Carnival, Political Prisoners & Naked Bike Ride: On Saturday 14th June 2008 I called in at Hampton Hill on my way into London for the 30th annual Hampton Hill & Hampton Carnival Parade, but it turned out to be a rather small event. In Trafalgar Square there was a protest outside South Africa House calling for the release of political prisoners held in prisons around the world and after this I went to Hyde Park for the start of the London World Naked Bike Ride.
Hampton & Hampton Hill 30th Anniversary Parade
Hampton Hill
In Hampton Hill I found cows on the High Street and a large rabbit as well as a few cars and some people on foot including a gardener with a wheelbarrow, but it was a small and rather disappointing parade and I left to continue my journey to London as it made its way towards Hampton.
The protest here was also rather smaller than I had hoped but included a group of Kurds calling for the release of their leader, Abdullah Ocalan from a Turkish jail.
Others called for the release of the Miami Five, Cubans who came to Miami to disrupt terrorist raids made by right-wing Cuban exiles living there against Cuba and imprisoned by the USA.
There were also calls for the closure of the illegal US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and for an end to the continuing torture there and release of refugees and asylum seekers locked in detention centres in the UK.
In 2008 the London World Naked Bike Ride began in Hyde Park, and I went there to photograph the riders getting ready and setting off. The start was very crowded mainly with tourists eager to view the spectacle.
When all had left I took the tube to Westminster to photograph the ride going over Westminster Bridge and then as the ride regrouped I rushed to the footbridge into Waterloo Station (now demolished) for pictures from above as it came down York Road. As the last cyclist passed below me I walked into the station to catch my train home.
As I commented “while bodies are very much on display environmental messages seemed at times to be rather well-hidden, leaving many of the public along the route bemused.” And on My London Diary I recount briefly the reactions of some of the people I talked to and heard as we watched the event.
Those organising the ride say it is a “peaceful, imaginative and fun protest against oil dependency and car culture. A celebration of the bicycle and also a celebration of the power and individuality of the human body. A symbol of the vulnerability of the cyclist in traffic.”
The annual ride continues to take place in London and in other cities. The 2026 London ride is today, Sunday 14th June 2026. Riders are starting from Clapham Junction, Croydon, Deptford, Hackney Wick, Kew Bridge, Regents Park, Tower Hill, Hyde Park Corner and all meeting up close to the south end of Westminster Bridge to ride together around Central London.
May Day 2000 – Anti-capitalist celebrations: May Day has been celebrated in Europe since ancient times as the beginning of Summer, with festivities, dancing and more, but also became International Workers’ Day following the 1889 International Workers Congress, the date marking the start of a general strike in the USA in 1886 which lead to the Haymarket affair three days later.
May 1st is a public holiday in many countries, but only occasionally in the UK when the first Monday in May happens to be on 1st May. The Labour government that eventually brought in the early May Bank Holiday in 1978 chickened out from making it actually May Day. So one of the many advantages of leaving full-time teaching to become a freelance writer and photographer was that I was for the first time able to able to go every year to the May Day events in London.
As it happens, the first May Day after that was Monday May 1st 2000 and the big London event on that day was an anti-capitalist celebration that combined elements of both the traditional events and International Workers Day, beginning with partying and ‘guerrilla gardening’ in the sun in Parliament Square.
I went with the protesters up Whitehall towards Trafalgar Square, and was outside McDonald’s when a handful of protesters began smashing the windows there. Most of the people at the protest stood back and watched. I was a few yards away and the crowd was too dense for me to get close enough to take pictures.
Police clearly made no effort to protect the McDonald’s though it was an obvious target, but stood waiting around the corner until after the damage took place before charging into the protest, herding them into Trafalgar Square where they were kettled for some hours and around 95 people were arrested. It looked as if police had they had planned to let protesters attack the fast-food outlet to justify the use of violence against the large crowd of peaceful protesters.
The BBC report began “Hundreds of demonstrators have been fighting running battles with police during anti-capitalist protests in London” but failed to say that these ‘battles’ were the result of police attacks on largely peaceful protesters – and they also wrongly said the McDonald’s was “in The Strand“. They used the term “defaced‘ for the decoration of Churchill’s statue with a turf ‘Mohican’ which considerably overstated the event, but was also the main preoccupation of the rest of the media. Reading their account I very much get the impression that it was written by someone not there when things were happening.
As you can see from my account at the time below, I was there until I saw the riot police charging the protesters, batoning clearly peaceful protesters offering them flowers, before deciding to go home rather than face possible police violence and detention.
