2018 | >Re-PHOTO

Nicaragua, Votes For Women, Al Quds Day – 2018

Nicaragua, Votes For Women, Al Quds Day: Sunday 10th June 2018 my work began in Trafalgar Square where Nicaraguans called for an end to the current government violence in their country. I then photographed a march commemorating the extension of the UK vote to include many but not all adult women a hundred years earlier. Then I went to the Saudi Embassy where there were two groups facing each other, kept well separate by police. It was Al Quds (Jerusalem) Day and supporters of the oppressed people of Palestine had come to protest there, with a counter-protest by Zionists.

End government killings in Nicaragua – Trafalgar Square

Nicaragua, Votes For Women, Al Quds Day - 2018

Nicaraguans came to call for an end to the violent attacks by police on protests in Nicaragua where they have killed over 100 protesters, injured over 600, and others have been unjustly detained, tortured and some raped.

The government atrocities have been condemned by he CIDH (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights) and Amnesty International and this was one of protests across Europe in solidarity, demanding the resignation of president Daniel Ortega and his wife and and vice-president Rosario Murillo and free and fair elections.

More pictures on My London Diary at End government killings in Nicaragua.

100 years of Votes for Women

Women wore purple, white and green head scarves to make up three strands of a huge procession in the suffragette colours through London marking 100 years since many British women gained the right to vote.

The 1918 act gave the vote to the first time to all men over 21 and to men like my father over 18 serving in the armed forces, but did not bring in universal suffrage for women. Women had to be over 30 and meet a property requirement. It was another ten years before all women over 21 – including my mother who was by then 23 – could vote.

My mother made no secret of her support for the Conservative party, displaying their poster in our front window at every election. My father, who kept quiet about his politics to avoid conflict at home, went into the polling station every time to cancel out her vote with one for Labour.

I left the march as the end of it passed Piccadilly Circus on its way to Westminster.

Many more pictures at 100 years of Votes for Women.

Zionists protest against Al Quds Day – Saudi embassy, Mayfair

As well as the official Zionist protest kept behind barriers by police around a hundred yards away from the pro-Palestine Al Quds day event there were also a number of extreme right football thugs roaming the area, together with some well-known Zionists. Some of these managed to come close to the Al Quds day event and shout at it and at times there was some forceful policing as the thugs were moved away.

The official Zionist Federation protest kept behind the barriers, shouting at the Palestinian supporters, most of whom simply ignored them though a handful faced them at a distance and shouted back. There seemed to be rather fewer of the Zionists than in earlier years and there were almost certainly more Jewish protesters in the Al Quds day event which was supported by several groups and numerous individuals from the Jewish left as well as the ultra-orthodox Neturei Karta, who always attract a great deal of venomous anti-Semitic shouting from the Zionists.

There had been considerable pressure on the UK government to ban the display of the Hezbollah flag, which was then still legal here, as the same flag was used by both the military wing, banned in 2008 and the political wing of the party which at the time had two ministers in the Lebanese government. Despite this the UK government banned the group as a whole in 2019, making the display of this flag from then on a criminal offence.

More pictures at Zionists protest against AlQuds Day.

Al Quds (Jerusalem) Day – Saudi embassy, Mayfair

*Protesters hold the largest Palestinian flag ever made, 70m long to symbolise the 70 years since the Nakba*

The much larger crowd who had come to the protest organised by the Justice for Palestine Committee and supported by the Islamic Human Rights Commission and a wide range of pro-Palestinian organisations was squashed into a small area in front of the Saudi Embassy.

There was a large police presence in the area that kept them well apart from the counter-protest by the Zionist Federation and stopped the football hooligans from attacking this peaceful protest.

Al Quds Day was established by the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 and is celebrated in many countries particularly across the Arab world. There have been events like this one in London for over 30 years.

The protest this year was a gesture of defiance to the demonisation campaign and the ongoing murders by Israeli troops of innocent Palestinian protesters in the Gaza Strip commemorating 70 years since Israel was formed on expropriated Palestinian land.

More on My London Diary at Al Quds (Jerusalem) Day.

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Palestine & Syria – 2018

Palestine & Syria: On Saturday 13th January 2018 I photographed a protest at the London US Embassy in Grosvenor Square against the continuing imprisonment of children in Palestine and another opposite the Russian Consulate over their continuing support for the Assad regime in Syria including the bombing of civilians.

