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London World Naked Bike Ride 2025

London World Naked Bike Ride

Last Saturday I photographed a couple of protests, went to a disappointing photographic exhibition, took a snap of the Red Arrows and found myself with time to spare to go and photograph the 2025 London World Naked Bike Ride at its start and then later on my way to my last protest of the day.

The first year I photographed this event was in 2006 and I came back to it in almost every year until 2014, then again rather briefly in 2019. Here I’ll post some of what I wrote about it on that first occasion and then my comments on returning to photograph it in 2019, and end with my thoughts about the 2025 ride. All the pictures in this post are from Saturday 14th June 2025.

Unfortunately Facebook’s “community standards” prevent me from publishing an album of my pictures there, but you can find a selection of images on my Alamy portfolio pages. Though you may have to search or browse a few pages to find them after I upload more work.

2006

People in over 50 cities around the world were taking place in the World Naked Bike Ride as a protest against oil dependency and car culture. In London. over 600 cyclists, along with a few rollerskaters, rollerbladers and others took part.

As a change, I congratulate the Met police for allowing the event (unlike the Brighton cops.) Police cyclists – looking rather over-dressed in their usual uniform – led the event in its ride around some of the busiest streets in central London, and kept riders safe from traffic. Most of them seemed to be amused by the event.

So too were the crowds in central London. Many obviously found it hard to believe the evidence of their eyes, but all I saw seemed amused and none offended. Riders handed out a leaflet explaining the purpose of the event and advising “if you don’t wish to see nudity, please avert your gaze – we’ll soon be out of sight,” but I didn’t see anyone following this advice. Indeed it looked like the event should attract even more tourists to the city.

I don’t have a great problem with nudity. I was brought up told we were created in the image of our maker, so feel it would be blasphemous to object about the display of the naked body, although generally we may find it more prudent to keep it covered, especially in our climate. As my pictures show, not all those taking part rode entirely naked: the invitation was to ride “as bare as you dare!”

Photographing an event like this could be awkward, but I recognised many of those taking part and they knew me. There were a few conditions, but only one person out of the several hundred made it clear she didn’t want me to take a picture, and of course I didn’t.

It was an afternoon when it was more comfortable to be without clothes than in them (so long as you had plenty of sun-screen) and it certainly made an interesting spectacle. I had chosen not to ride a bike, and just pretended to be one as I ran up Piccadilly fully dressed with the mass of cyclists. By the time we got to the top of Haymarket I was pretty much whacked, and continued by tube to Waterloo to meet the ride as it came up York Road and get a different viewpoint.

2019

I’ve never been too impressed by the protest side of this. It’s more a fun ride for people who want to ride around London with no or very few clothes on. For those of us watching on the streets it is certainly unusual and entertaining, and I think very few could be seriously upset by it. The normal response seems to be a lot of pointing and laughing.

Perhaps if it were more of a protest there would be more women taking part. This year the imbalance seemed even greater than previously, with perhaps 10 or 20 men for every one woman, though I didn’t try to make an accurate count. My pictures do tend to concentrate more on the women than the men for various reasons. To state the obvious, these pictures involve nudity. Please do not click on the link if you may be offended or if you are in a place where others may be offended.

2025

This year there were even fewer women on the ride which now seems to be dominated by male nudists, with some coming from the continent to take part. It has become an event very much more about “body positivity” than a protest about car culture and cycle safety. And it illustrated the huge anatomical variation of male members of our species.

A mere handful rode with political messages written on their bodies and even fewer with flags or posters on their bikes. There was little of the creative face and body paint and fancy dress which had enlivened earlier years. It’s an event that has lost much of its interest for me and is far more drab than my pictures, which concentrate on the things that still interest me. Perhaps this is an event which has outlived its times.