May Day 2000 – Anti-capitalist Celebrations
May in London must mean May Day, and we made the most of this one, dancing around Parliament Square.
I was more or less next to Macdonalds on Whitehall when demonstrators started to break windows and generally smash it up. It was obvious it was going to happen some time before, and the police made no attempt to prevent it, standing back and letting things happen, although they were massed down a nearby side-street.
I could only conclude they wanted some damage to be able to justify their actions that were to follow, as well as the dire warnings their superior officers had spent some time giving on the media.
The damage could easily have been prevented; action by a handful of police would have been enough to have led the demonstrators on into Trafalgar Square.
A woman harangues demonstrator’s from behind police lines
When I saw they were letting it happen, I drew back, making my way through the police lines as they prepared for a massive charge. I watched the first few waves go in and belatedly take up positions. They were hyped up for action and one or two stepped out of line to attack a demonstrator who was offering them flowers with their sticks, knocking him flying and leaving blood pouring from his head. I was just too far away on the wrong side of the charging police to get the picture.
One or two photographers who got close to the police received similar treatment. At this point I decided to leave the scene before I was trapped in by the police or assaulted – I had other things I needed to do that evening. If I had left it a few minutes later I would have been among the several thousand confined for hours for little reason in Trafalgar Square. Perhaps I would have got more pictures, but equally likely I would have suffered gratuitous violence. I wasn’t commissioned to be there and decided not to stay.
There are just a few more pictures on My London Diary but quite a few more that I’ve never posted on-line, both black and white and colour. I hope to digitise more later.
Mare De Gras & Choose Life: On Sunday 10 October 2004 I photographed two very different events on the Streets of London, a carnival in Hackney and and ant-abortion march. Perhaps the only thing they had in common was that both were misnamed.
Hackney Mare de Gras
Dalston, Hackney
Mare de Gras – Fat Tuesday – is a season celebrated in New Orleans as carnival season, from 12th Night at the end of Christmas on January 6 to Fat Tuesday itself, Shrove Tuesday, the day before the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday, 40 days before Easter. In England our celebrations are rather shorter and involve pancakes and pancake races.
The parade began in Dalston Market
But in Hackney it was the name adopted for the carnival which began there when some residents decided it would be a good thing for them to have a carnival like Notting Hill, and since the main street is Mare Street it seemed a good name, even though it took place in September.
It wasn’t the first carnival in Hackney – there is a tradition of English carnivals dating back mainly to the late 19th century, held in many towns and villages across the country, though most have now died out. Two of my friends got Arts Council money to document some of them – and I showed work from Notting Hill with them in a show, English Carnival, in 2008. Others are still going strong particularly in the West Country. Hackney had its carnivals way back around the 1900s but I don’t think they lasted too long.
Those traditional carnivals had one thing in common – “they received no core public funding. Many were almost entirely organised by volunteers; most also raised money for charities.”
For the show I wrote: “Carnival in England has been enlivened over the last forty or so years by the Caribbean influence, and West-Indian style carnivals have received considerable funding and become a popular celebration of our multi-cultural society within the larger metropolitan areas of the country, joined in recent years by Latin American, Asian and Central European communities.”
The revival of carnival in Hackney is thought to have started as the Street Carnival Theatre in De Beauvoir, organised by Centerprise, in 1973. Later came a new Hackney Carnival – Mare De Gras – bringing together many of the carnival groups that had their roots in Caribbean culture and had begun in the 1970s, 80s and 90s taking part in the Notting Hill Carnival.
In 2004, Mare De Gras in late September was cancelled after 16-year old A level student Robert Levy was killed on Mare Street, stabbed after he had tried to keep the peace in a fight between boys close to his home, and the event was rearranged for the 10th October.
Hackney Carnival continued in later years, though the name Mare De Gras was dropped soon after 2005. In 2024 there was a parade, but for 2025 there were only a number of activities and no real carnival.
I left the carnival in Hackney soon after the parade began to photograph a much more somber event, the Chose Life March opposing abortion. Again its name seems misleading to me – opposition to abortion is not about choosing life, and as I commented in 2004, “the misuse of language in using slogans such as ‘Choose Life’ disturbs me greatly, as an attempt to preempt rational thought.“
One of the few parts of the march that did not seem lacking in life
I also wrote “Nature is profligate, full of false starts, and life cannot sensibly be considered to begin at conception” which I suspect is a quote but cannot find the source.