Free Ahed Tamimi & All Child Prisoners

Teenager Ahed Tamimi was in prison in Israel for slapping an Israeli soldier who came into her family’s garden shortly after she had learnt that a relative had been shot by Israeli forces.

Her detention made the news and prompted this protest, but she was only one of the thousands of Palestinian children have been detained by Israel since 2000 in a systematic policy which the UN has said includes abuse and ill-treatment. Many Palestinian children have been kept for many days in solitary confinement in small underground cells in Israeli jails.

Israel is an apartheid state, with very different laws and police treatment for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank who are subject to Israeli military law and dealt with in military courts which offer little or no chance of justice. Many are held without any real trials in ‘administrative detention‘ which can be essentially indefinite, with prisoners being released at the end of one sentence and immediately re-arrested for another period of detention.

A number of those taking part were relatives or friends of Tamimi’s family, including her father’s cousin Nana Hourriyah, or of other prisoners in Israeli jails. One man who spoke had recently spent 3 months in Palestine and had stayed with the family of another child prisoner. He had then been deported for taking part in a peaceful protest.

During the hour I stayed at the protest a single Zionist protester in a pen at the end of the street waved an Israeli flag, shouting insults at the protesters and accusing them of supporting Hamas, which they firmly denied.

More at Free Ahed Tamimi.

Stop the Massacres in Syria

Protesters lined the street opposite the Russian Consulate calling for an end to the massacres taking place in Syria. Protests are not allowed in the private road a few yards away outside the Embassy.

Russia and Assad’s forces were bombing civilians in Idlib, Hama and Eastern Ghouta, specifically targeting medical workers and facilities, with 8 hospitals in Idlib bombed since the start of December.

Many of those still living in Idlib had fled there from other towns and cities previously bombed by Assad and his Russian allies who were attempting to complete the destruction of all groups opposed to the Assad regime and bomb or starve to death the civilian population in areas held by opposition forces.

Only now after the fall of the Assad regime has the full scale of their human rights abuses become widely known with over 150,000 people thought to have been tortured and killed in his infamous prisons. As many as 620,000 were killed in the 14 years of civil war – around 1 in 35 of its prewar population, with around half these being civilians.

More than 14 million – almost two thirds of the Syrian population – were forced to leave their homes in the civil war. Half remained elsewhere in Syria, around 5.5 million in surrounding countries. Around a fifth of the countries pre-war population made their way to Europe, with the majority of these going to Germany. The UK set up a scheme to take Syrians but the numbers here remain relatively small at around 40,000.

Stop the Massacres in Syria

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Brentford, Chiswick & Hammersmith – 2018

Brentford, Chiswick & Hammersmith: On Thursday 27th December 2018 we still had a lot of Christmas excess to walk off despite having made our normal Boxing Day walk the day before. But we had followed that with a second Christmas dinner.

This is still one of my favourite walks in West London and includes various stretches I’ve often walked over the years in one direction or the other, usually during the times of year when days are short and we don’t want to spend much time in travelling. And during the time between Boxing Day and New Year, rail travel is often something of a lottery with much of the network being shut down for engineering work.

Brentford locks were gauging locks so that tolls could be charged based on the weight of goods in barges. The flats here on a site between the River Brent and the canal have replaced large dockside sheds.

Even our short journey to Brentford was affected in 2018 and the usual direct train service to Brentford – our slow route to Waterloo – was not running. But we could take a train to Twickenham and go the rest of the way on the top deck of a bus, always one of the most interesting ways to travel in London. And the bus did take us more conveniently close to where I wanted to start this walk, at the bridge which takes Brentford High Street over the Grand Union Canal.

Brentford used to be a rather dirty downmarket industrial and commercial centre, with sheds and warehouses, factories, docks on the canal and where this enters the Thames, a thriving market, a large gas works and more. It has changed dramatically in the last 40 or so years with much of its river and canal sides now filled with luxury flats. Parts of the old Brentford remain but more and more is disappearing, including some things in these pictures I made in 2018. I’ve been there a few times since and it remains an interesting walk.

More on My London Diary at Brentford to Hammersmith. Here I’ll simply post a few images with captions from some of the key places along our route apart from the picture at the top of the post they follow roughly in the order I took them, though we did quite a bit of wandering around in Brentford.

