“Excalibur“, Wikipedia tells me, “is the mythical sword of King Arthur that may be attributed with magical powers or associated with the rightful sovereignty of Britain.” As a French poem of around 1200AD where it first appears relates, “Arthur obtained the British throne by pulling a sword from an anvil sitting atop a stone that appeared in a churchyard on Christmas Eve“.
“In this account, as foretold by Merlin, the act could not be performed except by ‘the true king’, meaning the divinely appointed king or true heir of Uther Pendragon“. This won’t happen at today’s event in Westminster Abbey, although there does appear to be rather a lot of medieval mumbo-jumbo – described by the Concise Oxford Dictionary as “an object of senseless veneration or a meaningless ritual.“
But Excalibur is also the name of of what was one of the more interesting estates in London, a pre-fab estate built during 1945-6 by German and Italian prisoners of war using two prefabricated designs of housing, and was initially intended to last 10 years.
The owner of the land, a Lord Forster gave it to the London County Council on a promise it would be returned to parkland when these single-storey two bedroom temporary houses were cleared.
The estate lasted rather longer than expected and most of the 187 homes were still being lived in when I paid another visit on 6th May 2014 to make some panoramic images and also to visit the Prefab Museum, an art project by Elisabeth Blanchet.
My first visit had been back in the 1990s, when I walked the Greenwich Meridian in London as a part of a proposed Millennium project, Meridian, which failed to attract the funding needed to complete it, though I had taken all the photographs I needed. Only some of those north of Greenwich are on line. The Greenwich meridian actually ran through the centre of the pre-fab which housed the museum.
I’d returned back in 2010 to take more pictures after reading that the estate was to be demolished, despite valiant attempts to save it. And of course that promise made to John Forster, 1st Baron Forster of Harraby was forgotten – and he had in any case died in 1972.
Half a dozen of the pre-fabs were eventually listed after a long battle and so should survive the demolition of the estate. But it was really the estate that was important rather than the individual buildings. Although parts of the estate have now gone, much still remains, but has been allowed to decay considerably since I made these panoramas on May 6th 2014. All of these pictures show a roughly 140 degree horizontal angle of view – and roughly 90 degrees horizontal, with some fine clouds in a blue sky. These are a small sample of the roughly 70 images I made on the day.
The images online – much smaller than the orginals – are actually twice the width they appear on this post and you can view them larger – as well as many more – on My London Diary at Excalibur Estate.
Protest against fast track deportations: On 5th May 2014, the early May bank holiday, protesters went to Harmondsworth Immigration Detention Centre close to Heathrow in solidarity with the prisoners inside who had gone on mass hunger strike against the unfair ‘fast track’ system which denies many a proper hearing. The were also protesting against other problems in the private-run prison.
The hunger strike by over 300 men held at the centre was sparked off by the failure of the only fax machine at the centre, an essential service for those trying to prepare their case to gain asylum in the UK.
The strike was suspended over the weekend after Home Office officials met delegates from the hunger strikers and promised to give answers to their demands on Tuesday, 6 May.
Detained Fast Track (DFT) was first introduced by New Labour, but its use had expanded under the coalition government. As I noted, it “is inherently unfair, giving asylum seekers little or no time to prepare their cases and has resulted in many unfair decisions. It disadvantages those in most need of asylum who are unlikely to have prepared essential documents in advance and to be in a condition to represent themselves effectively. And as they are held in detention it is very difficult or impossible for them to prepare a case, particularly when communication with the outside world is limited and difficult.“
As well as being unfair, DFT is also expensive, thought to at least double the costs to the country for every asylum seeker held in detention, though the government does not release the exact figures. But despite the cost, the quality of accommodation and services in the detention centres is extremely poor. Many of those held have medical problems, often linked to the reasons why they fled their countries and there has been a desperate lack of proper healthcare at this and other immigration detention centres.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that many in the Home Office – including those in charge – have lost any feeling of compassion for the desperate people who seek asylum, seeing them as a threat to our country, best locked away and as far as possible out of mind. In my post on the protest I mentioned the case reported by HM Inspectorate of Prisons of an 84 year old man suffering from dementia who died after being held for almost 3 weeks without and proper medical attention before being taken to hospital in handcuffs.