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Carnival, Racist Deportations & more Naked Cyclists – 2009

Carnival, Racist Deportations & more Naked Cyclists: I began work on Saturday 13 June 2009 photographing a carnival procession in Carshalton in the south of London, travelled to Islington in north London for a protest against Britain’s racist and inhuman immigration policies and finally covered the uncovered cyclists taking part in the 2009 London World Naked Bike Ride, photographing the preparations in Hyde Park ad the start of the ride there and then on the ride at Waterloo and in the West End.

Carshalton Carnival Procession – St Helier – Carshalton

Carnival, Racist Deportations & more Naked Cyclists - 2009 — *Sutton’s May Queen 2009 came to look at my cameras*

My account of this event on My London Diary begins with a slightly unkind description “of the St Helier estate, a huge sprawling area built by the LCC 1930 to a kind of debased Garden City plan almost entirely without the charm of those earlier developments on what had previously mainly been the lavender fields of Mitcham.”

The procession began next to the “St Helier Hospital [built] in the modern style of the 30s, facing the imaginatively named St Helier Open Space” outside the Sutton Arena leisure centre and as usual I found the more interesting pictures were those I took there rather than on long procession to Carshalton where it was to end at a fair in Carshalton Park.

I’d come to the carnival largely because I was then working on a project on London’s May Queens, with several groups of them from across south London taking part in the procession, along with various other local organisations. And a Dalek and others in fancy dress.

The Rotary had brought their Father Christmas coming out unseasonably from the chimney of a small four-wheeled house towed behind a car at the rear of the procession. He’d been there too when I photographed the carnival previously in 2004.

It was a long an hot trek to Carshalton from St Helier, and the procession paused at Carshalton College for a break. I’d walked enough and made my way to the station missing the rest of the event and the funfair in Carshalton Park.

Carshalton Carnival Procession.

Speak out against Racism and Deportations – Angel, Islington

Britain’s major political parties at the prompting of our mainstream press have long promoted myths about migrants and asylum seekers, the more rabid of our tabloids in particular promoting the views of clearly racist columnists who publish stories about them getting homes and huge benefits, depriving the working class of housing, pushing down wages, taking “our jobs“, making it impossible to see doctors and more.

Nothing could of course be further from the truth. It’s the greed of the wealthy and government policies that have led to these problems – and without the migrants we would be in a considerably worse position. It’s something that is glaringly obvious when we need to make use of the NHS which would have collapsed entirely without them, but also in other areas. Demonising migrants is a deliberate policy divert public attention and anger away from the real problem of our class-based society. Divide and rule by our rulers,

Most of those who settle here from abroad want nothing more than to work and contribute to our society, though we make it hard for many of them to do so. They want a better life, particularly for their children and often work long hours for it. Migrant workers who clean offices are often more qualified than those who work in them – but their qualifications are not recognised here, and asylum seekers are unable to work except in the illegal economy.

Some facts:

Over a quarter of NHS doctors were born abroad (and others are the sons and daughters of migrants);
Immigrants are 60% less likely to claim benefits than people born in Britain;
Studies sho immigration has no significant effect on overall employment, or on unemployment of those born in Britain.

This campaigning protest in a busy shopping area outside one of London’s busier Underground Stations was organised by the Revolutionary Communist Group and was also part of a campaign by the Suarez family to prevent the deportation of John Freddy Suarez Santander, a 21 year-old father with a 3 year-old son. He came here from Colombia when he was six and grew up here. As a teenager he committed an offence and served 7 months in a young offenders institution.

Two years after he had served his sentence, the New Labour government passed a law to deport all immigrants with a criminal record, and an order was made for him to be sent back to Colombia, where he has no remaining relatives. His case in 2009 was still being considered at the European Court of Human Rights. The ECHR generally asserts that juvenile offences should not be seen as a part of a criminal record, but the Home Office decided the month before this protest to deport him anyway, and this was only stopped by his family going to the airport.