*The River Brent from the footbridge over the weir.*

*Below Thames Lock the river comes back into the channel leading from the lock to the Thames.*

*A working boatyard at Dock Road on the River Brent*

*John’s Boat Works, Lot’s Ait with the bridge to it built in 2012*

*Hounslow Council and boat owners fought a long battle over the moorings at the gasworks site, but these boats were simply abandoned after the council’s victory.*

*Strand on the Green at low tide. It was warm enough to sit in the sun and eat our sandwiches*

*We walked through the gardens and out from the main gate to Chiswick House*

*The footpath to St Nicholas’s Church in Chiswick*

In Hammersmith we took the District line to Richmond and then a train back home to tackle some of the leftovers from our Christmas lunch.

More on My London Diary at Brentford to Hammersmith.

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Slavery, Climate, Stolen Goods & Santas – 2018

Slavery, Climate, Stolen Goods & Santas: on Saturday 8th December 2018 I began with a march against African migrants being enslaved in Libya, photographed Buddhists meditating against climate change, went to the British Museum for a call to them to return indigenous Australian cultural objects and finally met hundreds of people in Santa costumes in Covent Garden.

Protest Slavery in Libya

Slavery, Climate, Stolen Goods & Santas - 2018

There had been large protests a year earlier about slave auctions in Libya where many African migrants trying to reach Europe are captured by bandits, terrorists and jihadists – often funded by the EU and other outside countries – and sold as slaves.

The replacement of Gadaffi and his replacement by Western-backed puppets was a part of a continuing neo-colonialist attempt to control Africa’s natural resources which has led to the instability and mass migration from African countries to the south. Libya had begun a process of de-Africanisation and elimination of Black Libyans and the slave auctions are a simple extension of this policy.

Like many other issues, this had simply dropped out of the news despite the UK and other countries failing to take any action, perhaps why this protest was only by a small group. They met for a short rally outside the EU offices Europe House as the deals and actions of the EU to prevent migrants reaching Europe means many more of them are detained in Libya.

They then marched to protest outside the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, saying the UK had failed to do anything to help because the victims were African, then stopped briefly at the gates to Downing Street before marching on to the Libyan Embassy. I left them at Trafalgar Square

Protest Slavery in Libya

Dharma meditation for climate – Trafalgar Square

A small group from the Dharma Action Network meditated in Trafalgar Square as a call for people to take action, suggesting people move their money out of banks which invest in fossil fuels, get informed by reading the IPCC report on global warming and join them and other groups including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and take direct action with Extinction Rebellion.

Dharma meditation for climate

British Museum Stolen Goods Tour

I joined Indigenous Australian campaigner Rodney Kelly and others on the tour organised by BP or not BP? in the Kings Library of the British Museum in front of the glass case displaying the Gweagal shield stolen from his ancestor by Captain Cook at Botany Bay. Kelly is a 6th generation direct descendant of Cooman, whose Gweagal shield was taken when Captain Cook’s men on first landing in Australia opened fire with muskets, and the shield has a small hole caused by a musket round.

BP or not BP? activists came dressed as burglars in striped jumpers and black masks with sacks for swag.

Another, dressed as a ‘BP Executive’ explained how their sponsorship of art including exhibitions at the British Museum helps to clean up their reputation, tarnished by oil spills, the exploitation of oil fields around the globe with its associated environmental damage, the sale of climate change producing fossil fuels and more. It all looks much better with the nice glossy image of exhibitions such as those at the museum.

They then introduce Kelly who began (and ended) his talk by playing his didgeridoo, and then talked about how the British Museum had dismissed his earlier attempts to return the shield and other items, and had refused to take seriously the oral tradition of his people as it could not be confirmed by written records.

After retelling the story of how it was stolen and how the museum came to acquire it, he told the crowd now packing the room how the shield which few people stop to look at in the museum would reinvigorate the traditions of his people back in Australia and would be both the centrepiece of a museum of indigenous Australia and revive a great interest in traditional crafts.

The crowd then moved on to sit on the floor in front of the then current BP-sponsored Assyrian exhibition, where an Iraqi woman spoke, telling us that objects looted from Iraq during the invasion in 2003 and bought by the British Museum were on show which clearly should be returned to Iraq. Looting of cultural artifacts was considered respectable and normal back in the days of the British Empire (or at least by the British) but is no longer acceptable.