Hard too not to see the incompetence often displayed as deliberate, as in the case of those held sometimes for over a year after having agreed to voluntary repatriation or those transferred to here for interviews in London and then abandoned here rather than being returned to other detention centres to continue to consult with their lawyers and have family visits.
We could vaguely see a lot of hands and very dim faces in the windows. As well as the grid of the fence there is a layer of dirty glass and another of plexiglass between them and us
Difficult to understand the lack of legal help and advice at this and other centres enabling the detainees to prepare their cases, and the many holdups that they encounter in doing this – even when the fax machine is working.
Probably the main changes that have taken place at Harmondsworth since this protest nine years ago is that the prison, together with its neighbour Colnbrook are under a new private management and that security and police presence has been considerably tightened. In 2014 the protesters were able to walk down the private road leading to a BT site between the two prisons and continue around the outside of the 20ft high prison fence. Since then protests have been restricted to the front of the building, out of sight of the prisoners. Back in 2014 the police told them that so longs as they behaved sensibly and caused no trouble they would be allowed to protest – and they were.
Later in 2014 the High Court ruled that the Detained Fast Track procedure was was unlawful, though the Home Office appealed and eventually only minor changes have been made. The process is clearly in breach of international law, as is the wholesale detention of asylum seekers.
As recently as 2018 the UK again committed to a declaration that it would “ensure that any detention in the context of international migration follows due process, is non-arbitrary, is based on law, necessity, proportionality and individual assessments.” Current and proposed UK policies break every aspect of this commitment and other aspects of international law, much of which was driven by the UK and to which successive governments have at least paid lip-service. Our current government has declared it will ignore those aspects it finds inconvenient.
Elmers End May Queen and her retinue before the crowning
I’ve attended and photographed quite a few coronations, but will be having absolutely nothing to do with events this coming weekend. It appears to me an obscene waste of money, totally unnecessary spending which could be directed towards something far more worthwhile on a medieval relic that the country should have abandoned or hugely reformed years ago.
I do remember the 1953 event, when we spent rather boring hours crammed into our neighbours front room facing a 9 inch screen on the black and white television their elder son had built from a kit. And a few days later our school’s classes were trooped along to the local cinema – appropriately The Regal – to watch it in colour. It had rained for the event and I think we also got wet queueing to be let in. I think few found the film of much interest.
Of course there was a lot of ballyhoo back in 1953, but nothing like the prolonged media assault we are now seeing – our media have changed, and largely for the worst. And while some people held street parties I don’t think there were any in our London suburb.
There was certainly a lot of talk then about a new “Elizabethan Era” but little came of it, though we were still slowly emerging from wartime austerity. For most children in the UK the more significant event of the Coronation year had been the end of sweet rationing several months earlier, though sugar, meat and some other foods remained on ration.
Back in 2004 or 2005 four pictures in the posthumous Tony Ray Jones book ‘A Day Off’ of May Queen festivals had come to my attention and I decided it might be an interesting area for a photographic project if these events were still taking place. A little research, mainly on-line told me that there were still some in various parts of London and that the picture showing young girls dancing around the maypole was, despite an incorrect caption, actually from the London May Queen event taking place annually on Hayes Common.
So in May 2005 I went to Hayes Common, very uncertain about what I would find, and also about how I would be received. Old men photographing young girls was by then a rather suspect activity, but I talked with some of the organisers and if not immediately gained their confidence. It was the start of a project over several years that attracted interest from the Museum of London, though in the end they pulled out from the show at late stage, though I think they did buy a few pictures.
It took several years of attending various crownings and other May Queen events, including a few unconnected with the London May Queen for me to build up a body of work and I extended the project a little longer than was necessary to include the crowning of the 100th London May Queen in 2012, publishing my book London’s May Queens later that year. Being publishing on demand this is now ridiculously expensive but the PDF version is reasonably priced. The preview there contains my short article about May Queens and quite a few pictures.
By 2013 I had finished the project, but was still receiving invitations to return to take pictures, and was pleased I had time to do so, not just for the Beckenham May Queens on Sataturday 4th May 2013, from which the pictures here come, but for the crowning of London’s 101st May Queen at Hayes the following Saturday. I think this was the last coronation I attended.
Westminster Abbey has been home to some pretty bizarre events over the last thousand years or so since the site first became home to a small monastery on Thorney Island around 960 AD, and another will be taking place this weekend.
