2008 | >Re-PHOTO

Lord Maruga, Portugal Day & Khalistan – 2008

Lord Maruga, Portugal Day & Khalistan: My day on Sunday 8th June 2008 very much reflected the multicultural nature of London, beginning with a Hindu Festival in Thornton Heath, moving on to a Catholic Mass celebrating Portugal Day in Kennington and finally a march by Sikhs remembering the 1984 massacre and calling for an independent Sikh state, Khalistan.

Lord Muruga in Thornton Heath

Hindu God Lord Muruga is particularly popular with the Tamils of southeast India (Tamil Nadu), Sri Lanka and Malaysia, and several hundred from the Sivaskanthagiri Murugan Temple in Thornton Heath celebrated him by pulling a chariot carrying his representation through the local streets.

The procession was led by musicians, and by women carrying pots of burning embers on their heads and in their arms. As the chariot made its way along the street, people brought offerings of good to be blessed, and these were returned to them flaming.

Lord Muruga is the son of Agni, the fire god. He also carries a spear and a staff with a picture of a cockerel, and rides on a peacock. He is noted for the help that he gives for devotees who are in distress and the procession in particular visits those who cannot come to the temple because of their poor health or other disabilities

The flames are from camphor, widely used in Indian rituals and thought to eliminate negative energies. This waxy white solid burns with a relatively cool flame and emit little smoke.

Many more pictures on My London Diary at Lord Muruga in Thornton Heath.

Portugal Day in Kennington Park

Also known as Camões Day, Portugal’s National Day marks the anniversary of the death of its greatest poet and writer, Luís de Camões, on 10 June, 1580. He died in the year that Portugal became part of Spain, and the date of his death (the day of his birth around 1624 is not recorded) was celebrated as a national day after Portugal regained independence in 1640.

His great epic poem ‘The Lusaids’ centres on Vasco da Gama’s voyage to discover a sea route to India which was the foundation of the colonial explorations that brought the country great wealth and it made him a symbol of the nation.

Fascist dictator Salazar who ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1968 made the day a celebration of a fictional Portuguese ‘race’, but it is now simply a day for celebration by Portuguese communities around the world – and London has the largest Portuguese community outside Portugal, centred in Stockwell close to Kennington Park. The celebrations in the park includes entertainments and considerable eating and drinking after the initial open-air Catholic Mass I photographed.

Portugal Day in Kennington Park

Sikh Remembrance March and Freedom Rally

Sikhs remember the massacres at Amritsar by the Indian Army and the mob killings encouraged by the Indian government following the assassination of Indira Ghandi by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984.

Sikh interests were ignored by an ignorant and incompetent British administration led by the Viceroy and Governor-General of India Lord Mountbatten who were responsible for the partition of India in 1947.

This annual rally and march in London calls for the establishment of an independent Sikh homeland, Khalistan in the Punjab and possibly incorporating some nearby areas of India and Pakistan.

Some Sikhs had been calling for an independent state since the 1930s and the movement continued to grow after partition with various militant Sikh groups including Babbar Khalsa, proscribed in the UK. Violent repression by Indian police led to a decline in the 1990s, but repression continues against Sikhs and in particular against those campaigning for separation and has increased in recent years. This makes it very difficult to determine how much popular support there is for the Khalistan movement in the area.

Data in the UK suggests that only a small fraction of British Sikhs support the establishment of Khalistan. In 2018, India asked UK to ban Sikh Federation (UK) who organise these events for its anti-India, pro-Khalistan activities, including proscribing the organisation but this has not happened.

More at Sikh Remembrance March and Freedom Rally.