We moved on to a room devoted to objects taken from Polynesia where we heard about looted objects from the region and a statement from the Rapa Nui Pioneers on Easter Island calling for the return of their stolen Moai Head.

It was now time to visit the huge room containing the Parthenon Marbles, which Elgin claimed to have taken them with the permission of the Ottoman Empire, then rulers of Greece, but this now seems unlikely – and the marbles in any case surely belonged to the Greeks rather than thier occupiers.

Here one of the BP or Not BP? burglars, Danny Chivers, revealed himself to be part-Greek and talked about a recent visit to the Acropolis Museum, close to the Parthenon, where a room containing the marbles that Elgin left in Athens are displayed, complete with gaps in the appropriate places for those currently on display in the British Museum.

It seems clear that they should be returned to Athens, and it would now be possible – if expensive – to make a set of visually identical replicas to continue to display here. Perhaps in return for sending them back, the BM could receive replicas of those that remained in Athens – and so both cities could have a full set.

More at British Museum Stolen Goods Tour.

London flooded with Santas – Covent Garden

Finally I met Santacon in Covent Garden, with crowds of people dressed in Santa costumes, together with the odd elf and reindeer making their way to Trafalgar Square, spreading glad tidings as darkness fell, some following hand-pulled sound systems and dancing on the streets, though many groups were diverted into pubs and food shops on the way. This year the charity event was supporting ‘Christmas for Kids’ as well as having a great deal of fun.

Many, many more pictures at London flooded with Santas.

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Manchester Short Break – 2018

Manchester Short Break: We arrived in Manchester on Wednesday August 1st 2018 for a short break. Manchester was the city where I had met Linda and where we had spent the first penniless two years of our married life, and most of our honeymoon – apart from a day trip to the Lake District – but had only paid a few brief visits together since we left in 1970.

A ten minute walk from Manchester Piccadilly took us to our hotel. It was cheap and basic but had a good view from our sixth floor room overlooking the Ashton Canal – with the short New Islington Branch going under the bridge in the centre of the picture.

We dropped our bags and went out for a long walk around the hotel and into the centre of the city. Ours was a modern building but many of the old mills had been converted into hotels.

We walked past the main entrance to what had been the University of Manchester Institute of Technology where I often shared a large goods lift with the Principal, Lord Bowden on my way into work. A year or so earlier he had been Harold Wilson’s Minister for Education and Science and this was then very much part of the ‘white heat of technology‘.

After a year of work in a lab there I then moved to the brand new Chemistry tower a short distance away, a hazardous move carrying fragile glass equipment – much of which I had spent months building myself – and highly toxic chemicals. It was a health and safety nightmare, but we survived.

We walked on to take a look in a couple of places at the River Medlock. and on Oxford Road I photographed the splendid Refuge Assurance Building, 1891 by Alfred Waterhouse, extended in 1910 and 1912 by his son Paul Waterhouse, and further extended in 1930s.

Since 1987 it has been a hotel and was renamed ‘The Principal Manchester’ in November 2016.

Further down Oxford Road we came to the main university buildings, soot-blackened when I studied there but now cleaned up. I preferred them blackened with soot, particularly main building and Holy Name; Victorian Gothic really needs to be subdued not to be far too fussy. I wrote “It looks too toytown for my taste now, the soot stains gave it gravitas.“

My first year physics lessons were deadly boring and were conducted in a laboratory; the end of the bench where I sat was a small plaque with the message ‘Rutherford first split the atom here‘. An article in The Guardian in 2008 revealed that I and other students and staff were being exposed to radioactive materials left over from the work by his groups and later researchers in the building until the Physics department left it in 1970. But most of the contamination – including significant amounts of polonium – the material used to kill Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko – probably dated from the early years as before the death of the discoverer of polonium Marie Curie in 1934 were not fully appreciated. Her notebooks “in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, are still so radioactive that it is not considered safe to handle them.” I suspect the bench at which I sat and made notes will also have been highly radioactive.