Possibly the most obscene and blasphemous service there took place on Friday 3rd May 2019, when a service was held there celebrating Britain’s weapons of mass destruction, giving thanks for 50 years of continuous nuclear threat by British submarines armed with nuclear missiles.
As protesters across the road pointed out, Britain was currently wasting £205 billion on the replacement of Trident, around a quarter of a year’s total government spending on a weapons system which can never be used as it would be totally catastrophic for the world.
The established church has of course a long record of taking the wrong side in history, supporting the rich and powerful, something Christianity inherited from older religions, which throughout history have been ways to subjugate the common people and keep them docile.
This weekend we see this again in action, with a ceremony taking place in which people around the country are to be invited to swear an oath of allegiance, though I think many will be swearing other things about this. It follows in a tradition established in 1066 when our Norman conquerors celebrated their victory with the first coronation there.
Reading the Bible and in particular the New Testament, supposedly the basis of Christianity, we find a very different religion, one in which swords shall be beaten into ploughshares and the love of power is seen as a sin. Certainly not one as the protesters pointed out one that would be thanksgiving for nuclear weapons.
CND and Christian CND protested opposite Westminster Abbey against the blasphemous and morally repugnant thanksgiving service celebrating Britain’s nuclear weapons. It was a much more Christian event than that taking place across the road, though the Christians there were joined by others including Buddhists.
Those present took part in a die-in after which there was a rally, but I left to go home, stopping briefly on my way to photograph a small group of Fridays For Future climate protesters in Parliament Square.
World Justice And A Black Friday: Friday 2nd May 2008 was unusual for me as my work began with and event by Just Share in front of the Bank of England when my wife and I appeared together in public, a rather rare event as she seldom comes to London. But later it was a very dark day for London as the results of the Mayoral Election were announced, the begining of 8 years of rule by a dangerously incomptent, unreliable and untrustworthy man who went on to become prime minister and make a real mess of the country too. In between the two events I had time to visit an exhibition and take a little walk along the riverside.
Just Shares Take On The Bank – Royal Exchange, Bank, London
‘Just Share’, based at St Mary-le-Bow church in Cheapside, describes itself as “a coalition of churches and development agencies seeking to engage with the City of London on issues of global economic injustice” and to “address the widening gap between rich and poor in the global economy.”
They had organised the event on the steps of the Royal Exchange in front of the Bank of England, with stalls from several groups involved in the trade justice movement including Operation Noah (a Christian-based charity campaigning about the environment) and Muslim Aid, before speeches by Ann Pettifor of Advocacy International and Operation Noah, previously Jubilee 2000, and The Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott.
Following this we walked the short distance to St Mary Woolnoth – one of Hawksmoor’s finest buildings, and where former slave captain John Newton, who wrote ‘Amazing Grace’, preached his last 28 years – a few yards away.
Here there was a seminar where Pettifor expanded her argument about the false basis of our current economic system, which is the subject of her book ‘The Coming First World Debt Crisis‘ arguing that the current global debt-based financial systems are unsustainable and that a structural change is necessary to give proper regard to actual production, and the rediscovery of the insights of earlier Christian (and of course Muslim) traditions.
There wasn’t a huge attendance at the event, and probably a majority of those present were wearing dog collars. I didn’t find it easy to make interesting pictures though I did photograph most of the speakers. And I suspect it fell on very closed ears in financial circles where people were and are personally doing very well from our failed system.
It was some time before the result of the London Mayoral elections was to be announced in the early evening, and I made my way to the Hayward Gallery to see an exhibition there before taking a leisurely walk along the South Bank to City Hall. I think there may well have been time for a little food and liquid refreshment too.
On Bankside I made this picture of Cardinal Cap Alley and the house that Christopher Wren didn’t live in. You can see some more pictures from the walk, including at the Hayward Gallery, a distant view of Tate Modern’s chimney, St Pauls Cathedral and the Millennium Bridge and Fishmonger’s Hall at London Riverside.
No to the Crook, the Toff, the Fascist or Cop – City Hall, Southwark
Like other photographers attending protests in London I had become used to being routinely photographed by police photography teams, the so-called Forward Intelligence Teams, FIT. But sitting reading on the steps in Potters Fields on this occasion waiting for things to start I attracted more than the usual attention, perhaps because the book I was reading had the title ‘Terrorist’. As I point out in My London Diary, this is not a training manual, but a novel by one of America’s leading novelists, John Updike.