Speak out against Racism & Deportations

World Naked Bike Ride – London

I’ve written rather often about this event, intended as a protest against the domination of our lives by ‘car culture’ which has resulted in our towns and cities and transport networks being designed around the priorities of motorists and road transport rather than us as pedestrians and cyclists – and to serve the interests of the companies that make cars and lorries. And it has resulted in illegal levels of pollution causing massive health problems.

Although it’s certainly an eye-catching event, it isn’t always very clear why it is taking place to those standing on the pavements, gazint at it in amazement, laughing and recording it on their phones. It’s probably good for our tourist industry, though I rather think London has too many tourists anyway, particularly as I struggle to walk over Westminster Bridge.

Heres one paragraph of what I wrote in 2009 – you can read the rest on My London Diary.

Some riders did have slogans on their bodies, mainly about oil and traffic, and some bikes carried A4 posters reading REAL RIGHTS FOR BIKE and CELEBRATE BODY FREEDOM or had flags stating ‘CURB CAR CULTURE’ which made clear the purpose of the event to the careful onlooker, but for most people it seemed simply a spectacle of naked or near-naked bodies. Though of course also a rare treat for any bicycle spotters among them.

I didn’t censor the pictures I put on line from the event though I’ve carefully selected those in this post. I think that there is nothing offensive about the naked human body but I included the following statement with the link to more pictures I posted then and which you can still see online.

Warning: these pictures show men and women with no clothes on. Do not click this link to more pictures if pictures of the naked human body may offend you.

Many more pictures at World Naked Bike Ride – London.

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Intellectual Property, Naked Cyclists – 2012

Intellectual Property, Naked Cyclists: On Saturday 9th June 2012 after a rally against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement outside Europe House in Smith Square I went to Hyde Park Corner where cyclists were preparing for the London World Naked Bike Ride, an environmental protest against a society based on oil and the domination by cars.

Rally Against ACTA

Intellectual Property, Naked Cyclists - 2012

Current debates on intellectual property in 2025 are mainly concerned with protecting the rights of individual creators from being used without permission or compensation by companies developing AI which could then use the data taken to create new works which would mimic their work, essentially producing counterfeit works.

Back in 2012 the protests were against ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement put together in secret talks between the USA, Europe, Japan and some other major governments to protect the copyrights, trademarks and patents held by major multinational companies.

Wikileaks had released the secrets of these talks, deliberately set up in private to exclude the views of civil society and developing countries. They proposed putting draconian powers in the hands of major corporations without the need for allegations of abuse to be properly tested.

Now in 2025 the government is attempting to put into law an act which would legitimise the production of ‘fakes’ by the major AI companies, though the fight against this is being carried on largely in the House of Lords rather than on the streets or on the web. As usual laws are largely about protecting and advancing the interests of the rich and powerful – whose donations and lobbying keep our legislators on side.

As well as preventing much sharing of material on the web – some legitimately – ACTA would also disrupt much-needed generic medicines to majority world countries, where indiscriminate raids had already disrupted some legitimate supplies. And many musicians and other content creators feared it would be used by the major corporations to prevent or inhibit their ability to profit through distributing their own work via the Internet.

On 4th July 2012, 478 MEPs in the European Parliament voted against ACTA, 39 in favour, and 165 abstained, meaning the agreement did not enter into force in the EU.

More about the protest and about ACTA, along with more pictures on My London Diary at Rally Against ACTA.

Naked Cyclists Ride Against Oil

Around a thousand cyclists in various states of undress, some wearing nothing but shoes, took part in the World Naked Bike Ride, an annual environmental protest touring central London, much to the astonishment of many tourists. Shoes are required, but otherwise the dress code is “as bare as you dare.”

*People gathered at Hyde Park Corner for the start of the ride*

Public nudity is not illegal in Britain and the ride seems to cause a great deal of hilarity from some onlookers but little or no offence. Most of those on the pavements were tourists and eagerly taking photographs of the event.