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Just Shares, Riverside & No to the Crook, the Toff, The Fascist or Cop 2008

Just Shares, Riverside & No to the Crook, the Toff, The Fascist or Cop: Friday 2nd May 2008 was the day the results came out for the election for London Mayor and it turned out to be a sad day for London. Earlier I’d covered a protest calling on the City of London to move away from its unjust economic prcarices and then gone to an exhibition and walked along the riverside while I waited for the mayoral declaration, though it came after I had given up and left for home

Just Shares Take On The Bank – Royal Exchange, Bank

‘Just Share’, “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” based at St Mary-le-Bow church in Cheapside had organised a protest in the heart of the City, in front of the Royal Exchange and at the side of the Bank of England.

I don’t think anyone at the Bank was listening to Ann Pettifor, Guardian economist Larry Elliott or the others as they spoke on the steps of the Royal Exchange, or took seriously the seminar later by Pettifor in one of Hawksmoor’s finest churches, St Mary Woolnoth, where former slave captain John Newton, writer of ‘Amazing Grace‘, preached his last 28 years.

She argued that current global debt-based financial systems are unsustainable and that structural change is necessary which gives proper regard to actual production, and the rediscovery of the insights of earlier Christian (and of course Muslim) traditions.

more pictures

London Riverside – South Bank and Southwark

After visiting an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank next to Waterloo Bridge I walked slowly along the riverside and took a few pictures.

I was on my way to London’s City Hall, then close to Tower Bridge, owned by the government of Kuwait. In 2021 City Hall moved to a GLA-owned property in Newham, some miles to the east. The results of the London Mayoral Election were expected to be announced there in the early evening.

A few more pictures.

No to the Crook, the Toff, The Fascist or Cop -City Hall, Southwark

I sat on a wall close to City Hall reading John Updike’s novel ‘Terrorist’ which is perhaps why I attracted quite so much attention from a Metropolitan police FIT team (Forward Intelligence Team) photographer who took a number of photographs of me sitting there. I don’t object to being photographed, but was a little surprised when later I put in a Freedom of Information request to find the Met claimed they had no pictures of me, despite having photographed me working at many protests.

Protesters from various anarchist groups including Class War had come to City Hall to wait for the new London Mayor to be announced, though they were clear that they were against all the candidates – who they described as the Crook, the Toff, The Fascist and the Cop (there were six others also standing including Green Party candidate Sian Berry who got more votes than “the fascist” BNP candidate.

The protesters were allowed to protest in front of City Hall for around 35 minutes until Fitwatch went into action to frustrate the FIT teams (who could really use a little more intelligence) enclosing one of them in their banner.

Police called up their waiting reinforcements and the TSG arrived four minutles later and began to push the demonstrators, along with some bystanders, mainly tourists, towards the waiting pen which had been set up a short distance away.

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.

I watched as police told a man leaning peacefully on the river wall watching that he had to move as he was “obstructing the highway“. Clearly he wasn’t (though the police were) and he refused to move. They dragged him from the wall, claimed he was struggling (visibly he wasn’t), handcuffed him and led him away to one of the over 40 police vans parked nearby.

I showed my press card and for once was allowed through the police line obstructing the riverside path and made my way to a public balcony overlooking the area. “Cannier protesters had moved away faster, and were able to display their banner” for a couple of minutes but as I arrived they saw the police coming after them and made a run for a nearby pub.

“The police 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 joined the protesters in the pub for a drink before leaving for home.

By the time I arrived home Boris Johnson (the Toff) had been announced as the winner and London suffered from a dysfunctional mayor for the next 8 years as he was again elected in 2012. Later those the police had penned were allowed to go home.

Many more pictures.

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St Patrick’s Day – 2008

St Patrick’s Day – 2008: A parade in Willesden on Monday March 17th 2008 celebrated St Patrick’s Day. I came to it from a protest by the all-Irish environmental and social justice movement Gluaiseacht against the Corrib Gas Project in Mayo outside the Shell Centre, and had to rush away for a protest by Tibetans at the Chinese Embassy.