I was filmed for over a minute and a number of still photographs were taken. Some months later I made a freedom of information request asking what pictures the police held of me, giving this as one of the dates on which I had been photographed. I paid my money, waited and eventually got the response – that they had no pictures of me.
I was there to take pictures as several anarchist groups had come to protest at the result, saying ‘No to the Crook, the Toff, The Fascist or Cop’, declaring none of the four candidates suitable to be Mayor. Personally I felt they were being a little unfair to previous mayor Ken Livingstone who while he had his faults had largely done his best for London and certainly now seems a shining beacon of honesty compared to most of the leading Tories – including Starmer – we have seen since.
Things outside City Hall remained pretty calm until Fitwatch got fed up with being photographed and began to try to frustrate the FIT teams by surrounding one of them with their banners. The police called up reinforcements and the Territorial Support Group (TSG) arrived and began pushing everyone around, including the protesters, press and bystanders, most of whom were tourists, in the direction of a penned area a short distance away. As I reported, ‘One French woman was bemused. “But why are they just letting themselves be pushed” she asked me as I took photographs. “Because this is England and not France” I replied.’
One man sitting watching from the river wall refused to move and was told he was obstructing the highway – which he clearly was not. Eventually they arrested him and dragged him away. But otherwise the police were reasonably well-behaved and on showing my press card I was allowed to walk away from the area.
I was keen to do so, not just because I didn’t want to be kettled, but also because I had seen some of the cannier members of Class War moving away and was able to photograph them displaying an Anti-Fascist banner from a balcony overlooking the site for a few minutes until they melted away as officers began moving in our direction, finding refuge in a nearby pub. By the time the police arrived they obviously couldn’t be bothered to chase them, and contented themselves with moving the innocent public away from the balcony, and after a short time, also moving the press. I went and joined Class War in the pub briefly before leaving for home.
For once this year May Day falls on a Bank Holiday – as it should every year, but in 1978 James Callaghan’s Labour government bottled it when establishing the Early May Bank Holiday. So it only falls on May 1st once every six or seven years – as it last did in 2017.
So in other years many of us have to work on May Day, although since I gave up regular full-time work as a teacher I’ve been able to attend the London May Day March every year except when prevented by illness or lockdown.
Most years here on >Re:PHOTO I’ve written something about the early origins of May Day and how in 1889 it was adopted as the date for International Workers’ Day by the Second International socialists and communists, and then adopted by anarchists, labour activists, and leftists in general around the world to commemorate the 1886 Chicago Haymarket affair and the struggle for an eight-hour working day.
London has a May Day Organising Committee which arranges the event, which is supported by “GLATUC, LESE, UNite London & Eastern Region, CWU London Region, PCS London & South East Region, ASLEF, RMT, MU London, BECTU, FBU London & Southern Regions, GMB London & Southern Regions, Unison Greater London Region, POA, NEU London, NPC, GLPA & other Pensioners bodies and organisations representing Turkish, Kurdish, Chilean, Colombian, Peruvian, Bolivian, Portuguese, West Indian, Indian, Sri Lankan, Cypriot, Tamil, Iraqi, Iranian, Irish and Nigerian migrant workers & communities plus many other trade unions & Community organisations.”
As the list shows, it has a very international nature – as too does London, and visually tends to be dominated by large and organised groups from some of London’s minority communities, particularly Turkish and Kurdish groups. But it’s an event supported by most of the left if a few anarchists sometimes come to the start at Clerkenwell Green to hand out leaflets but head for the pub as soon as the march itself starts.
Here are some pictures from ten years ago, Wednesday 1st May 2013. There are more on My London Diary, which also has some of the history of the event at London May Day March. I also posted a few pictures of the area to the north before the march as I arrived early, at Finsbury (though some are in Clerkenwell) as well as a piece about the TUC May Day Rally at the end of the march.
Goods Way, Gasholders & St Pancras: My walk around King’s Cross continued after the walk led by the Greater London Industrial Archeology Society finished on Saturday 8th April 1989 . The previous post was More from King’s Cross Goods Yard.