Although there had been many earlier naked bike rides organised as naturist or political demonstrations, the first World Naked Bike Rides were organised in 2004 and now take place in many cities around the world. The rides are a protest against dependence on oil and other forms of non-renewable energy and “expose the unique dangers faced by cyclists and pedestrians” in modern cities.

In 2012 there did seem to be a rather clearer environmental message than in some other years, and my pictures here – and in the many more on My London Diary concentrate on this rather than the nudity, and on the many with body paint, sometimes solely for decoration but often expressing an environmental message, contributing to the purpose of the ride to “deliver a vision of a cleaner, safer, body-positive world.”

Back in 2012 there were similar rides in 20 countries around the world ands well as others in Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter, Glasgow, Manchester, Portsmouth, Southampton and York.

After photographing the riders on the grass at Hyde Park corner I set off with them on foot, rather dangerously as other traffic was still driving around the busy roundabout and along Piccadilly. But I soon got out of breath and had to rest.

Later I took the tube to Westminster and met the cyclists again coming down Whitehall, going with them across Westminster Bridge. I left them to go to Waterloo Station on their way to the City and then back trough Holborn to Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park Corner.

Many more photographs at Naked Cyclists Ride Against Oil.

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London Gardens, Green Lifestyle & Carnival de Cuba – 2005

London Gardens, Green Lifestyle & Carnival de Cuba: I had an interesting time twenty years ago on the weekend of 4-5th June 2005 in London. After a visit to some fantastic private gardens on the Saturday, on Sunday I went to a Green Lifestyle festival in Greenwich then photographed a Cuban carnival procession at Coin Street.

Here I’ll edit slightly the text I wrote back in 2005 and integrate it with some of the pictures I made, with links to the rest of those I put at the time on My London Diary. And end with a brief comment.

London Gardens – North London, Notting Hill and Chelsea

London Arts Café, now sadly long defunct, was an organisation which promoted urban art and examined its contribution to urban life. Its annual programme often included some interesting visits, sometimes taking us to places we never knew existed. On Saturday June 4th 2005 we were privileged to be able to visit three very different private gardens, each it it’s own way extraordinary. They are all among those featured in the 2000 book by George Carter, The New London Garden, (ISBN 1-840000-347-2) where you can find more details about them and view some splendid photographs by Marianne Majerus.

*Judy Wiseman’s sculpture garden in Gospel Oak*

We met George in the Notting Hill garden and he talked to us about his work and the importance of the garden in urban space, and we were also fortunate to meet the garden owners who also told us about their own gardens.

A grotto in Notting Hill

In North London, we visited a garden filled with sculptures of various types by designer and sculptor Judy Wiseman, making the most of the various locations. Most were casts of bodies or parts of bodies. This garden, I think alone among the three we visited, is open to the public to visit on one day most years as a part of the charity Open Gardens scheme.

In Notting Hill, the garden was more practical in some ways, with a large expanse of lawn, but in one corner was a dark area of trees and bushes with a fantastic grotto.

Most fabulous of all was the rooftop garden in Chelsea, stretched along the rooftops at the back of four houses, all former studios of well-known artists. One of the highlights for me was a scale model of a glasshouse built by Decimus Burton, used to create a miniature world with plants and figures.

After spending some time admiring this garden, we were also shown the art gallery in one of the houses, with an incredible collection of pictures, including works by Picasso, Braque, Courbet, Moholy-Nagy and many other famous names, including some fine work from the 1950s. There were also some fine rooms in the house, including a modern kitchen and some fine period pieces.

more pictures

London Green Lifestyle Show – Greenwich Park

*Solar Panels and The Queen’s House, Greenwich, London, June 5, 2005*

The group that had organised Kingston Green Fair had been asked to organise the London Green Lifestyle show in Greenwich Park, held on World Environment Day, June 5, 2005 as a part of London’s contribution to a more sustainable lifestyle. Unfortunately the events were spread over far too wide an area of the park to really be successful.

