birthday | >Re-PHOTO

Rail Fares, ISIS and Biofuels – 28 Oct 2014

Fair Fares Petition – Westminster. Tue 28 Oct 2014

Eight years later problems with our rail system continue and no significant changes have been made. Rail is a textbook example of something which should be run as in integrated public service and privatisation has been an entirely predictable disaster, at least for taxpayers and particularly those who use the railways.

*Campaigners met at the Dept of Transport in Horseferry Rd*

It has of course been a bonanza for the companies that have run parts of the service, particularly the three large companies that own and hire out most of the rail carriages, engines and waggons. Three ROSCOs (Rolling stock leasing companies) – Porterbrook, Eversholt and Willow – own together 87% of the rolling stock – and have made huge profits for their shareholders while failing to invest a great deal in new rolling stock. They are almost entirely owned by German, Australian, Canadian and other multinationals, mostly registered in Luxembourg to evade tax.

*Stephen Joseph OBE, executive director of the Campaign for Better Transport joins the protest*

Probably most people now know that the companies that actually run the trains – Train Operating Companies or TOCs – are largely foreign owned, mostly by the nationalised railways of Germany, France and Holland, with a couple from Italy and one from China (Hong Kong.) We do now have three nationalised TOCs, ScotRail, Northern and Transport for Wales. So basically the railways proved a mechanism for our government to hand over large amount of our taxes to these foreign countries.

*They stop to pose in Parliament Square*

The Campaign for Better Transport protest on Tuesday 28th October 2014 was more simply about changes in the evening peak time fares introduced by Northern Rail, then I think run by Serco-Abellio, a subsidiary of the Dutch state railway. These changes have particularly hit shift and part-time workers who work irregular hours, resulting in a 167% increase for some. Other TOCs have since made similar changes – with the ‘Off-Peak’ fares no longer available on my line, having been replaced by much more restricted evening fares.

*And then hand the petition to Rail Minister Claire Perry MP*

Our whole incredibly complex fare system is also down to the fragmented privatisation, and often means people pay far more than necessary. Even the highly trained ticket office staff are often unable to find the cheapest fare, and machines and web services are often misleading.

Rail fares are now often ridiculously high, particularly for those unable to book in advance. It’s often cheaper to fly to America than take a train from one English city to another. Even the Advance fares (Introduced by British Rail before privatisation) limited to a specific train can be pretty huge, often several times the European fares for similar journey lengths. We need lower fares to encourage people to stop using cars and move to public transport.

More at Fair Fares Petition.

Kobane – Unite against Isis Drawing – Trafalgar Square, Tue 28 Oct 2014

Kurds chanted slogans against ISIS and in support of the defenders of Kobane around a giant pavement chalk drawing based on an agonised Statue of Liberty in front of London’s National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.

More pictures at Kobane – Unite against Isis Drawing.

Biofuel picket Green Investment Bank Birthday – King Edward Street, Tue 28 Oct 2014

Protesters from Biofuelwatch and London Biomassive, some dressed as wise owls, picketed the second birthday celebrations of the Green Investment Bank at Bank of America Merrill Lynch against their funding of environmentally disastrous biomass and incineration projects.

The say the large-scale projects the bank funds are worse for the environment and for climate change than burning coal and urged the GIB to finance “low carbon sustainable solutions” instead of these “high-carbon destructive delusions.”

More at Biofuel picket Green Investment Bank Birthday.

Hull City of Culture 2017

Hull City of Culture 2017. I spent a few days in Hull in February 2017, while the city was celebrating its year as UK City of Culture.

Hull was important to me in my early years as a photographer, and was also where my wife grew up, and we made our trip partly to celebrate her birthday in the city, as well as for a little promotion of my photographs from the 1970s and 80s and also to work on a new photographic project.

I had my first – and still my largest – one person show in Hull’s Ferens Art Gallery in 1983, and much later self-published a book, Still Occupied: A View of Hull 1977-85. It’s still available, but at a silly price – and for some reason the hardcover imagewrap version is now cheaper than the paperback version. I’d always suggest getting the PDF version at £4.50, as the images are at just a tad better quality than in print and good enough to make a print should you wish (and I’ll pardon any small breaches of copyright.) The book has around 270 black and white photographs, some reproduced rather small, on its 120 pages. First published in 2011 it was republished with minor corrections to captions for the 2017 Hull UK City of Culture.

Two rather more reasonably priced 36 page black and white booklets were later published by Cafe Royal Books, one on the River Hull, and the second, The Streets of Hull. I promised another on the docks but have not yet got around to it.

I also set up a new web site on Hull for its year as City of Culture, finding much to my surprise that the domain hullphotos.co.uk was still available. I began this with a couple of hundred pictures at the end of 2016 and then added one every day through the whole of 2017. There are now over 600 black and white images on the site. A search of my images on Flickr reveals rather more than twice as many, including a large number in colour.