Brent St Patrick’s Day Parade – Willesden Green

Brent is one of London’s more diverse boroughs and has a large population of Irish and Anglo-Irish residents, particularly in what was sometimes called “County Kilburn“. As a borough it promoted various events to celebrate and unite its different communities, and among them I think was the only London borough to have its own St Patrick’s Day Parade.

Or it did until government cuts in funding to local authorities which hit particularly hard on boroughs like Brent meant it could no longer afford to support these community events.

London does now celebrate St Patrick’s Day with a march and event in Trafalgar Square on the nearest Sunday to the day itself, and I photographed the first of these, promoted by then London Mayor Ken Livingstone in 2002, though I only put a few black and white images on to My London Diary.

But the parade in Brent, though often involving some of the same people and floats was always a more interesting and intimate event, with the large local element giving it greater authenticity and I was sorry to see it go.

Local people came to view the parade, some waiting patiently on the pavement, others spilling out of packed bars drinks in hand as it arrived.

Local schools got involved, with children of all ethnicities becoming involved – and their families coming to watch.

I went to where the march was to start, at an Islamic Centre close to Willesden Green Underground Station, where the streets were most crowded and followed the procession as it made its way to the library in High Road Willesden where there were various musical performances and a bit of a funfair.

St Patrick was there of course, with the Mayor of Brent and others leading the parade. People walked with flags of the Irish counties (or at least the 26 of the 32 that are in the Republic of Ireland.)

I had to rush away shortly after the parade began to cover another protest.

More pictures at Brent St Patrick’s Day Parade.

Irish Protest Brings Pipeline to Shell – Waterloo

All-Irish environmental and social justice movement Gluaiseacht were in London for the weekend, and on St Patrick’s Day itself gathered outside the Shell HQ at Waterloo, bringing with them a very large pipeline.

The protest was over the Corrib Gas Project in Mayo in the north-west of Ireland, which the Irish Government has given at a knock-down price to Shell, Statoil and Marathon. It’s a project estimated to be worth over 50 billion Euros, but the Irish people will hardly benefit from the profits – and Shell gets the largest share.

Even worse the people in Mayo will suffer from the pollution around an inland refinery and a high pressure pipeline that will endanger local communities. Protests in Ireland have led to innocent people being jailed.

More text and many more pictures at Protest Brings Pipeline to Shell.

Tibet Vigil at Chinese Embassy – Portland Place

According to the Chinese Authorities, they “exercised restraint” in dealing with the Lhasa protests, using only non-lethal weapons and only killing 13 innocent civilians. Monday afternoon’s demonstration in Portland Place opposite the Chinese Embassy was timed to coincide with the midnight deadline in Lhasa for protesters to surrender.

After protesting for around an hour on the opposite side of the wide dual carriageway, one man jumped over the barriers and rushed across towards the embassy door waving a Tibetan flag. Others followed and police were unable to stop them.

The stewards from the protest tried to get them to make back and were eventually able to persuade them with some gentle pushing to make back to the central island in the road where the protest continued, with some of the protesters sitting down.

Eventually police reinforcements arrived and after failing to persuade them them to move an officer read out something over a loudspeaker. The protest was too noisy for me to hear it, but I think it was a warning that the protesters would be arrested if they didn’t go back to the pavement. The stewards then persuaded everyone to move back to the pavement to continue their vigil, and I went home.

Tibet Vigil at Chinese Embassy

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Serenading the Bomb Makers – 2008

Serenading the Bomb Makers: Given the current increased tension over the possible nuclear escalation of the Ukraine war – something that would be disastrous to us all and totally insane and irrational, but if NATO keep poking the Russian Bear with a stick could be provoked – it seems appropriate to remember the lunchtime tour around the London offices of some of the companies involved in making the UK’s nuclear weapons on Friday 12th December 2008.

I don’t think I can improve on the piece I posted on My London Diary in 2008 – except by adding the odd word that somehow got missed out, so I’ll copy that here, with some of the pictures from the event. I got too cold standing around and left after an hour and went to take a short look at the work taking place on the Olympic site at Stratford Marsh as the light was beginning to fade.