As always, there was rather a lot of missing the obvious in the approach to a better environment. So there was little about the need to drastically cut down air travel, and relatively little about cutting down car use. Casual visitors could certainly have gone away with the idea that if we all recycled our rubbish and perhaps switched to a green power supplier, everything was set for a rosy future.

I first spoke in public about the need for effective action to save the world in 1970. I had sold the last car I owned in 1966, using a bicycle wherever practicable since then, very occasionally using taxis and hiring a car for a few holidays. We’ve lived a relatively low-impact lifestyle, perhaps except for my addiction to cameras and computers! I changed jobs so I could cycle to work (and now work mainly online to avoid travel.) Others I’ve known have done more, moving to become largely self-sufficient.

At the moment the government is playing lip-service to the need for urgent action on the environment, but falling short of taking or even discussing any effective actions, to do things like actually cutting the use of fossil fuels, or reducing the number of car and air miles we travel. [Little has really changed in challenging the centrality of the car in our culture since – and electric cars are little better for the climate.] I’m increasingly gloomy about the future, though the world will probably stay in reasonable shape for the rest of my lifetime.

We need to think far more seriously about quality of life, rather than concentrating on things that are easy to measure like gross national product. much of it is truly gross, and there are better ways to organise our lives around the things that really matter.

more pictures

Carnival de Cuba – Coin St Festival, Bernie Spain Gardens

Carnival de Cuba was taking place the same day at Coin Street (perhaps the one successful development in london since the war.) I got there in time for the procession, and clearly everyone was having a great deal of fun.

There was really far more to photograph and though I spent less time there than at Greenwich there are several times as many pictures from the carnival on My London Diary.

Afterword

The visits to the gardens in these pictures was for me a rather unsettling window on the private realms of the over-privileged in our society who inhabit a very different world to the rest of us. Though there are far worse ways many of them chose to spend their phenomenal and largely unearned wealth it would be good to see the tremendous creative talent shown here put into work that could be appreciated by a much greater public in public spaces.

But perhaps like the private collections of Sir John Soane we can now see in Lincoln’s Inn Fields or those stolen from the Tradescant family by Elias Ashmole at least some of these may eventually become publicly accessble assets.

Later I photographed more private gardens of the wealthy in a collaborative project with the short-lived Queen’s Terrace Café, shown there in 2011 as ‘The Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood’ and with the book with Mireille Galinou of the same name still available from Blurb, where you can view the preview which contains many of the pictures.

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Naked Cyclists Ride Against Oil

Naked Cyclists Ride Against Oil: I thought people might like some more naked cyclists so here are some pictures from the 2012 ride, eleven years ago today on 9th June 2012. Men were in a fairly large majority in the thousand or so riders taking part and photographically they represent rather more of a challenge, at least to make pictures that editors think suitable for family viewing. So I’ve chosen pictures of men, though there is a woman in one of them.

The only country from where I’ve had any negative feedback about my pictures of naked cyclists is the USA, where I’ve had emails from teachers and librarians requesting that I remove these pictures from My London Diary as they say they make the site unsuitable for young people.

I find this difficult to understand but reply politely refusing to do so. Their complaints seem to come from some kind of warped religious objection and I like to remind them “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” and to somehow find that image offensive seems to me to be blasphemy.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the ride is not the nudity in itself but the variety of the human form it illustrates compared to the photographs of naked or near-naked people we usually find in newspapers or on our screens.

I tried hard to find pictures that reflected the purpose of the ride, a protest against dependence on oil and other forms of non-renewable energy and a culture based on cars and to “expose the unique dangers faced by cyclists and pedestrians” in modern cities. Some of the riders did so with a considerable sense of humour.

And some good drawing skills.

Careful timing and cropping sometimes makes the pictures more acceptable to a wider range of publications. And a bus with the message ‘Get Your Socks Off’ seemed rather appropriate though few in the frame were wearing them.

Another bus had three men in dark glasses who unlike all those watching the event from the pavements seemed to view it rather sternly. This is an event that causes a tremendous amount of hilarity on the streets as it goes past, but they are clearly not amused.

