London Summer Festivals : Sunday 11th July 2004 seemed to be a day of festivals in London and I spent some time at three of them, walking between Trafalgar Square, Denmark Street and St Paul’s Covent Garden and taking a few pictures on the way.
Back then I was still working with the rather primitive Nikon D100 DSLR, with probably the dullest and smallest viewfinder of any camera I’ve used (though I have used deveral with no viewfinder at all.)
But although it only gave 6.1Mp files, (3012X2008 pixels) and the DX sensor was only half the size of a 35mm frame these were of remarkable quality and could be extrapolated to make decent large prints – one taken on another day was blown up to 2.3m wide for a public exhibition.
Nikon at the time and for some years were saying that the DX format was all that was needed for its cameras, and the later decision to move to ‘full-frame’ was driven by marketing – keeping up with Canon – rather than technical considerations.
Of course like most other photographers followd sheep-wise to move to full-frame when these new cameras came out, though most of the time when working with telephoto lenses I switched down to DX format for the greater equivalent focal length this gave.
At first the DX format with its 1.5x focal length multiplier meant I was working without any real wide angle lens. The 24-85mm worked as a 36-127 lens, But by July 2004 I had acquired the remarkable Sigma 12-24mm lens, “the world’s first ultra-wide-angle zoom for DSLRs with full-frame sensors” – 18-36mm equivalent on DX, solving that issue. And since on DX it was not using the corners of the frame it was a better performer than on full-frame.
I put the pictures in this post on the web in 2004, when most of us were still accessing the internet on dial-up modems and even the fastest connections were only 512kbs. To get web pages to load at a sensible speed the jpg image files had to be drastically cut in size to around 50-70kb. Now I would upload the same files the same size at two or three times the size to get visibly better quality.
Here- with some corrections is the text I wrote about the day in 2004:
Sunday I walked into Trafalgar Square to find it full of young Indian girls carrying ornamental jars and dancing with them, rehearsing for the Trafalgar Shores event that afternoon.
I left and went up to Denmark St for a set by 50hz, electrifying the first Tin Pan Alley Festival, organised with Shelter. Great Indie Rock and supporting charity without running. more pictures
Then on to a garden party in St Pauls Covent Garden, which was sprinkled with celebrities, actors (female) and others I’ve not heard of and didn’t recognise. And a picture I didn’t post in 2004
Back in Trafalgar Square the girls had donned traditional garb and were now recognisably the Saraswati Dance Academy in a colourful South Asian show. After this we were treated to some water puppetry from the Vietnamese National Puppetry Theatre (not very photogenic and hard to photograph) so i went back to catch Billy Thompson playing Grapelli to Tim Robinson’s Django with rhythm support from Dukato. Finally back in the square I watched the superb Irie! Caribbean Dance Fusion from Deptford/New Cross, London. Then home for a slightly dark and chilly alfresco dinner with family. more pictures
Saturday April 17th 2010 was a long and varied day for me, travelling to various parts of London and making a couple of short walks as well as photographing three events.
New River & Harringay – Finsbury Park
My journey across London had been rather faster than expected, probably because TfL’s Journey Planner had estimated rather longer times than I needed for connections, and I arrived at Harringay Green Lanes with rather a lot of time to spare.
So I decided to walk around part of the area, walking partly along the New River, a water supply aqueduct opened in 1613 to bring water from Hertfordshire to London. It’s no longer New and was never a river.
The light and sky was rather unusual. Like most of the Europe London was under a cloud of volcanic ash from the impossible to spell Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, and no planes were flying. Thee sky had a slightly different blue to usual and lacked the con-trails and wispy clouds that these decay to and was a little dull from horizon to horizon. It wasn’t ideal for the panoramic views I made.
A few members of the Nuclear Trains Action Group and London CND were handing out leaflets close to the rail bridge on Green Lanes warning of the dangers of trains carrying highly toxic radioactive waste through densely populated North London. The event was given added moment by President Obama’s recent warning that nuclear terrorism is the gravest threat to global security.
Protesters had come to Haringey because nuclear waste from the power station at Sizewell is regularly shipped by rail on the line through here on its way to be reprocessed at Sellafield. Waste from Dungeness also travels through London, but on a route through the south and west of the city.
A terrorist attack on the trains carrying spent fuel rods could contaminate considerable areas of London with highly toxic materials and deaths could result. The protesters also pointed out that the route also goes past the Olympic site and an incident there would give the terrorists a huge amount of publicity.
Journalists had planted a fake bomb on one of these trains in London in 2006 to show the lack of real security and there has been no attempt to provide adequate security along the whole length of the route.