Many other Christians and other religions do not accept the Catholic teaching on abortion but take more sensible and more scientifically bases views. But “this doesn’t mean we should take abortion lightly or allow scientists to play as they like with human genetic material. ” And of course our laws do have important safeguards on abortion and the use of human material in research.
More pictures, including a couple of Brian Haw and one of the River Thames as the march passed them on My London Diary.
Kingston Carnival: On Sunday 2 September 2007 I went to Kingston to photograph the carnival.
Kingston is a town I’ve visited fairly often over the years, though mainly just going through it or changing buses to meet friends or go to meetings elsewhere, but I’ve never really got to know. Its an ancient town, where Saxon Kings were crowned and the street layout in its central pedestrianised areas still follows much of its complex medieval pattern. It includes several pubs worth a visit.
Kingston (officially Kingston-upon-Thames) also has a fine museum where I was pleased to be a part of a show, Another London, in January 2007 along with Mike Seaborne and Paul Baldesare – which you can still see online. Among my 26 pictures which featured in it were three made in Kingston including two from the 2006 Kingston Carnival, as well as two from adjoining Surbiton.
The museum also has a permanent exhibition of Kingston’s most famous son, photographer Eadweard Muybridge, (1830-1904) best known for his pioneering studies of animal movement beginning with pictures of the racehorse Occident owned by the former governor of California, Leland Stanford made in 1878 using a line of 12 cameras triggered by strings the horse ran through.
His work had been interrupted earlier in 1875 when he was on trial for murder after having shot his wife’s lover. His lawyer pleaded insanity presenting evidence that he had bouts of unstable behaviour caused by a severe head injury in a stagecoach accident in 1860 and the jury acquitted him recording a verdict of justifiable homicide.
The centenary of Muybridge’s death in 2004 was celebrated in Kingston including by my late friend photographer Terry King whose re-enactment of Muybridge’s work using twelve 10×8 cameras at Ham Polo Club. Modern ponies apparently refuse to run through strings thinking they are an electric fence and a different method had to be found to trigger the special shutters attached to the cameras.
Kingston’s 25th Carnival takes place on Sunday 7th September 2025, and I might just go along again, though I don’t think I’ve been to it since 2007.
I didn’t write a great deal about it in 2007, but here it is:
“This year’s Kingston Carnival was a much more exciting event than last year’s but there was still a large rent-a-carnival aspect to it. Kingston is an ethnically rich borough, and although there was plenty of home-grown talent on display, particularly in the performances by youth from the borough, the procession was still dominated by out of town talent.
“It’s great to encourage diversity, but I think a borough carnival has a duty to promote its local expression rather more, even if it might mean – at least until it built up more – a rather less flashy display.
“Of course it was good to see a greater diversity among the ‘foreign’ talent that paraded past the rather dazed looking shoppers along Kingston’s pedestrian streets, including even some clog dancers from Croydon, along with Caribbean groups.
“Beeraahaar Sweet Combination, based in Stamford Hill enlivened the main parade, and the elaborate larger costumes from Paddington Arts arrived later to play their part.”
Notting Hill Carnival – Children’s Day: Lurid and largely untrue media reports had put me off from attending carnival until 1990, but after I had gone and seen for myself the two days at August Bank Holiday each year became one of my unmissable events of the year.
Each year from then on I went to photograph the revels, trying to capture the spirit of the event in my pictures, and I had some success, with publications and some small exhibitions of the work.
I saw and experience little of the criminality reports of which still often dominate press coverage, with many still trying to get carnival banned or to emasculate it as a static event in Hyde Park or something similar. Opposition to carnival, a great community event, seems at least in part driven by the same kind of racist and classist attitudes that led to Grenfell. I only once in over 20 years came close to it when I caught a pickpocket with his hand in one of my trouser pockets in a densely packed crowd. I grabbed it and pulled it out, to find it clutching an empty wallet – not mine.
Of course I took some sensible precautions, taking only the equipment I needed and keeping a close eye and hold on it. I used a small bag which in crowded areas at least was always around my neck and in front of me rather than on my shoulder, and left my wallet and credit cards at home, carrying enough cash for travel, food and drink in a zipped pocket.
Most of what mayhem there was – and given the huge number of people in the area there was relatively little of it – took place later in the day, after a day of dancing and drinking and after I had gone home, always before the light began to fade.
While I was there the streets were full of people having a good time and happy to be photographed while they were doing so. Mostly they were Londoners, and particularly black Londoners, though some people came from far away for the event. When we were in St Denis at the north of Paris one year I photographed posters advertising trips for the event.