And finally, close to the former City Hall I photographed The Vitruvian Man.

There is a description of the ride and many more photographs – including some that would apparently shock some people at Naked Cyclists Ride Against Oil.

Food Sovereignty, Big IF & Naked Cyclists

Food Sovereignty, Big IF & Naked Cyclists: Saturday 8th June 2013 was another varied day of protests in London.

Food Sovereignty not Food Security – Unilever House, Blackfriars

Friends of the Earth, War On Want and others held a protest outside Unilever House where David Cameron was addressing carefully picked delegates at his ‘Hunger Summit’. They were protesting against the ‘new alliance for food security and nutrition’, a special initiative launched by the G8 in 2012.

Cameron’s ‘summit’ and the protest came before a G8 meeting and Unilever’s iconic London offices overlooking the Thames at Blackfriars, was particularly appropriate as Unilever, along with other global agribusinesses such as Monsanto and Cargill are the major beneficiaries of the ‘new alliance.’

The G8 initiative will spend billions of dollars to finance the expansion of these agribusiness in Africa but damage existing landowners and farmers, who will either have to sign agreements to land grabs by the giant corporations and replace their traditional plants and seed with GM and other high-tech seeds and supplies or see their markets disappear.

The initiative will marginalise small African farmers, driving them from their traditionally owned land, increasing unemployment and the movement to cities. As in India some will be driven to suicide as their only solution. It should increase agricultural output in the short term but most of it will be food for export or biofuels, and hunger will increase – along with the profits of the mega-corporations. Almost certainly all these technological fixes will in the long term fail, leading to further desertification.

African farmers need support that increases their economic, social and cultural resilience, methods to increase their productivity through simple low-tech improvements in land use, that preserve and improve the soil, and increase water retention, that improve traditional crop varieties by proven old-fashioned methods. Various projects have demonstrated the success of these approaches – but they fail to increase the profits of multinational companies so do not attract support from the G8.

Almost 200 African groups signed a Statement By Civil Society In Africa which condemned the proposals, describing them as “a new wave of colonialism”, pointing out that they work to the benefit of the corporations and not for Africa.

This was a peaceful and family-friendly protest, with campaigners bringing containers with growing plants and baskets of fruit and vegetables to set up a small garden on the road island in front of the main entrance to Unilever House.

More about the protest and the Statement by Civil Society in Africa at No to G8 New Alliance on Food Security.

Big IF Solidarity Walk – Westminster to Hyde Park

The second protest I photographed was also about global hunger, with thousands marching in solidarity with the one in eight people around the world who go hungry and to demand that the G8 world leaders tackle the root causes of global hunger.

The problem isn’t about producing food as “The world produces enough food for everyone, but more than two million children die every year because they can’t get enough to eat.” The problem is the unfair distribution of wealth and power which means many of those who need food don’t get it, while others have more they can eat.

The walk to send a message to the G8 was supported by a wide range of organisations including Christian Aid, Oxfam, Cafod, Save the Children and many more who work in countries around the world, and many had begun the event by attending a service in a packed Westminster Central Hall in Westminster, the Methodist church where the first meeting of the UN General Assembly was held in 1946.

This wasn’t a march but a walk, with people taking a rather circuitous route and walking in small groups on the pavements, which made it rather more difficult to photograph.

More at Big IF Solidarity Walk.

World Naked Bike Ride – Marble Arch & Westminster

The World Naked Bike Ride is an annual protest against oil dependency and and the negative social and environmental impacts of a car dominated culture as well as a demonstration of the vulnerability of cyclists in traffic and to celebrate body freedom. It began in Spain in 2001 and has spread to London and round 70 other cities in over 30 countries.

In London it has usually attracted around a thousand cyclists, along with a few others on skateboards etc, and provides considerable interest, with crowds of tourists stopping to watch and to photograph, and although everyone around me seemed to be greatly amused, there seemed to be little or no appreciation of the reasons behind the protest.