‘Muriel Lesters’ Serenade the Bomb Makers

Serenading the Bomb Makers - 2008 — *Lockheed Martin, Carlisle Place – A man sprawls in memory of the many deaths caused by atomic weapons; security men look bored.*

Ten activists turned up in Victoria, London on Friday for a festive protest outside the offices of the US company behind the production of the UK’s nuclear weapons and the huge expansion of bomb production facilities at Aldermaston – costing £6,000,000,000 – which has never been debated or approved by Parliament.

They were the ‘Muriel Lesters*’, a London affinity group of Trident Ploughshares. Dressed in Santa suits, white nuclear inspector overalls and festive hats they called for an end to bomb production at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE).

Appropriately, their renditions of festive songs and carols with modified anti-nuclear lyrics were largely less than tuneful (one taking part was hear to say “I’m a Quaker, we don’t sing” and who could contradict him?) They called for a stop to the illegal activities of these companies in making weapons.

First to be serenaded by the group were the offices of the US arms giant Lockheed Martin, makers of ‘bunker buster’ and ‘cluster’ bombs, the worlds largest exporter of weapons and the leading member of the consortium set up to produce the nuclear warheads for the UK Trident replacement at Aldermaston.

After an hour or so of leafleting and displaying banners on Vauxhall Bridge Road just around the corner, the group moved to the front door of the building housing Lockheed Martin and several other companies in Carlisle Place for their half hour carol ‘concert’. It was a site I knew from the ‘Merchants of Death‘ tour by CAAT earlier in the year. A number of people came in an out of the building while this was going on and some took leaflets while others hurried past, often to waiting taxis.

Half way through the performance, a police car pulled up and dropped off two constables who came to talk to the protesters. They asked who was in charge (and of course nobody was) and for a mobile number they could use to contact the group, saying “it’s standard practice for protests“. Oh no it isn’t! They were handed a leaflet with the Norwich details of Trident Ploughshares, but that wasn’t what they had in mind.

The police were informed that the real criminals were in the Lockheed Martin offices, carrying out the vast expansion in UK nuclear arms, a breach of the UK’s obligations under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that they were involved in an illegal conspiracy with some groups we could name down the road in Whitehall. The police chose to ignore this vital evidence but eventually they went away, reminding the protesters that while they supported the right to demonstrate, it was important to keep the pavement clear.

As they left, one member of the group stretched out “dead” on his back on that pavement as a symbol of the many victims of nuclear weapons, including those killed in nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “bomb test veterans, and victims of leukaemias, lymphomas and cancers caused by exposure to radioactive discharges from AWE Aldermaston and AWE Burghfield in Berkshire, Sellafield in Cumbria, Rolls Royce Raynesway in Derby and other sites“

I left the group as it packed up and decided to take a short break before going on for a similar protest at the London offices of Jacobs Engineering and Fluor Corporation, two other US companies who are competing for the stake in the AWE bomb-making contract currently filled by the British Nuclear Group. The third player in the contract – the only remaining UK involvement – is SERCO.

A few more pictures here

Muriel Lester, (1883–1968), born in Leytonstone, was a leading Christian peace campaigner and writer. Among many other things she founded Kingsley Hall in Bow, was a friend of Gandhi, Travelling Secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and was detained for ten weeks in Trinidad and then several days in Holloway Prison for her activities during the Second World War.

Olympic Site – Stratford

A few more pictures from around the London 2012 site.

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Buttes Chaumont and Belleville Traversée 2008

Buttes Chaumont and Belleville Traversée: Monday 17th November 2008 was the last day of our stay in Paris where I had come with my wife for a week for me to go to Paris Photo and for the two of us to enjoy the city and the huge number of photographic shows that were taking place there. On My London Diary you can read PARIS SUPPLEMENT, my diary of our week there.