At least two Manchester University lecturers who worked in these rooms after they were taken over by the psychology department are presumed to have died because of the radiation. The building has now been decontaminated and is in use as university offices. I don’t know what happened to that small I think brass plaque when the Physics department moved out – I suspect it may have been lost – and it may also have been dangerously radioactive. But a safe blue plaque was put on the outside of the building in 1986 and states “Ernest Rutherford (1871 – 1937) Nobel Laureate led this laboratory 1907 – 1919 herein discovered the nuclear atom, split the atom, and initiated the field of nuclear physics” and in 2016 the university renamed the building the Rutherford Building.

We walked a little through the campus to see the Arts Faculty Building where Linda studied and briefly taught in 1971-2 and then continued down Oxford Road to take a brief look at the outside of our first home in a upper floor flat on a side-street off Platt Lane – the house had a new doorm but otherwise was much the same. If it is still flats I suspect the rent may be a little more than the £2 18s 6d a week we paid. The alley at the back of the houses, always clean and tidy when we lived there, was now overgrown.

We wandered a bit around Rusholme and then went further south on Wilmslow Rd, as far as Owens Park where Linda spent three years and I lived for one on the 10th floor of the tower in a room with great views over the city, often obscured by smoke. Security around the site, parts of which were being redeveloped meant I could only view it over the wall, and we walked back up the road to the “Curry Mile” where we had one of the most disappointing Indian meals ever – which made me quite ill the following day.

You can see more pictures from this walk on My London Diary – and also pictures from the next few days when we visited some of the more interesting parts in and around the city.
Manchester Visit
   Ancoats – Saturday
   Central Manchester – Friday
   St Johns Quarter
   Oxford Road to Castlefields
   Mersey Walk &, Fletcher Moss
   Manchester to Didsbury
   Manchester: Canal walk
   To Stockport & Bramhall Hall
   Science & Industry Museum
   Manchester: City Centre – Thursday
   Manchester: Oxford Road
   Manchester: City Centre – Wednesday

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All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
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Greenwich Walk – 2018

Greenwich Walk: On Thursday 18th October 2018 I walked with two or three other photographers from North Greenwich Station to the centre of Greenwich and made the pictures in this post. You can see many more of them in a post on My London Diary, Greenwich Walk.

Recently on >Re:PHOTO I’ve published a series of posts about my walks in London back in the 1980s, along with some of the pictures I took then which are now in my albums on Flickr. The most recent walk I’ve featured has been in Brixton and Stockwell and began with Stockwell Park, Bus Garage, Tower and Mason, and I’ve still to finish the posts on this, and will do so shortly.

But I’ve continued to walk around London, if less frequently than before in recent years. My walks now are rather shorter in length and duration and are mostly together with a few friends, other photographers who sometimes lure me into pubs on the way (I’m easily tempted.) And we almost always end up with a meal together in one.

Photographically things are rather different too. I don’t even always take any photographs and am no longer working on the kind of extended projects which I had back in those earlier days, recording the fabric of the city and in particular those areas undergoing substantial change – such as the whole of London’s docklands.

Back in the 80s and 90s I always worked with at least two cameras, one with black and white film and the other with colour. So far I’ve included very little of the colour work in those posts here, in part because I was working on a different project with the colour. You can see more of the colour work in the online project initially put together as a dummy for an as yet unpublished book in the early 1990s, ‘Café Ideal, Cool Blondes & Paradise‘.

More recently several web sites have published features using mainly these colour pictures from my Flickr albums sometimes along with some of the black and white. The most recent of these is on Flashbak, ‘34 Photos From A Walk Around Tooting, South London In 1990‘. It puts together images from several visits to the area and includes a few black and white images of people on the streets, In the introduction Paul Sorene comments “What we love about Peter’s pictures is that he shows us the everyday things we saw but didn’t much notice. Now that we get to look again, things looks strangely familiar.” I think this is about the 12th set of my pictures on that site.

But now I only take one camera on my walks, and always work in colour as the camera is digital. I could easily switch the images to black and white, but have only done so extremely rarely.

The other large change for me is the ease with which I can now make panoramic views, no longer needing to carry a separate camera for these, just the right lens. Many of the images from my walk on Thursday 18th October 2018 are panoramic with a horizontal angle of view of around 145 degrees even though they have a ‘normal’ aspect ratio of 3:2 as they also have a large vertical angle of view. Just a few are cropped to a more panoramic format.