Not all riders are naked for the event, some riding partially clothed. The dress code is that people should ride ‘as bare as they dare’ and only the wearing of footwear is compulsory for safety reasons. Many riders have some creative body paint, some with slogans on their body to promote the ideas behind the ride, and I’ve chosen images for this post that show these.

In 2013 the ride began at four different points, Marble Arch, West Norwood, Clapham Junction and near Kings Cross, with the routes converging on Westminster Bridge, from where they went on to ride to St Paul’s Cathedral and back through Holborn and Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park Corner.

I went to Marble Arch for the start of the event there and later took photographs on Westminster Bridge where the four groups were intended to meet up, but tho cyclists from Marble Arch were held up and arrived after the others had left.

It’s a ride that attracts considerably more men than women as riders, although my pictures might seem to suggest the opposite. There are several reasons why I find the women more interesting, partly because I think more of them make an effort with body painting and other ways to create an impression. It’s also rather harder to photograph nude male cyclists in ways that many publications would find acceptable, and my selection of images is largely for submission to agencies.

There are many more pictures on My London Diary at World Naked Bike Ride. At the top of each page of pictures I included the statement “These pictures include some nudity – don’t view them if this might offend you” above a long area of empty white space, with two links to either take viewers down the page to see them or back to the main June page.

Past Time To Act On Climate Change?

Past Time To Act On Climate Change? Seven years ago on Saturday 7th March 2015, 20,000 or so protesters marched through London to remind government and the nation it was Time to Act on Climate Change. Seven years on, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report released a week ago warns “that climate breakdown is happening faster than expected and that the window to take action is closing fast. The report is a call to governments and private sector players to take drastic action against climate change.”

It’s a report that has largely been lost to public sight, pushed together with the stories about Tory sleaze and lies out of the news by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, though it has even more far-reaching implications. Not that I want to in any way minimise Putin’s criminal action and its terrible consequences for the people of Ukraine, largely innocents caught up in a situation of others’ making.

Of course the invasion of Ukraine has now raised the spectre of a nuclear war, which would almost certainly lead to mass extinction rather more rapidly than climate change, but the very dramatic prospect fortunately makes this almost unthinkable. Were it to happen it would almost certainly be by accident, something we have come close to several times in the past. Even our maddest politicians realise there is nothing to be gained by mutually assured destruction, and there would be no profits in it for the oligarchs or billionaires.

Climate change doesn’t happen in a massive flash, but is relatively slow and insidious. Even in the richer countries we are just beginning to feel its effects, and some in the Global South have long been suffering extreme hardship. But unless we heed the report and take drastic action without delay it will be too late to stop; many systems are coming close to their tipping points, past which there is no chance of recovery.

Scientists have been warning about the dangers for many years. Even 50 years ago when I was a student I spoke about the need to change the way we used the Earth’s resources and move to renewable systems of energy and agriculture, as many aspects of our current way of life were unsustainable.

Over 50 years ago it was clear to me that we needed to cut our dependence on fossil fuels, not just because of the carbon emissions and other pollutants, but also because thinking in the longer term it seemed a waste to burn what was a limited resource and an important chemical resource for plastics and other materials. I sold the only car I’d owned in 1967 or 8, because we needed to move away from a society based around private cars. It was clear too that we needed to farm in ways that conserved the soil and that many modern agricultural practices destroyed it – my father had joined the Soil Association which was established in 1946.

But of course there were huge profits to be made from fossil fuels and other industries that were driving up global emissions – and huge campaigns of obfuscation and lobbying. Most politicians in most countries were doing very nicely out of exploiting our natural resources – and the workers, who needed to be kept happy by more and more consumer goods as well as a huge and almost universal media promoting consumerism. Bread and circuses is of course nothing new.