We had arrived in Paris the previous Monday and the first thing we did on arriving there was to buy our weekly tickets – then Carte Orange – for bus and metro transport across the city – incredible value for those used to UK transport prices.

Buttes Chaumont and Belleville Traversée 2008 — *Parc de Buttes Chaumont*

But that of course had finished on Sunday. And the only real way to see any city is on foot, so we decided to spend the day before our Eurostar train left for London at 17.13 taking a walk around some of our favourite places, booking out but leaving our cases in the hotel foyer to collect later.

Buttes Chaumont and Belleville Traversée 2008 Le Voltigeur on the courner of rue des Couronnes — *Le Voltigeur on the courner of rue des Couronnes*

As you will see from the pictures here we first made our way to Paris’s most fantastic park, Buttes Chaumont, a former gypsum quarry and waste tip converted into gothic fantasy, and then on to Belleville.

Earlier in our stay we had visited the Bar Floreal where I had been given a free copy of a small book produced some years earlier for a show there by Willy Ronis (1910-2009), one of my several favourite photographers of Paris, ‘la traversée de Belleville’ which describes his favourite walk around the area.

Linda was keen to use this and find exactly the scenes in his pictures, while I was more interested in making my own pictures, and had followed a quite similar route some years earlier. But it was interesting to see it through his eyes, although considerable redevelopment had changed the area since he walked it in 1990. And more since 2008.

Rather more atmospheric than my pictures is the video which Ronis appears and speaks about some of his pictures in made at the time of the show in 1990.

Unfortunately the restaurant ‘Aux Monts D’Auvergne’ at which we ate a splendid three course lunch had been replaced by another by the time we next came to Paris. After the large meal we struggled a little but did just about manage to finish the ‘Traversée’, walk back to the hotel to collect our luggage and catch our train and were back home on the outskirts of London by 8pm.

There is more detail about the day in the text on My London Diary as well as in the picture captions – and as usual many more pictures.

Buttes Chaumont / Belleville Traversée

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March on the City 2008

March on the City: On Friday 10 October 2008 several hundred anti-capitalist protesters, mainly students, took to the streets of the City of London to say “We Won’t Bail Out the Bankers’.

The financial crisis had started in 2007, but reached a climax with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15 2008 which precipitated an international banking crisis.

Wikipedia sets out the causes of the crisis in some detail, but essentially US banks had been allowed to make more risky loans by changes in US laws which loosened regulations and allowed banks to take part in high risk operations such as proprietary trading and investment banking.

In the US one result of this was the proliferation of mortgage loans to people on low incomes who could really not afford the repayments and eventually defaulted. The problems with ‘subprime mortgages‘ particularly given to many in minority communities in the USA came to a head as a boom in US house prices in the early 2000s was followed by a sharp drop in the value of properties which were the security for the loans.

As Wikipedia comments, “governments deployed massive bail-outs of financial institutions and other palliative monetary and fiscal policies to prevent a collapse of the global financial system.” This resulted in the widespread feeling that those who had created the crisis were being rewarded for their failures.

In the UK, the New Labour government under George Brown made a massive financial intervention, paying £137 billion to the banks in loans and new capital, some of which was later recouped, but leaving a cost of £33 billion. While some support was necessary to avoid a total breakdown of the financial system, many felt that the government should have taken a firmer line and that those responsible should have had to pay for their mistakes and not to seem to have kept their highly paid jobs.

Both Northern Rock – the first UK bank to fail in July 2007 and Bradford & Bingley were taken into public ownership, and RBS/Nat West into majority public ownership. But RBS still ended up costing us £35.5 billion – and the leading bankers still ended up getting huge salaries and big bonuses. The Royal Bank of Scotland seemed to be getting off scot free.

