Close Down Yarl’s Wood: On Saturday 8th August I went with around a thousand protesters to Yarl’s Wood Immigration prison, in the middle of the countryside around 5 miles north of Bedford.
There were coaches from around the country but I travelled by train to Bedford, where organisers Movement of Justice had arranged for a bus to pick up epole from the station. The prison is on a wartime aerodrome at the top of a hill and a relatively remote location.
Even after the coaches had dropped us off at the front of the estate, there was then a walk of a little over a mile along the road and then along a public bridleway to the field sloping up from the 20 ft prison fence on the north side. There is a road for official visitors leading to the other side of the site.
I had missed an earlier protest which I had been invited to cover as I thought I was ill-equipped and other photographers would have more suitable gear than me. Most of my work is made with wide-angle lenses and to photograph though the mesh top half of the 20 foot fence the women at the windows inside was a challenge for me.
But this time I borrowed a 300mm Nikon lens from a friend and used it with my Nikon D700 in DX mode, which made it equioalvent to a 450mm lens, and it did a reasonable job, though ideally I would have had something even longer and faster. Most of the pictures taken with it are cropped.
Most of the pictures were made with a wideangle Nikon 16-35mm zoom, but a few with my usual longest lens, a Nikon 18-105mm, and even fewer with a Nikon fisheye. As well as the D700 I was also using a D810 at the event.
On My London Diary I list around 25 groups supporting the protest – and probably missed quite a few more. There is a very widespread feeling of disgust and shame at the way this country treats asylum seekers in a racist system that detains so many for long periods without trial, locking them away in detention centres such as these run for profit by private companies where they are always mistreated and often subjected to real abuse and sexual harassment.
Yarls Wood was then used to hold women asylum seekers, though there were also some families held there. When we arrived and they could hear the shouts and some could see us through the upper windows there “was a rapturous welcome from the women inside the prison, who came to the windows, shouting and waving and holding up signs. Protests like this really give the prisoners hope, and show them they have support and are not forgotten. Together, inside and out people chanted slogans ‘Shut Down Yarls Wood’, ‘Detention Centres, Shut them Down’ and more.”
The solid metal lower half of the 20 ft fence makes a loud noise when hit or kicked and the protesters made the most of this, with others writing slogans on them – though these were not visible to the women inside.
Although the detainees are prisoners they are treated differently to those in normal jails and have to be allowed some contact with the outside world to organise their cases – including mobile phones. They held up signs with their phone numbers so that we could see them – and then ring them up so that they could speak to the public address system the protesters had brought.
Many of those outside who spoke during the protest had spent some time in this or other detention prisons, and some were speaking to friends still inside. Detention is open-ended with people having no idea of when they would be released – or, if their applications failed, deported. One detainee was only released one day before having spent three years here.
There are many more pictures on My London Diary. Here’s how I ended my piece: “Too soon we had to leave. And they had to stay. As I walked away to catch the coach back to Bedford station I felt ashamed at the way that my country treats asylum seekers. They deserve support and humanity and get treated worse than criminals.”
Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos
All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.