Transport by sea would be safer but would add significantly to the costs, and nuclear power is already hugely uneconomic when the full costs of decommissioning of power stations and safe long-term storage of wastes are included.
It hadn’t taken long to take a few pictures of the protesters in Haringey, and I still had rather a long time before my next event.
I’d heard that a new section of path had been opened by the Wandle close to where it enters the River Thames and planning my day I’d thought I would have time to take a look at it. It’s a longish journey from Haringey to Wandsworth, south of the river, but I had plenty of time to eat my sandwich lunch on the journey.
I was disappointed to find that although I could walk along the new section of ‘riverside’ path, it was still a short distance from both Wandle and Thames and these were still largely hidden from view by fences.
My next journey, to Clapham Junction and then Victoria was rather easier, and I arrived in time to photograph the members of the City of London District Orange Lodge and their guests as the prepared to march though central London on their St Georges Day Orange Parade.
They were going to march to lay wreaths in memory of Crown Forces at the Cenotaph and then on to St James’s Square to lay another at the memorial to WPC Yvonne Fletcher, fatally wounded by a shot from the Libyan Embassy on 17 April 1984.
Among other groups taking part were the Corby Purple Star Flute Band and the Churchill Flute Band of Londonderry.
Even with progress towards peace continuing in Northern Ireland and now 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement, parades such as this are still contentious there. But in London they arouse little or no antipathy and are seen simply as a celebration of a particular Protestant culture.
Release Syrian Political Prisoners – Syrian Embassy, Belgrave Square
I left the Orange parade to make my way to the Syrian Embassy, where Kurds and others were protesting on the 64th anniversary of Syrian independence calling for the release of Kurdish prisoners of conscience held in Syrian jails.
Similar demonstrations, organised by the International Support Kurds in Syria Association (SKS, based in the UK and founded in 2009) were taking place in Brussels, Canada, Switzerland, France and the USA.
The protesters waved both Syrian and Kurdish flags – which are illegal in Syria – and called for the prisoners to be released and for the repeal of Decree 49. Introduced in September 2008, this controls the movement of people in the border area between Syria and Turkey where most Kurds live, and under it people there have to get a licence to build, rent or buy property.
Around 1.7 million Kurds live in Syria and have been systematically denied their basic human rights for many years. In 1973, around 300 villages were confiscated and the land taken from around 100,000 Kurds and handed over to Arab farmers, with the names of Kurdish villages being changed into Arabic names.
Emergency rule had been in force in Syria since 1963 and a 1962 law led to around 120,000 Kurds being stripped of Syrian nationality and becoming stateless. They are not allowed to move house, own land or businesses, are banned from many jobs, have no passports or other travel documents and their access to medical treatment is restricted.
Since the Syrian revolution of 2011, the largely Kurdish northeast of Syria has become the de-facto autonomous region of Rojava, adopting universal democratic, sustainable, autonomous pluralist, equal, and feminist policies.
The car in the foreground seemed appropriate for ‘High Society’ at the Victoria Palace, but I would have preferred it without the foreground post. But this wasn’t a planned photoshoot, just a car that happened to stop at the traffic lights while I was looking at the threatre, and it moved off before I could change my position.
Morpeth Terrace runs along the west side of Westminster Cathedral, and its mansion flats have over the years housed some notable residents. A few doors down the street a black plaque records that Winston and Clementine Churchill lived here from 1930-39.
They had apparently bought the flat on the fifth and sixth floor from Lloyd George, who reportedly had housed his mistress there. It was in the study of the flat that Churchill held a meeting with other MPs and wrote a letter to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain urging him to send Hitler an ultimatum the day before war was declared in 1919.
Later the same flat is said to have been home to Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva. But if so, her stay there was probably brief as she defected while on a trip to India, going to the US embassy in New Delhi and became a US citizen, though later moved for a short while to Cambridge before returning to Russia and then back to the USA.
I photographed this end of building rather than the part of the block with the Churchill plaque as it seemed more interesting. You can also see it was in rather poor external condition at the time – it has since been refurbished.
It looked as if Baxendale & Sadler, Electrical Engineers and Contractors might still have been in business, though their shop front was rather the worse for wear. I think it had once said they were established in 1956.
The shop, a few yards from Vauxhall Bridge Road, is now residential.
The Empire Hospital for Paying Patients in Vane St, Westminster obviously rather predated the National Health Service, and according to the Lost Hospitals of London web site was “opened in December 1913, intended to receive paying patients, primarily visitors from overseas” and was a nursing home with no doctors or surgical staff. Taken over as a military hospital it became the “Empire Hospital for Officers (for Injuries to the Nervous System)” and closed in 1919.