Part of the problems we still see in financial markets came from changes worldwide in the way that trading now takes place. In the UK Margaret Thatcher had brought in the ‘Big Bang’ which abolished traditional practices and introduced electronic trading, greatly increasing volatility.

On My London Diary I give a fairly full account of the actual protest which started at Bank where some protesters tried to storm into the Royal Exchange – long just a prestige shopping centre – and the Bank of England but were easily stopped by police.

There then followed a slow march around parts of the City, with police attempting to stop them at various points and the marchers pushing their way through police lines.

As my pictures show, there was some rather forceful policing at times and some of the press also suffered with the protesters. As I write, “I got a few bruises and my glasses were damaged when police rushed in as I was taking pictures in Lombard St.” But there was none of the confrontational use of trained riot squads that have led to extreme violence at some protests policed by the Met. Policing here was by the City of London Police – along with a guest appearance by one French cop.

Eventually there was a short rally with a few speeches on the corner of Bishopsgate and London Wall after which the demonstrators dispersed. Police seemed fairly relaxed at the end of the protest and I saw no arrests.

I don’t think the protest got much if any coverage in the mass media and most accounts I read on-line were confused, with many suggesting it went to the Stock Exchange. While that might have been a logical place to protest, the marchers actually went in the opposite direction.

March on the City.

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No More Fur March – 2008

No More Fur March: Harrods has been getting a lot of attention in the media recently for the activities of its former owner, but on Saturday 27th September 2008 it was the destination of a march by the Campaign Against the Fur Trade.

Shamefully you can still buy fur coats at Harrods, A ‘secret shopper’ filming for animal protection charity Humane Society International/UK who raised concerns was lied to in 2021 by sales staff wearing Harrods-branded name badges about the conditions in which the fur is farmed.

Sales staff assured this customer that the foxes were kept in “separate rooms” with “enough space to play and everything“, and that they were “literally put to sleep” by injection when in practice they are confined in some farms in cages barely longer than their body length and anally electrocuted without any anaesthetic. The Harrods staff dismissed the many reports and videos of animals suffering in the fur trade as “only propaganda, madam“.

You can find out more about the actual practices of fur farming with evidence on many pages acriss tge web, including on the Humane Society International web pages which also have information on the other ways animals are mistreated in research, farming and other areas.

Fur farming was banned in the UK as ‘unethical‘ in 2000, but fur is still being imported into the UK from countries where fur farms raise and kill animals in desperately cruel conditions. Humane Society International has a letter you can sign to send Prime Minister Starmer calling on the UK government to end our association with fur cruelty for good and impose a fur import and sales ban.

Of course Harrods is not the only store still selling fur, and the march from Belgrave Square in 2008 also targeted other shops in Knightsbridge including “Gucci, Prada, Escada, Versace, Fendi, Joseph, Armani and Burberry” but in 2008 Harrods was the only department store in the UK still selling real fur.”

Since 2008 and despite many protests – as well as large events such as this there are smaller protests every weekend at Harrods and other shops selling fur – the sales of real fur in UK shops have continued.

Harvey Nicholls which had been fur-free since 2004 decided in 2014 to sell animal fur products again at its branches in London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Dublin, Leeds and Birmingham and the largest national anti fur campaign for many years was been directed against them. In 2023 they finally announced that they were returning to their no-fur policy.

More at No More Fur March.

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Notting Hill Carnival – Monday 25 August, 2008

Notting Hill Carnival: Here with some minor alterations is the piece I wrote for My London Diary about Carnival in 2008, with a few of the pictures. You can see many more pictures from the day on My London Diary.

There isn’t a great deal more to say about Notting Hill, although it did seem to be significantly less crowded than in recent years (some sources estimate attendance yesterday as three quarters of a million), and I walked easily through a number of areas that have usually been filled with seething masses. There did also seem to be fewer lorries and groups on the circuit than in previous years, but the big mas bands at the core of the event were out in force as usual.