Countries around the world, whatever their politics, are almost entirely run by politicians who have prospered from ‘business as usual’, and usually business corruption which they have colluded in by allowing money laundering, allowing huge tax avoidance and evasion and more. They have now learnt to talk the talk about climate change, but, as Greta Thunberg pointed out, it has been all “blah, blah, blah”, promises but little or no action.

There were many different groups taking part in ‘Time To Act on Climate Change’, including the Campaign Against Climate Change who have organised regular protests in London since 2002, Friends of the Earth who I’ve supported since the 1970s, the Green Party, anti-fracking protesters including the fabulous ‘Nanas’ of Frack Free Lancashire, campaigners against Heathrow expansion – and I list a few more in Climate Change Rally, which also has pictures of some of the speakers.

At the end of the rally I went on to photograph a protest by ‘Art Not Oil’ who invaded the steps of Tate Britain with their ‘longship’ and ‘oil spills’ in a protest demanding the Tate give up taking sponsorship from BP, who used their support of the arts to give themselves a positive public image despite the pollution and climate change their activites cause. It’s time to end this ‘greenwashing’.

Viking longship invades Tate steps has a few pictures of the event. The Longship first sailed to the British Museum where BP had sponsored a show on the Vikings. As I commented, the plastic oil spills used by the protesters “are a lot easier to clean up than the real ones BP has created such as Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, and which could be truly catastrophic in the Arctic.”

More on all these on My London Diary:
Viking longship invades Tate steps
Climate Change Rally
Time to Act on Climate Change

Reclaim the Streets – 1996

Broadgate 96-719-35-positive — Protesters including groups of drummers meet at Broadgate

I read a reminder a couple of days ago that this was the 24th anniversary of the 1996 Reclaim the Streets protest in West London, which began at Broadgate, then took the Central Line to Shepherd’s Bush, where line of police held up the protesters and the partying began while we waited for everyone to arrive.

Shepherds Bush 96-721-61-positive — Police manhandle a protester at Shepherds Bush

It wasn’t too long before some of the protesters had outflanked the police and the rest surged through to take over the A41M spur which leads from Shepherds Bush to Westway and to party across both carriageways.

Shepherds Bush 96-720-12-positive — Let London Breathe

There was a stage with music and dancing, and some people turned up with carpets and old sofas and made up living rooms on the tarmac.

Shepherds Bush 96-721-25-positive — A woman looks at the notice ‘Street Festival – Temporary Road Closure

It was difficult to know exactly what was happening, particularly at Shepherds Bush, but also once we were partying on the motorway, and harder still to know how to photograph the event. Looking back I don’t think I did a very good job of it, though there are some pictures I quite like. But though I think they convey something of the spirit of the event, perhaps they don’t tell the story as well as I would like. There is also a certain sameness which results from them all being taken on 28mm or 35mm lenses, probably on a Minolta CLE or Leica M2.

RTS Party on A41M Motorway 96-724-55-positive — Partying on the A41M

You can read several stories with people’s own recollections of the day online which provide some of the background to these pictures on the Past Tense radical histories blog.

After I’d been photographing the partying on the motorway for some time I decided that nothing new seemed to be happening and it was time to go home and have a meal. I saw some others climbing over a low wall and followed them, making my way to Latimer Road tube.

RTS Party on A41M Motorway 96-725-11-positive — A living room with sofa and carpet on the A41M

The pictures were of course taken on film, and I seem to have only worked in black and white. I probably developed the films I had taken a few days later, and will have then printed perhaps half a dozen and probably a few weeks later taken them in to Photofusion’s picture library. Over the years a handful may have been printed in magazines and books, and I think I probably shared a few on various web sites, but many are now being seen for the first time outside the small group of friends with whom I met to share and criticise work. The images were digitised using the Nikon ES-2 adapter and a Nikon 60mm f2.8 macro lens on a Nikon D810.

You can see more of the pictures I took that day in my Flickr album Reclaim the Streets: London 13 July 1996.

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.