The only real problem I had over the years was with my ears. At carnival you don’t just hear the music, you feel it as the tarmac on the streets vibrates and your internal organs jump around to the beat. For several days afterwards my ears would hurt , my hearing would be dull and my head would still be ringing. Some years when carnival came late in the month I was back teaching within a couple of days and it was hard.
Professional media crews covering the event mainly wear ear protectors, and I did try using earplugs, but found it unsatisfactory. They stopped me experiencing carnival fully and made communication with those I was photographing difficult. It was like eating wearing boxing gloves. So I just put up with being deafened and taking a day or to for recovery.
But by 2012 things were different for me. As I wrote then: “But either I’m getting too old for it, or perhaps carnival is changing, and this year I found it a little difficult. So I went on the Sunday, stayed around three hours and didn’t really want to return for the big day. So I didn’t.“
And this was the last time I went to Carnival. The next year I was away from London and in years since then I’ve thought about it, but not gone. I feel I’ve taken enough pictures of it.
You can see more of the pictures from the 1990s in two albums – Notting Hill Carnivals and Panoramas on Flickr though I’ve still to add some from later years. Many of those from this century are on My London Diary, including many more from 2012 at Notting Hill – Children’s Day.
Hayling Island Carnival: On Wednesday 3rd August 2005 I went to photograph the carnival on Hayling Island with a couple of friends. I’d been there for the carnival a couple of times in earlier years, though it wasn’t really my kind of thing.
Neptune’s court – he had plenty to keep him busy
Two of my friends had in earlier years got money from the Arts Council to record English Carnivals and had persuaded me to go with them in earlier years and I was with one of them again in 2005.
There is an odd fascination about English carnivals, bringing out the eccentricities of the English, something that had been exploited by earlier photographers, perhaps the first being Sir Benjamin Stone (1838 – 1914), who as Wikipedia states made “an invaluable record of the folk customs and traditions of the British Isles, which influenced later photographers of note“. Notable among these, and one who inspired many before his tragic early death was Tony Ray-Jones (1941-72) and the posthumous book ‘A Day Off: An English Journal‘ published in 1974 was certainly the most influential British photographic publication of that era.
I never met Ray-Jones, who died before I was deeply involved in photography, but I did later become friends and worked with his friend, the Brooklyn-born photographer John Benton-Harris who printed much of his work, including the prints for ‘A Day Off’ and had occasionally photographed with him. And those two photographers who first took me to Canvey were ex-students and close friends of John too.
I worked with John on producing the images for what would have been his masterwork, ‘Mad Hatters – a diary of a secret people… as seen through the looking glass of – John Benton Harris‘ still unpublished, though a few of us treasure copies printed by Blurb but never made public. In mine he thanks me for my ‘Valued Technical Help‘, though we also had many discussions and arguments on the sequencing and very occasionally the selection of images, many of which I made significant improvements by some judicious dodging and burning – though always subject to his approval.
The ladies from the Health centre were going on a booze cruise
Actually with John virtually every discussion was a bitter argument – we were once asked to leave an event in Borough Market after a shouting match over a review I had written of a book by Homer Sykes (another of those influenced by Stone.) Sadly ‘Mad Hatters’ remains unpublished. It’s a fine body of work but a book greatly in need of an editor – something John would never tolerate.
The Navy gets in on the act with HMS Hayling
Back to 2005, here is the text I wrote for My London Diary about the day:
I went to Hayling Island for the carnival with Paul and Michael, and it was a nice day. Paul drove us down - it isn't too long a drive from London, really a Londoner's day out. Hayling seems full of people from London on holiday, some with second homes there, others hiring them, often from family and friends.
A beach tableau, complete with seagullBack to the beaches
Despite a longer than usual hold-up at Haslemere, we arrived just in time for the official opening. Everything was happening on the day, and it started with the crowning of the Carnival Queen and her retinue, then on to the Fancy Dress.
Then came the Baby Show, after which we went down to the other end of the town, where the carnival formed up in previous years. It seemed dead there, with more housing and less shops than before, and nothing was happening. People up that end are apparently pretty fed up to lose the carnival, and we were sorry to miss another meeting with 'the King' whose playing had been a major feature of previous years.
We grabbed a meal at a restaurant and then made our way back for the Dog Show, After which it was time for the parade to form up near the sea front. There were more mermaids than you could ever imagine and everyone seemed to be having fun and I took a lot of pictures.
Olympic Torch in Brixton: On Saturday 26th June 2004 the official torch of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, presented by Coca-Cola and Samsung came to London for a day and was ferried around by taxI from Wimbledon to Brixton, Peckham and elsewhere before a concert on the Mall in the evening.