Finally, here is the paragraph I wrote about the area in 2018:

I first walked along here back in 1980, and have done so a number of times since, though in recent years much of the riverside path has been closed as the old wharves are being replaced by luxury flats. It is still an interesting walk, though it has lost virtually all of the industrial interest it once had. A River Thames that is rapidly becoming lined by new and largely characterless buildings is at times a sad state, but there still remain some liminal landscapes and surprising vistas.
Greenwich Walk on My London Diary

March With The Homeless – 2018

March With The Homeless

No More Deaths On Our Streets Saturday 3rd March 2018

A few days ago in February 2023 a report came out that the number of rough sleepers in England has increased for the first time since 2017.

The increase is blamed on the cost-of-living crisis making the various causes of homelessness worse, and the government’s ‘Ending rough sleeping for good’ strategy announced last year has so far failed to be any help.

We are still one of the richer countries in the world, and it is a disgrace that so many have no place to go. London’s Mayor is reported as calling it extremely alarming and saying “It is high time ministers got a grip on the escalating food, energy and housing crises and restored the social security safety net which helps stop people becoming trapped in a cycle of homelessness.”

The area with the largest number is of course London, and within London the boroughs of Westminster and Camden at the heart of London top the figures. As well as having the most people sleeping on the streets, these boroughs are also home to many of the wealthiest people in the country (or at least one of their homes) and of the most egregious examples of over-consumption where the wealthy swarm to spend ridiculous amounts on over-priced goods and services.

The increase has also been greatest in the capital, with the figure in Westminster, the home of our government, alone up from 187 in 2021 to 250 in 2022.

London of course has ridiculously high house prices, stoked in part by foreign investors who own properties just to profit from the increases in prices rather than actually live in them. Many too are owned by offshore trusts, still hiding the actual owners, and often empty or underused.

The problem isn’t really house prices, or a lack of homes – we have more than are needed to give everyone a decent home. But inequality, which continues to rise. And at its roots is the greed of the rich, for whom enough is never enough. And there are ten times as many empty houses as there are homeless people.

The March With The Homeless on Saturday 3rd March 2018 took place are a recent cold snap had killed a number of rough sleepers on the streets of London. As well as organisations supporting street homeless including #solidaritynotcharity, Streets Kitchen, Homeless Outreach Central, and London: March for the homeless there were also some of those homeless taking part.

I found the police reaction to this protest shocking. They came out onto the streets to try to stop it happening and to force those taking part to return to there static protest opposite Downing Street where it began.

As well as officers on foot there were also two police horses trying to control the protest, but whose riders seemed unable to control, particularly in some of the narrower streets. I often had to rush out of their way and at one point I was crushed against a wall by a clearly out of control horse, but fortunately only slightly bruised.

I think the police saw their role as protecting the property, particularly the properties of those owners who had empty properties which they feared the protesters might attempt to occupy. The intention of the march wasn’t to actually occupy properties, but to create a little minor disruption to traffic and noise that would bring attention to the problem and put pressure on the government and authorities to take some effective action. But I think there was little if any media coverage of the event.

They intended to march to a squat in Great Portland Street that had occupied empty commercial premises and was giving food and shelter to homeless people, getting them off the freezing streets. The police seemed to be trying to keep them out of the West End, where they might disturb more people. I had to leave the march when police had halted them at Piccadilly Circus, but I think eventually they did make it and the squat provided food and overnight shelter for around 30 people on the night of the march.

More on My London Diary at No More Deaths On Our Streets.

Nuclear Fools Day & CND at 60

Nuclear Fools Day & CND at 60 – Twice in the last ten years, on 1st April 2013 and 1st of April 2018 I’ve got on my bike and cycled to Aldermaston to take part in protests by CND around the UK’s Aldermaston nuclear bomb factory, 12 miles west of Reading.

I wasn’t there for the first big Aldermaston March in 1958, though one of my older brothers went, and I remember him coming back rather tired and muddy but please he had managed the whole 4 day march. CND had then just been formed and supported the march organised by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War and the next year they began a series of annual marches, marching from Aldermaston to a rally in Trafalgar Square.

The annual marches continued until 1963, and in 1964 there was just a one-day march in London which I think I may have taken part in, though by then I was a student and I don’t recall well which of many demonstrations I took part in during the sixties. I didn’t keep a diary and couldn’t afford to take photographs then. There was a shorter march in 1965 from High Wycombe and the march in the original direction to Aldermaston was revived in 1972 but with fewer marchers taking part. And a number of marches and rallies in London since then which I did photograph.