I walked west along Goods Way, running parallel to the canal a short distance to the south. It was a way I’d walked before and I didn’t stop to make many photographs. Ii wanted to photograph the bridge across the canal to the goods yard, but couldn’t get the view I wanted and had to make a note to come back another day – which I did a couple of weeks later when I arrived early to take a train from St Pancras.
But this rather nicely proportioned building seemed worth recording at 3 and 3A, perhaps offices and a factory at right, particularly as it seemed unlikely to survive the redevelopment of the area. You can see the girders of a gasholder reflected in the window above the main doorway.
This splendid group of gasholders is of course no longer at the corner of Goods Way and Camley Street. The last gasholder on Goods Way, on the south side and not included in this picture was demolished around 2010 while these ones were moved a short distance away to the other bank of the canal by St Pancras Lock.
The large name on the wall, HADEN YOUNG were electrical contractors and one of the smaller signs is for Balfour Beatty. The gasworks had been here and although the UK had been converted to gas the gasholders were still being used for storage.
Another view of the gasholders, this time from close to the bridge under the lines out of St Pancras, now underneath the widened viaduct for the Eurostar high speed rail link. Nothing in this picture remains in place, with gasholders and the brick Victorian water tower having been re-sited and the rest demolished.
St Pancras Station, Pancras Rd, Somers Town, Camden, 1989 89-4g-15
Pancras Road runs down the west side of St Pancras Station and this view disappeared with the building of St Pancras International Station which was officially opened in 2007, with much of the original station being converted into a shopping mall.
Culross Buildings was built by the Great Northern Railway as housing for railway workers in 1891-2. As well as flats 1-40 and a basement workshop and boiler room there was an adjoining Mission Hall, Culross Hall and a canteen at 41 Battle Bridge Road. Derelict in postwar years and squatted the building eventually became a part of a housing co-op and the flats were brought closer to modern standards.
As the large writing on the wall states, in 1989 the building was home to 150 people. The buildings were unlisted but within the King’s Cross Conservation Area and were demolished in 2008.
My posts about my walk around King’s Cross led by the Greater London Industrial Archeology Society on Saturday 8th April 1989 continues with this post. The previous post was Coal Drops and Canal Kings Cross 1989
Western Goods Shed, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-23
A couple of the others on this GLIAS walk are on the right edge of this picture, which gives a good impression of the state of the building at the time with scattered rubbish in the foreground and a large pile of it in the distance. You can find more about the site in Peter Darley’s post on the Gasholder blog, from which much of the information here comes.
Behind Western Goods Shed, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-11
The Western Coal Drops were converted to become a part of the Western Goods Shed in 1897–99 when the timber viaduct which had been on their west side leading over the canal to Samuel Plimsoll’s coal shoots in Cambridge Road in 1886 was also rebuilt. (I think ‘shoot’ was simply an alternative spelling of ‘chute’.) Darley says that this iron on brick Plimsoll Viaduct was later dismantled and re-erected on their east side when the Western Goods Shed was built. I think this was at the north end of the Goods Shed at left and the Coal Drop roof at right.
North End, Goods Shed, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-12
Although this was taken over a barbed wire fence, the next pictures (one below) were made from the other side of this. I think at least this row of buildings from the original 1850s buildings although in part rebuilt. I don’t think these have survived in the redevelopment though I could be wrong.
North End, Goods Shed, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-14
Another picture from further down the yard in the image above.
We returned to the northern end of the Eastern Coal Drops where I think this shows the brickwork that once supported the two lines of rails. In the distance you can just see the tops of the Kings Cross gasholders.
This shows a ground level view of the ‘Berlin Bank’ viaduct seen in an image on my previous post at left and also on the right the viaduct for the Eastern Coal Drops. The area was still in use for storage and as you can see several vehicles were parked around in and between the arches.
Another view at ground level between the two coal drops, looking towards the Eastern Coal Drops.
Under the 1864 Viaduct, Kings X Goods Yard, King’s Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4g-41
For this picture I used flash to illuminate the brick arch which was only dimly lit. Beyond this the area of the actual coal drops was open above and illuminated by daylight.
This is now part of the restored building which can be seen from what is now called Stable Street. It was the last of the roughly 50 pictures I took inside the Kings Cross Goods Yard where I was able to benefit from the insights of several of the country’s leading industrial archaeologists before the GLIAS walk ended at the exit from the area on York Way.
From there I continued to wander unguided around the area to the north of Kings Cross and St Pancras stations, and I will continue with pictures from this in the next post in this series.