Dancing along Brixton High St after the Olympic torch
Urban 75, a fantastic non-profit site about all things Brixton and surrounding areas of South London, running since 1995, gave information about the event and a discussion on its Forums, including this post from “Well-Known Member” Gramsci (I’ve taken the liberty of correcting a few typos – as I do with my own work) :
Like most sport this is something you cant avoid. At least England have lost in the Europe so wont get any more St Georges flag waving. Now its the Olympic torch. Its all so shallow and meaningless. We live in a world divided into a rich powerful West and a Third World dealing with IMF led “structural adjustment” and US military might etc.
Every few years a carefully staged fake coming together of the world as though we are all equal and happy with our lot. Parts of the Olympics remind me more of a Nuremburg rally. When its going on its like you have to know something about whose won or lost. If you don’t your not being patriotic or something.
Why is it that people who go on about sport eg football are quite often the most unfit people I meet?
My own post about the event on My London Diary also reflected a certain scepticism – here it is with the usual corrections.
Frank Bruno
Wimbledon can doubtless be blamed for the rain, and it fell relentlessly if not too heavily all Saturday morning as we waited around in Brixton for the precursor of the next example of sporting madness.
However it was an occasion for a little fun, with music and some attractive samba dancers from Quilombo do Samba, some athletic capoeira (a Latin American version of Morris dancing?) from Abada Capoeira and a little carnival from South Connections and Angell Town community group (and some drumming from Sandy Lamb) lifting the greyness.
Eventually the caravan arrived, although it was actually a black taxi, carrying an Olympic torch. I gave the photocall a miss so as to get in position to catch Frank Bruno ambling down the street with the torch, across the traffic lights and into Brixton’s high street [Brixton Road] where he passed it to a rather more attractive Davina Mccall, apparently a TV presenter (well, I don’t have a TV, so I wouldn’t know.)
It all seemed rather a sad non-event (thank goodness I missed the concert.) The whole Olympic bit seems little more than a commercial event now, publicity for the sponsors. Surely its time for a new Olympic Movement to pick up the old ideals again?
But in Brixton the carnival was bright and colourful and fun for those taking part and watching.
Looking back at it I think Gramsci was spot on, though I also fail to understand how anyone could design an Olympic torch to look like such an ordinary old bit of stainless pipe. People in Brixton are still rather short of bread and this was something of a crumby circus, but they made the most of it.
The ‘Carnival of Dirt‘ united activist groups from the UK and around the world in a funeral procession for the many killed by mining and extraction companies, powerful financial organisations whose crimes are legitimized by the City of London.
Mining companies have exploited mineral resources in countries around the world, mainly in the majority countries to feed the industrial development of countries such as ours, and have done so with little or no regard for the environment or the people who work in their mines or live in the areas around, creating large amounts of pollution and destroying vital habitats and traditional ways of life, driven by producing minerals at the lowest possible cost.
Many of those companies are based in London, in part because of our imperial past and are listed on the London Stock Exchange and trade on the London Metal Exchange. They are propped up by our pension funds and protected by our government and even allowed to get away with evading millions (if not billions) of UK taxes – as well as often evading taxes in the countries where they mine. Among the major criminals named were Xstrata, Glencore International, Rio Tinto, Vedanta, Anglo American, BHP Billiton, BP and Shell.
Turtle & Dugong – Xstrata has destroyed their homeland in the Macarthur River
The carnival procession began at St Pauls and stopped at the Stock Exchange, the Bank of England and the London Metal Exchange for speeches about the various crimes, before going to stop for lunch at Altab Ali Park.
There had been several heavy showers and by lunchtime my zoom lenses were all steamed up internally – zooming draws in damp air which condenses on the glass – and I only had a 16mm fisheye giving totally clear images. I needed to dry the others out and decided I had taken enough pictures and it was time for me to go home – although the carnival was going to continue to the West End and end with a ‘Reclaim the Streets’ style party starting on the Embankment at 6pm.
I described the event at length in 2012 and here I’ll quote some of it, but you can still read it all at Carnival of Dirt on My London Diary.
The funeral cortege that gathered at St Pauls included a large snake, a turtle and a tortoise, a reminder of XStrata’s criminal diversion of the McArthur River, destroying the ecosystem and despoiling the sacred sites of Australian aborigines.