Perhaps there are just too many other events on over the weekend and people were tired. Perhaps with the difficult economic times there is less funding for groups and less commercial interest (though Unison were still behind South Connections.) The weather wasn’t great either, though it didn’t rain.

Of course there are still many people who won’t go to carnival because they are scared of possible crime and violence. Police have reported that they had over 300 crimes reported to them at carnival on Monday and made around 150 arrests – considerably up on last year. With a reported 11,000 officers on duty it was still probably the safest place in the country, although I saw no sign of the metal detectors that were intended to prevent knifes being carried. In around five hours I only saw one brief incident as a young man was escorted away. The only knives I saw were plastic.

Of course carnival did go through troubled times. Its genesis was as a black response to the race riots in Notting Hill fifty years ago, although it only became a parade around the streets in 1965. In 1976 there was serious fighting when 3000 police attempted to take over and control the event and had to withdraw. Since then there have been various attempts to control and even stop carnival in Notting Hill, including the organising of alternative events elsewhere. And carnival itself has become much more managed and along with this, much safer to attend

I first went to carnival and took pictures around 20 years ago and have returned every year except one when a knee injury made it impossible (I made an effort, limping from home to our local station where I collapsed, unable to climb the footbridge, and decided I really wasn’t up to it.)

In October 2008 I took part in a show in the Shoreditch Gallery at the Juggler (now long close) in Hoxton Market, confusingly half a mile away from the site in Hoxton St where Hoxton Market is held and I was photographing Sunday’s ‘1948 Street Party‘. Hoxton Market is immediately to the north of the Holiday Inn on Old Street. The show, still online, was called ‘English Carnival’ and was a part of the East London Photomonth 2008.

The other 3 photographers, Paul Baldesare, Dave Trainer and Bob Watkins, showed pictures from ‘traditional’ English carnivals – like the Hayling Island one at the beginning of this month (August 2008), but my pictures were from Notting Hill – which now with other carnivals drawing their main inspiration from the Caribbean and elsewhere around the world is very much a part of the English carnival scene.

The work I chose for this show was a black and white portfolio of 20 images which had been previously published in ‘Visual Anthropology Review‘, where it accompanied a scholarly essay on carnival by distinguished academic, George Mentore along with his perceptive comments on my pictures.

You can see many more of my pictures from Notting Hill Carnival in two albums, Notting Hill Carnival – the 1990s and Notting Hill Panoramas -1992 and from later years on the August pages of My London Diary.

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Glasgow Visit 2008

Glasgow Visit 2008: In August 2008 with my wife and elder son and friends I went to Iona. The journey up from London is a long one and we decided that rather than try to do it in one day we would take the opportunity to spend a few days in Glasgow on our way, staying in a hotel close to the School of Art in the centre of the city, named after Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

We were in Glasgow for only five days but managed to see quite a lot of the city and some of its surroundings as my pictures show. Looking back I’m surprised at the variety of subjects in the roughly 2000 images I took, working over a 12 hour day on most of the 5 days we were there.

Only a fairly small fraction of the pictures are on My London Diary – partly because this wasn’t London and I then felt a bit embarrassed about posting work from another city. But the web site – which I updated regularly from around 2000 to the start of 2022 except during the lockdown and is still on line was very much my personal diary and so does include at least some of my pictures from outside London.

All were taken on the 12Mp Nikon D300, a DX format camera which I had bought earlier in the year. It was a very usable camera with decent autofocus and nothing that came later from Nikon was really much of an improvement, though the sensor size and pixel count increased. Should you want a good, cheap DSLR a secondhand D300 would still be a good choice, so long as the shutter count was well below the rated 150,000.

I think I had both a wide-angle and telephoto zoom with me. The Raw images I made have suffered a little from the processing to produce jpegs – software has improved significantly since 2008, and I think all of them could benefit from being made a little brighter. But life is too short to re-process them all.