I had some disappointments during the 5 days I was in Hull in February 2017, and I found many other photographers and others in Hull who were also upset at the lack of opportunities the year had provided for local artists, instead concentrating on buying in talent from elsewhere. There is no shortage of talent in Hull and it would have been good for more of it to be showcased during the year. Plans for a small exhibition of my own work unfortunately fell through.

Self-portrait by gas light in Nellie’s in Beverley

But it was a good 5 days, with plenty to do and to seem and I was pleased with some of the panoramas I was able to make, though I’ve not yet got around to creating a show of these together with my old black and whites from the same locations. We also enjoyed a family celebration of Linda’s birthday,

The pictures in this post were all taken on Sunday 19th February 2017, where I got up fairly early for a long walk in the area close to the River Hull before meeting family for lunch, then took a bus to Beverley, where we walked around the town before having a drink in Nellie’s, one of the country’s more remarkable pubs and then catching the bus back to Hull, and then walking back through an empty city to the house we were staying in on the Victoria Dock estate.

Here’s the full list of links to our five days in Hull:
Hull 2017 City of Culture
    Sculcoates & River Hull
    City Centre & Beverley Rd
    Ropery St & St Mark’s Square
    St Andrew’s Dock
    Hessle Rd
    Gipsyville
    Beverley and Nellie’s
    Around the Town
    The Deep
    More Hull Panoramic
    Wincolmlee and Lime St
    Evening in the City
    Old Town
    A ride on Scale Lane Bridge
    Around the City Centre
    Hullywood Opening
    East Hull & Garden Village
    Albert Dock
    Old Town & City Centre
    River Hull
    Night in the Old Town
    Victoria Dock Promenade

Parliament Square

While I used to think of Trafalgar Square as being the centre of protests in London, and it still is a place where protests take place, over the years there does seem to have been a shift towards Parliament Square (and the nearby Old Palace Yard), largely I think after the years of vigil there by Brian Haw and supporters. And often when I’m in the area for one or two events I’ll come across others that I’d not known about it advance.

Of course Steve Bray and his SODEM campaigners against Brexit are always around when Parliament is sitting, day in day out – and even during the recent recess they only moved as far as the Cabinet Office. But today was a special day for them, marking the number 50. Not the number of years they have been protesting, but the fiftieth birthday of their founder.

There was so much else going on that I managed to miss the peak of the celebrations, arriving back just as they were finishing. But though I try, you just can’t be everywhere all of the time. I should have asked them when I walked past earlier about their plans, but I was in a hurry to get elsewhere.

And that elsewhere was in front of the gates to Parliament, where Operation Shutdown , a group of families and friends bereaved by knife crimes were calling for urgent action by government over knife crimes. I don’t share their faith that a meeting of the government’s emergency response committee COBRA would do much to help – or that tougher sentences for carrying and using knives and guns would have any real impact on knife crime, but there is clearly a need for action.

Clearly a starting point should be to reverse the government cuts to youth services and family support and to look at programmes to work with young people. London Mayor Sadiq Khan has come in for a great deal of criticism, but has set some reasonable policies in this area, but it really needs a reversal of the harmful policies imposed on local councils by the Coalition and Tory governments. So Operation Shutdown were clearly demonstrating in the right place, and of course their pain and grief is only too clear. Though they were I’m afraid talking to a government with little idea of how most people live and close to zero concern so long as they and their friends are getting richer.

Sometimes I have a problem with cropping. Often there is a tension between making an image visually strong and the text which locates and explains what the picture is about, and perhaps this image is a good example, where I think I have cropped just slightly too tightly. It’s often a good idea to give the reader some slight puzzle, but it’s hard to know if most people on seeing this will actually decipher ‘Stop the Mass Slaughter Of a Generation Now!’ Another inch or two at the left would have helped.

On the Olympus camera which has now become a part of my standard outfit, I work with the camera set on RAW and the aspect ratio as 3:2. But when working with raw images, the camera actually always records the whole sensor, with a roughly 4:3 ratio, which includes a small strip on top and below the 3:2 frame. When editing the pictures I do sometimes find that including some or all of this improves the images. Just a pity that there isn’t any similar leeway at the picture edges!

Just across the street, on the pavement in front of the grassed centre area, there was another protest, by the UK Chapter of the Free Balochistan Movement. It was the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, and they were calling for an end to the large-scale disappearances, arrests and torture of anyone suspected of having links to the Baloch nationalist movement by Pakistan military forces and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

My day which had begun with the mass lobby, hadn’t ended, and I returned just a little too late to SODEM, before going on to photograph two other protests, to which I’ll refer in a later post.

More pictures from these three protests at:

SODEM Steve’s 50th Birthday
Operation Shutdown against Knife Crime
End torture in Balochistan

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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