April 28th 2015 IWMD; April 28th every year is International Workers Memorial Day, and last year here on >Re:PHOTO I wrote about this, beginning with a quote from the TUC web site:
Every year more people are killed at work than in wars. Most don’t die of mystery ailments, or in tragic “accidents”. They die because an employer decided their safety just wasn’t that important a priority. International Workers’ Memorial Day (IWMD) 28 April commemorates those workers.
I wrote more about it and illustrated the post with pictures taken mainly at previous years on Tower Hill. You can still read it at International Workers’ Memorial Day (IWMD).
This year there are events planned in Stratford, Barking and Walthamstow marking the event, as well as others around the country, and many workplaces will be holding a minute’s silence at 12 noon.
On Tuesday 28th April 2015 two of the three events I covered were related to IWMD, but I also went to Holloway Prison with protesters demanding the release of an immigration detainee being held there.
Qatar Slave Labour deaths – World Cup 2022 – Qatari Embassy, Mayfair
My working day began with trade unionists outside the Qatari embassy in Mayfair, where they attempted to deliver a letter on International Workers Memorial Day protesting the slaughter of migrant slave labour workers on World Cup building sites. At current death rates, over 4,000 migrant workers will die by 2022.
According to a Guardian report, on average one Nepalase worker there dies very two days, and including the deaths of Indian, Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi workers the death rate is most likely more than one every day. At least 964 workers from Nepal, India and Bangladesh died working in Qatar in 2012 and 2013.
Work had still to begin on eleven of the 12 stadiums needed for the 2022 World Cup and there are likely to be many more dying due to the appalling exploitation and abuse of these migrant workers.
The International Labour Organization had urged Qatar to “ensure without delay, access to justice for migrant workers, so that they can effectively assert their rights […] strengthening the complaints system and the labour inspection system”.
According to Amnesty many of the migrant workers have there passports confiscated when they arrive for work in Qatar and are forced to work long hours for very low pay day after day with no rest and are often physically and sexually abused.
Police moved the protesters away from the embassy to the other side of the road but allowed a small deputation to approch the doorway with a letter. A police officer went inside the embassy to ask if someone would come to the door to accept this from Gail Cartmail, Assistant General Secretary of Unite the Union. After a lengthy wait, a man came to the door and refused, and the protesters then left it on the doorstep.
In 2021 The Guardian revealed that “More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years ago“. A few days football came at a very bloody price.
Holloway protest for Yarl’s Wood protester Anna – Holloway Prison
From Mayfair I travelled to a very different area of London for a protest outside Holloway Prison, a Victorian prison in one of the poorer areas of North London which had housed only women prisoners since 1902 and was closed a year after this protest.
Anna, a detainee in Yarls Wood immigration detention prison, had been one of a group of women defending another detainee, a torture victim, who was about to be deported. Thirty guards rushed into the room and brutally assaulted them all, taking them to solitary confinement in the ‘Kingfisher’ isolation unit at Yarl’s Wood. Both Anna and another woman, Lillija, were threatened with prison, but only Anna was transferred to Holloway prison and was being held there although she was had not been charged with any offence.
Both women had been involved in a Channel 4 News exposure of the abuses of women by guards in Yarls Wood which had led to one guard being suspended.
Many of those at the emergency protest organised by Movement for Justice demanding Anna’s release had served time in Yarls Wood or other immigration prisons.
When a group of three prison employees came out to argue with the protesters that their protest simply upset women being held inside the jail they told them from their first hand experience how greatly they had welcomed knowing that there were people outside the prison who were aware of them and wanting to help.
Finally I came back to central London and the Hilton London Metropole hotel on the Edgware Road in Bayswater and in another protest for International Workers’ Memorial Day against the exploitation of workers, mainly migrants organised by the Unite Hotel Workers branch. Workers at luxury hotels in portering and household services are employed by agencies on minimum wage, zero hours contracts and denied basic rights.
Several workers including former room attendant Barbara Pokryszka spoke at the protest, complaining of heavy workloads and abusive treatment by management, who fail to treat them as human beings, saying “We Are Not Machines”. As in other areas of work outsourcing to contractors who pay minimum wage and impose abysmal conditions is at the root of the abuse.