There were coffins representing the dead and naming many of the companies involved one said ‘Glencore Values – Toxic Assets, Toxic Environments‘, another ‘XStrata – X-Rated on Human Rights‘ and pointed out the CEO Mick Davis “Gets £30 million to stay in job while 2 Dead 80 Injured protesting at Tintaya mine in Chile.’
A small coffin represent the over 18,000 child miners in the Phillipines, while another read ‘10 Million Dead Through Conflict in 16 years equals a 9/11 every 2 days‘. A black coffin carried on the side the message ‘Resist Corporate Terrorism‘ and on the top the message ‘London Metal Exchange – Setting the Global Standard in Bloodshed‘ with red drops bleeding from it. Another testified to the genocide in West Papua where Indonesian troops have torched villages.
Many carried placards with photographs of a few of the better-known activists who have been murdered for standing up to corporate terrorism, and marchers distributed a leaflet naming 15 of them – Valmore Locarno, Fr Fausto Tentorio, Victor Orcasita, Alexandro Chacon, Fr Reinel Restropo, Dr Gerry Ortega, Armin Marin, Dr Leonard Co, Elizer Billanes, Jorge Eliecer, Floribert Chebeya, Raghunath Jhodia, Abhilash Jhodia, Damodar Jhodia, Petrus Ayamiseba. Others carried photographs of unnamed and horribly mutilated victims.
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
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.
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.
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.
I wrote this post some months ago but when I tried to publish it none of the pictures appeared. They seem to be working now, though I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Poor Little Overlooked Images: I’m often asked “Is it worth putting images on Flickr?” My answer is it depends on why you take pictures, what you photograph and what you expect to get out of it.
Ionic Temple, lake and obelisk, Chiswick House Gardens, Chiswick, 1977 10c103
To state what I think is obvious, I don’t make a living out of Flickr, though I do get the occasional sale because people have found my pictures through it. It’s actually getting a little embarrassing now, as I shut down my business after Covid and I think I’m going to have to re-open it due to increasing sales.
Cheshire St, Tower Hamlets, 86-4r-23
But what I’ve always wanted to do is to share my images with other people, and Flickr is certainly doing that. When I was writing this some months ago there were over 45,000 views of my pictures on Flickr in a single day, and many days there are over 10,000 views. In total I’ve now had over 15 million views of my pictures there.
Brick Lane, Tower Hamlets 86-4r-11
Of course it isn’t the same as a gallery show, but most of those I’ve taken part in over the years have been lucky to get 100 visitors coming to view them in a day. So Flickr can get your work seen, and seen by a very much wider range of people than are interested enough to go into a gallery to see photographs.
Collegiale Notre-Dame de la Crypte, Cassel, France
Though I have to say that some of those people see very different things in the pictures than what interested me and what I was trying to say when I made the picture.
D933, France
I don’t mind this. Sometimes they give me information about the scene which I was totally unaware of – and occasionally it adds something to my appreciation. Often I get comments which are very personal to the viewers who may have lived or worked in somewhere that I photographed and it perhaps adds another layer to my view of the image, as well as being pleasing that they found it of interest.
Notting Hill Carnival, 1999. Peter Marshall 99-823-11_2400
But there are some things I don’t like. People who share my images on social media without naming me as the photographer is perhaps the top of the list, and if anyone should dare to colorize one of my black and white images I might to moved to take out a contract on them. So far as I’m aware it hasn’t happened yet.
St Omer, France
But while my most viewed images have been seen over 20,000 times (one now 35,699 views) there are also a few which have apparently never been viewed at all.
St Omer, France
They aren’t any worse than most of my other pictures – and in any case how would anyone know without viewing them. I think it may actually reflect some small glitches in Flickr’s recording of views, as when I click on them in the Flickr report it actually states “No recent stats available for this photo” and I’m fairly sure some at least will have been seen by some people.
St Omer, France
But here, illustrating this post. are some of the fifteen images which had apparently never been seen when I wrote this post a few months ago. And after writing I discovered why – Flickr had changed their privacy settings to private. Not me – all of my images are uploaded as public. Somehow a stray bit or byte in their database had flipped. I’ve just checked again and found a different half-dozen images hidden in the same way.
Flickr has a reasonable search facility (though occasionally it goes haywire) and almost all of my images are keyworded. If you want to know if I have taken a picture of your street or town – or anything else – simply click this link to Flickr and type my name followed by what you want to find in the search box at the top of the page.
So to find if I have photographed Pegasus simply type:
Peter Marshall Pegasus
into the search box – and it should find all seven. Londoners in particular may find it useful to search on the names of London boroughs in this way.