For convenience I divided the pictures into eight rather arbitrary sections to post them on My London Diary, and I’ll include the direct links to these at the bottom of this post. But you can start at ‘My Pictures’ and click the link at the bottom of each page to go through the complete set I’ve posted.

This wasn’t my first visit to Glasgow, but I don’t think any pictures from my earlier visit when we spent a week there are online, and on the brief visit with friends back in around 1962 I took no pictures – I think I’d finished my holiday film on Skye, where my holiday also almost ended as I fell down a mountain.

Mmong other holidays in Scotland I’ve also spent a couple of weeks in Edinburgh – including once for the festival. And though I enjoyed both cities, I found Glasgow interested me more. If I ever return to Scotland it will be to Glasgow, as I now feel too old to walk the West Highland Way.

Glasgow 2008

My Pictures
Buildings
Sculpture
Museums
Roads
Clyde
Clydeside Titan
Forth-Clyde Canal

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No New Coal Rally and March – Rochester, Kent 2008

No New Coal Rally and March: On Sunday 3rd August I took a train to Rochester in Kent to photograph a rally in the town of Rochester from which people were marching to the Climate Camp was at Kingsnorth on the Hoo Peninsula in Kent where E.ON were intending to build the country’s first new coal-fired power station in 30 years.

I wasn’t able to attend the Climate Camp itself as I was leaving for Glasgow early the following morning so I left the marchers on their way to the site, seven miles away.

There was a large police presence at the rally and for the march, and later at Kingsnorth a number of protesters were arrested, with others assaulted by police who carried out a repressive action against the campers.

Press who had gone to cover the event were stopped and searchers, some multiple times and were subjected to both obvious and secret filming, as well as being pushed and shoved by police who demanded unnecessary personal information. Months later Kent Police admitted they had been wrong to film journalists, but claimed it was hard to tell them from the protesters – despite the fact that they all wore or showed the police-recognised UK Press Cards.

E.ON’s proposals to build a new and highly polluting power station at Kingsnorth had gone largely unnoticed in the media until the Climate Camp brought the issue to national attention. The over-reaction by the police helped to raise its profile, as did the trail of the Kingsnorth Six, activists arrested for causing an alleged £30,000 damage to one of the chimneys of the existing coal-fired in October 2007 and charged with criminal damage.

The activists claimed they had “lawful excuse” for their actions in that they carried it out to help prevent the much greater damage that a new coal-fired power station would cause by accelerating climate change.

Their trial heard evident from five defence witnesses, one of them Professor James Hansen, a former climate change adviser to the US White House, who stated that the social cost of emitting a tonne of CO2 was around £50. He estimated that a new coal-fired power station would cause around £1 million worth of damage per day it ran.

In truth the activists had not actually damaged the chimney significantly, but had simply painted the word ‘Gordon‘ on it, but they were acquitted in September 2008 because the jury found the damage they did to the smokestack was outweighed by the harm done to the planet by emissions from the power station.

E.ON was forced to abandon its plans largely because of the substantial public protests and criticism much of it arising from the publicity given to the Climate Camp and the trial.

The UK establishment were appalled by the verdict, and we have recently seen part of their reaction to this in the recent trial of Just Stop Oil activists who were judged to have committed contempt of court for attempting to introduce similar issues in their defence and then given draconian sentences for their peaceful protest. The law is meant to protect the interests of the rich and powerful not the planet.

You can read more about the rally in Rochester and the march towards Kingsnorth on My London Diary. One Climate Camp Caravan had started from Heathrow a week ago and another, the Stop Incineration Climate Camp Caravan had been travelling from Brighton, both demonstrating at various related sites along their routes and they met on Sunday morning in the middle of Rochester for a ‘No New Coal’ Rally attended by around 300 people.

After the rally the protesters set off to march to Kingsnorth and I went with them across the Medway and up the long hill in Strood before leaving them and returning to Strood station.

More at No New Coal Rally an d March.

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