Luxury hotels have a world-wide reputation to maintain and this would be damaged if they were found to be treating staff on their payroll in such a disgusting way. A night’s stay for two in a room costs over £200 and housekeeping worker would usually have to clean between 12 and 20 rooms in an 8 hour shift. The worker’s pay for cleaning – before deductions would be around £85 while the hotel guests would be paying over £3000 for their stay. Hotels could surely pay more to their essential workers.
Coal Drops and Canal Kings Cross 1989: My posts about my walk around King’s Cross led by the Greater London Industrial Archeology Society on Saturday 8th April 1989 continues. The previous post was Gasholders, Flats and the Goods Yard – Kings Cross 1989
The Coal Drops Yard was reopened to the public in 2018, 29 years after I made the pictures in this post as what TripAdvisor calls “King’s Cross’ boutique shopping and foodie hotspot“, and I went along shortly after they opened to take some photographs of the transformed site which you can see on My London Diary at Euston to Kings Cross Coal Drops. You can read more about its early history in a post by Peter Darley on the Gasholder site.
Coal was carried in railway waggons from coalfields in the Midlands and North of England to the coal drops and these facilities built in the 1850s were an early example of bulk handling of goods. The Eastern Coal Drops, together with a coal and stone basin opened in 1851 could handle 1,000 tons of coal a day. Later around 1860 a second set, the Western Coal Drops were added. Derelict for many years, parts of the Eastern Coal Drops were badly damaged by fire in 1985.
Rather than unload the coal waggons by hand, the coal drops allowed a waggon at a time to be discharged into a storage hopper below, at the bottom of which it could be fed into sacks and loaded onto the waiting horse-drawn coal carts. There was also a coal drop to allow the waggons to be discharged into barges for onward transit.
The waggons could be tipped sideways in a special rig to empty, but it was easier to use waggons which had a bottom that could be opened to simply let the coal fall into the hopper of the floor below the track.
As well as supplying coal to businesses and homes across London, the nearby gasworks would also have been a major coal user. But I imagine they would have had their own rail sidings for delivery. The gasholders have been relocated since I made these pictures, which sometimes makes it difficult to understand the geography of the area.
In 1866 a viaduct was opened across the canal from the Western Coal drops to Samuel Plimsoll’s coal yard on the south on what was then Cambridge Street (marked as Coal Shoots on the OS map. He patented an improved coal drop which treated the coal more gently and avoided much of the breaking up and dust produced by the earlier drops and was more suitable for the softer household coal he traded in. (There were also coal drops on the other side of Cambridge St, on a siding from the lines into St Pancras.) However visiting the Camley Street Natural Park now on his site shortly after it opened in 1985 I found at least in parts the ground was still more coal dust and fragments than soil. Parts of the demolished viaduct could still be seen when I photographed from the canal towpath in 1979.
Viaduct, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-33
As well as taking waggons full of coal to the coal drops, a second track was needed on the viaducts to bring back the empty waggons, which were moved sideways using a traverser or waggon turntable. I think these had long disappeared before our visit in 1989.
This picture is I think of the viaduct for the Western Coal Drops, and the sign BERLIN BANK presumably reflects its use as a location for a film. Perhaps someone can tell me more.
Western Goods Shed, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-34
The covered loading bay of the Western Goods shed was in rather poor condition at the south end, but was still providing cover for the loading and unloading of lorries further along. The lorries have the name ‘newsflow’, a name now in use for a number of media and news aggregators but then I think rather more physically connected with the newspaper and magazine industry, possibly for delivery of the printed papers.
Although looking rather derelict parts of the area were still in use for various purposes and I think a small piece of sculpture visible here suggests a sculptor’s studio. In the 1980s and 90s the goods yard was a popular spot for raves.
Viaduct, Kings X Goods Yard, Kings Cross, Camden, 1989 89-4f-35
We were able to wander around the area fairly freely, although there were obviously some rather dangerous areas where we could have fallen like the coal, and others where roofs or walls seemed unsafe. But our wanderings make it difficult to place the exact location of some of my pictures. I think this is the viaduct for the Eastern Coal Drops, and it clearly shows the two tracks, one for the coal drop and the closer for the return of emptied waggons. Underneath you can see the area for the hoppers and where carts would be loaded, in the picture used for parking. Across the tracks are a line of newsflow lorries.
More of my pictures from the GLIAS walk around the area in a later post.