The next revival of the march I think took place in 2004, and on that occasion I photographed the rally in Trafalgar Square at the start of the march on Friday 9th April and marched with around 2,300 to Hyde Park but left the around 430 of who set off to spend the night in Reading. I got on my bike on the Sunday to meet them again at Maidenhead, walking with them to their lunch stop at Knowl Hill, from where I walked back into Maidenhead to pick up my bike and ride home.

*Kate Hudson, Natalie Bennett and Pat Arrowsmith, Aldermaston, 2013*

On the Monday I was up early to catch a train to Reading where the final leg was starting with my wife and elder son. I didn’t feel I could walk the 12 miles with my usual heavy camera bag so took along just my Canon Digital Ixus 400, (aka PowerShot S400), an ultra-compact and light camera with a 36-108mm equivalent lens giving remarkably sharp 3.9Mp images, although the autofocus wasn’t always precise. You can view a large number of pictures from 2004 on My London Diary

The pictures on this post come from two more recent events, the Nuclear Fool’s Day – Scrap Trident rally at Aldermaston on Easter Monday, 1st April 2013 and CND At 60 at Aldermaston on Sunday 1st April 2018. On both occasions I cycled from Reading station the 12 miles there carrying my normal camera equipment. I think I was a little tired when I got there on both occasions, and perhaps not working at my best. The ride back was a little easier as it is downhill much of the way.

In 2013 there were protests all around the extensive site and the bike enabled me to get around and take pictures of the protesters at each of half a dozen gates around the over 5 miles of the site perimeter, as well as of people walking around and attaching messages and banners to the tall security fence.

The speakers were also travelling from gate to gate, but in a couple of cars and a lorry and among those I heard and photographed were CND Vice-Chairs Jeremy Corbyn MP and Bruce Kent, CND General Secretary Kate Hudson, Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett and South East Green MEP Keith Taylor, Stop the War’s Chris Nineham and CND founding member Pat Arrowsmith and another veteran Walter Wolfgang, as well as US activist Linda Pentz Gunter, the founder of ‘Beyond Nuclear’.

*Rebecca Johnson holds up a copy of the UN treaty banning nuclear weapons*

The 60th anniversary event in 2018 was easier to cover as it took place mainly in the Atomic Weaopons Establishment Car Park close to the Main Gate and on the fence close by, so I didn’t need to ride around the area, parts of which are rather hilly. As well as 60 years of campaigning by CND it celebrated the UN treaty banning nuclear weapons, finalised last year and signed by 122 nations, for which ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, of which CND is a part was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Something that went almost unnoticed in the British media.

More at:

2004 on My London Diary
Nuclear Fool’s Day – Scrap Trident
CND At 60 at Aldermaston

After Christmas – Brentford to Hammersmith

After Christmas – Brentford to Hammersmith was one of our more interesting walks in London to walk off our Christmas excesses in recent years. For once I’m not sticking religiously to my usual practice and this was three years AND one day ago, and the four of us set out on 27th December 2018.

Often in recent years we’ve gone away in the period after Christmas to visit one of our sons and his family in Derbyshire, with some great walks in the areas around where they have lived, and there are pictures from these on My London Diary, but in 2018 my other son and his wife were staying with us and came for this walk.

Public transport in the period between Christmas and New Year is at best restricted and rather unreliable, and 2018 was no exception and this always limits our starting point. Even for this relatively local walk what would have been just a short direct train meant taking the train to Twickenham and then catching a local bus to Brentford. And on our return trip again a bus took us back to Twickenham for the train home. It meant less time for walking and we had to abandon the idea of actually going inside Chiswick House in order to complete the relatively short walk of 5-6 miles before it got dark.

Brentford, and particularly the Grand Union Canal where we began our walk is now very different from how I remember it – and indeed since I first went back to photograph it in the 1970s. Commercial traffic on the Grand Union came more or less to an end in the early 1970s. What was once canal docks and wharves by the lock where boats were gauged and tolls charged the sheds have been replaced by rather uglier flats and a small marina.

Walking by the canal towards its junction with the River Thames there are areas which still look much as they did years ago, and some rather more derelict than they were then. This is a side of Brentford invisible from the High Street but with much of interest. Probably in the next few years this too will disappear as gentrification advances.

