the Catholics in the north, something which parades such as this clearly do in some areas of Northern Ireland. In London they are much less controversial, although I have at times been threatened by those taking part for photographing them. But on this occasion I received just a few hard stares and even some faintly welcoming grins from some who recognised me.
All I can tell you about SERIUS GALLERY is written on the door of 44 Bellefields Rd, which continues with ‘QUEEN MARTIN’ and gives its opening hours as Mon-Fri 2-6pm and Sat, Sun 12-3. These houses are still there, looking in rather better condition but no longer as a gallery.
Nor can I tell you anything about Queen Martin, though these was a rather nice looking Victorian pub at 45 Bellefields Road opposite this house named The Queen, which was demolished in 2006 and replaced by an rather ugly block with flats above ground floor commercial spaces also named THE QUEEN.
MOT Centre, Ferndale Rd, Brixton, Lambeth, 1989 89-6a-24
The M.O.T. Centre for Cars & Motor Cycles offering Free Steering & Brake Safety Check would not inspire my confidence with its heap of car scrap at the left of the picture. This site is now a little tidier as Zaks Tyres and the Ferndale Road Car Wash, on the corner of Ferndale Road and Pulross Road.
The fence just visible above its notices is along the railway line.
Tintern St, Brixton, Lambeth, 1989 89-6a-12
I made another picture of the M.O.T centre (not on line) which continues on the other side of the railway bridge and a couple more and continued along Ferndale Road, wandering down some of the side streets. I’ve also not yet digitised a picture of the Brixton Seventh Day Adventist Church on the corner of Ducie St and Santley St, and my next picture on-line is this one from Tintern Street. The building at right of the picture is on the corner with Ferndale Road, with two shops there not visible in my picture.
The shopfronts have changed but the upper floors and general appearance are still much as they were in 1989, and the whole remains a rather nice reminder of the Victorian era. The main loss is in the shopfronts at the left of my picture. Of course it is no longer the ‘TWO BEES LADIES AND GENTS HAIRDRESSERS’ but still in the same trade as a Unisex Hair Salon.
I’m not sure I entirely understood the amendments made to this billboard which advertised Billy Graham’s 1989 Evangelical Mission when I made this picture. It helps too look up Luke 12:19, which in the King James Version reads “And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” And to put the comment into more standard English, “Dollar bill still has to be my bowl of cherries.”
While it’s clear that the L is now a pound sign, and is followed by a dollar symbol. I think the ‘E’ at right is added to make this now read £$ FEE.
I think it was probably a different hand that posted a line of five anti-poll tax posters posters at bottom right.
The Chequers Café, a greengrocers and a pub on the corner of Bedford Road with Landor Road. The pub is still there. In 1989 it was the Bedford Arms, there since around 1874, but I think later was the Hog’s Head and simply the Bedford. In 2003 it became The Clapham North, the first of several pubs in the area opened by the pub group Livelyhood who made it one of Clapham’s most popular pubs. But they were simply tenants and the pub was bought by Young’s in 2013 and ten years later they decided to take over the lease. So now just another Young’s pub.
This was the last picture on my walk on 4th June 1989. These unusually ornate early Edwardian houses caught my attention. They are terraced houses, but built to look grander than they are with substantial doorways over paired front doors. The houses at left are part of a short terrace of four, and then a longer terrace goes around a corner in the street.