Later it became the Grange Rochester Hotel and is now the the Rochester Hotel by Blue Orchid, and looks rather more welcoming, with the text above the door covered by a hotel sign.
Wyndham Lewis (1882-57) disliked the name ‘Percy’ and dropped it, but others continued to use it and it appears on the GLC plaque in Palace Garden Terrace, Kensington which does not record when he lived here.
Born on a yacht, Lewis went to Rugby School and the Slade before studying in Paris before settling in London. A founder member of the ‘Camden Town Group’ he became one of Britains leading painters, best known for what Ezra Pound named as ‘vorticism’. After serving as an officer in the Great War he was made a war artist. In the late 1920s he turned mainly to writing and had produced over 40 books before his death.
Between the houses you can see Courtlands, described as a former coach house, though it looks rather more grand than that. The terrace seemed overpowering with long and largely unbroken stretches of largely white stucco, and these brick houses with a vista of a white villa attracted me.
The Grade II listing for Mall Chambers on Kensington Mall is unusually concise, at least at its start: “Improved industrial dwellings. 1865-8. J Murray. Yellow brick, stone dressings. Five storeys. Corner site, with corner entrance.” Towards the end it quotes Building News from 1868 “”intended for a class somewhat above ordinary mechanics and labourers”.
That is of course even more true now. A three bed flat here sold for £741,000 in 2014.
Joseph Yates Timber Merchants were suprisingly still in business here until fairly recently and its timber yard now houses a luxurious four bedroom town house. Yates’ shop on the left of its carriage entrance is now The Kensington Cigar Shop.
The planning permission granted in 2004 required the retention of the lettering on the front of the building.
You can click on any of the images to see the larger version on Flickr and to browse more of the album 1987 London Photos.
I had my doubts about including this picture in my London album, not because of my opinions about Churchill, but because it is very much a cliché. But at least I think it is a fairly well done version, and the two men with the motorbike add just a little interest.
Churchill was a great leader in wartime, not least because his first action as Prime Minister was to invite Attlee, Sinclair and Chamberlain – the leaders of the Labour, Liberal and Conservative parties – to serve in a Coalition Government. I was too young to vote in the 1945 election (just over two months old) but clearly the nation wanted a change and saw that his strengths were no longer relevant to its future. His return to power in 1951 was something of a disaster for the country, made more clear by his protégé and successor Eden.
All of these buildings at Nine Elms, seen from across the River Thames, have now been demolished. None was I suppose a great loss, but together I think they made an interesting ensemble. The cold store, brutally functional but with the elegant spiral staircase at its centre, presumably a fire exit, the curving horizontal of 95 Wandsworth Rd, for long occupied by Cap Gemini, demolished in 2018 and I think the site now owned by a Chinese property developer, and the two tower blocks at the right have also gone.
Taken on the riverside path opened up in front of Crown Reach in Pimlico and now a part of the Thames Path. This view of the building looks to me like an Escher drawing, but for real, and I liked the contrast in shape and style with the rounded and decorated riverside lamp post.
Another picture of Henry Moore’s Locking Piece in the Riverside Walk Gardens on Millbank, again with the River Thames, Vauxhall Bridge, Nine Elms Cold Store and Market Towers in the distance. A figure walking past gives some sense of the scale of the piece, and the view is tightly cropped (I think the negative probably just contains the right edge of the plinth at its extreme edge.) I deliberately stood where a small area of sky was visible through the centre of the sculpture.
Another example of very deliberate framing at the left and top edges of this view of the buildings around the base of the Millbank Tower.
I wasn’t able to quite do the same when I made another exposure including the whole of the tower, but I think it makes effective use of the curvature of the building.
I think this picture in Thorney St shows the rear of the rather oddly shaped Millbank Tower building, but I think the concrete spiral ramp has been replaced by a garden.
And my final picture, taken in John Islip St, is something of a mystery to me, because of the reflections in the large polished stone triangular section fins on its surface. I found two of these fairly close together and the reflections make it almost impossible (at least for me) to see this building as it actually was rather than some optical illusion. If I start at the bottom of the frame where there is less reflection I can force myself to see it as it was.
Abell House and its neighbour Cleland House were I think built as government offices by TP Bennet around 1930, and were over-clad in 1985 using matching dark brown marbleised granite cladding, with a highly polished surface. I’m not sure which of the two is in this picture. Both were demolished around 2011-2 and replaced by taller residential towers with the same names, completed in 2016. The replacements look over-fussy to me, but would be rather easier to photograph.
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.