Shortly before the lock leading to the Thames, the River Brent which is here combined with the canal runs over a weir to make its own way to the main river. There are still working boatyards in the area around here, though a little downstream more new flats and a part of the Thames Path here was closed and a short diversion was necessary.

We continued along past new riverside flats and a new private footbridge to the recently revivied boatyard on Lot’s Ait to an area of open space which was a part of the old gas works site, then along the riverside path past more new flats to Kew Bridge and Strand on the Green. Here it was warm enough to sit in the sun and eat our sandwiches before leaving the river to walk to Chiswick House Gardens.

I’d planned to get here for lunch, perhaps spending an hour or so going around the house and then perhaps a drink in the cafe, but there was no time thanks to the rail problems, so we briefly visited the toilets before heading on to St Nicholas’s Church and Chiswick riverside.

From there it was a straight walk by the river to Hammersmith Bridge, arriving around sunset with some fine views along the river – and then the short walk to the bus station for the bus back to Twickenham and the train home. The two bus journeys made our travel take much longer, but you do get some interesting views from the top deck of a double-decker and the journey was intereresting at least until it got too dark to see much.

More on the walk and many more pictures at Brentford to Hammersmith.

Extinction Rebellion Climate Protest 2018

Protesters in Parliament Square on 31st October 2018 heard speeches from climate activists including Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg, campaigner Donnachadh McCarthy, Labour MP Clive Lewis, economist and Green MEP Molly Scott Cato, before making a ‘Declaration of Rebellion’ against the British Government for its criminal inaction in the face of climate change catastrophe and ecological collapse.

Three years ago British campaigners were particularly inflamed by the almost total lack of any measures in the budget to meet the impending catastrophic climate change, and three years later we can say the same about last week’s budget. Sunak still seems to be intent on growth and business as usual, encouraging road building and air travel and there was little or no mention of any green initiatives, something of a pre-COP26 sabotage of stated government policies.

But as Thunberg and others made clear, we have seen some rhetoric but totally inadequate action so far to meet the challenge and the Extinction Rebellion protest made this clear in its ‘Declaration of Rebellion’ against the British Government for its criminal inaction in the face of climate change catastrophe and ecological collapse.

Schoolkids get it – and it led to Greta’s protest outside the Swedish Parliament which has inspired many around the world. Even some of our media are beginning to get it, but governments around the world, including our own seem reluctant to actually make the kind of changes that are needed. And although some MPs speak out, neither Labour nor Conservative parties have embraced the kind of policies that are necessary to avert mass extinction.

Its a shame that many on the left have devoted rather more energy to criticising the actions taken by Extinction Rebellion rather than getting out and doing something positive, with few others organising protests and direct actions. XR have done a lot to raise public awareness and the vicious reaction to their protests with the government pushing prosecutions against them and a draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill currently in its final stages in Parliament , and threats to rewrite the Human Rights Act and to hobble judges have shown the true colour of our Tory government as we move towards a police state.

After reciting the ‘Declaration of Rebellion’ the protesters moved onto the road and sat down to block it and continue the rally with songs, poems and speeches, including by Caroline Lucas MP and George Monbiot. There were several votes during the sit-down when protesters were asked if they wished to leave the roadway as police were threatening to arrest them which resulted in a near-unanimous show of hands in favour of remaining.

As George Monbiot finished some of the protesters began to leave, and several activists stood up to encourage people to stay behind on the road and be arrested, and several groups continued the protest, including one circle with protesters linking arms including Donnachadh McCarthy and George Monbiot. Police surrounded the group, and then arrested the man to McCarthy’s left, coming back a few minutes later to take McCarthy away – and he later published an account of what appeared to be a symposium on climate change he conducted in the police van. Monbiot shortly after got up and left, apologising to those remaining that he needed to collect his children from school.

The arrests continued slowly, and there was still a group on one side of the road who had been locked together for some hours who police seemed to be largely ignoring and were still there when I left, along with others still sitting on the road.

I have low expectations for next week’s COP 26. We will get more promises to add to those which have already not been kept and not the real shift into action that the world desperately needs. Of course I’d be delighted to be proved wrong. But this side of a revolution I think it unlikely that the ultra-rich can be persuaded to change their ways.

Many more pictures at:
Extinction Rebellion roadblock
Extinction Rebellion rally