Monkey Business, Wrecked Cars & Roupell: I’d thought when I wrote my previous post about 1990 that my day on April 1st 1990 had finished when my walk in Stoke Newington ended, but my contact sheets and the dates written on them tell a different story.
I’d not gone to the Poll Tax demonstration the previous day, but from Stoke Newington took the tube down to Covent Garden and walked to St Martin’s Lane and Tottenham Court Road where I photographed a few burnt out cars before going on to Waterloo East and catching a train to Lewisham to take more photographs there.
Monkey Business was a restaurant in Covent Garden which apparently came to an untimely end around 1991. In a Facebook post Sajan Narain relates: “While I was studying at Cambridge, a few of us friends went to Monkey Business, an aptly named restaurant in Covent Garden. While we were dining in the basement there, we heard loud sounds of guns being fired, and smashing of glass, like sound effects from an action movie. Waiters and staff were running around shouting.
We saw lots of huge red marks on white shirts worn by waiters. It turned out to be blood. There was a huge gang war going on above us. Many shots were fired and glass windows at the front of Monkey Business had been smashed.
Armed police, ambulances, doctors and paramedics arrived while we were there. We survived the gang war without any injuries. After that incident, Monkey Business had to be shut down, unfortunately.”
Back in 1990 I rarely photographed demonstrations, mainly only on the large marches of organisations to which I belonged such as the Anti-Apartheid movement and CND. Although I was aware of protests against the Poll Tax – and had photographed people burning their community charge demands – I did not attend the major protest called for March 31st when around 200,000 crowded into the area around Trafalgar Square.
The police had thought there would only be a few thousand and laughed at the protest organisers when they had suggested there could be 20,000 but it turned out much, much larger and the police were unprepared.
Heavy-handed policing, including the violent arrest of a man in a wheelchair and a charge by mounted police into the crowd in Trafalgar Square, followed by police driving riot vans into the crowd aroused huge anger from the protesters, many of whom began attacking the police with anything to hand, including scaffold poles. The police actions turned what would have been an angry but largely peaceful protest into a riot.
According to Wikipedia “Scuffles between rioters and police continued until 3 am. Rioters attacked numerous shops, most notably Stringfellow’s nightclub, and car showrooms, and Covent Garden cafés and wine bars were set ablaze, along with motor vehicles.”
A police report the following year found “no evidence that the trouble was orchestrated by left-wing anarchist groups”, though some of these definitely claimed the credit. As usual at protests, most of those responsible for attacks on police evaded arrest and those arrested were largely bystanders and many were acquitted with video evidence showing the police had “fabricated or inflated charges”.
Protests including this one against the Poll Tax led to the questioning of Margaret Thatcher’s position as Prime Minister and led to her replacement by John Major. In 1991 he announced his intention to replace the Poll Tax by a new Council Tax, still in operation.
This returned to basing tax levels on property valuations but was in many respects a much cruder and less fair system than the former rates, particularly favouring owners of large and expensive properties at the expense of those in moderate and smaller homes.
My day was still not finished and I was on my way to Lewisham. As I walked down to the platform at Waterloo East station I pushed my camera through the gap in one of the slightly open windows and took this picture of the rooftops of Roupell Street and its neighbours.
These densely packed late Georgian worker’s cottages were developed by metal merchant John Roupell in 1824. He had married the daughter of a wealthy City wine merchant and after she inherited a wealthy aunt’s estate in Essex bought around 7 acres here at a cost of £8,000 to develop the Roupell Park Estate, its streets named after his family.
In their early years many of these small 4-roomed houses will have housed perhaps four large families, one to a room, perhaps over 20 people. These streets are much used as settings for films and TV, and the small houses now sell for around £1.5m
Pictures from Lewisham in later posts.
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