Goodbye and Good Riddance – March 2023: Continuing from yesterday’s post some more pictures from 2013, from my albums on Facebook from March 2003.
More pictures from these and other protests in March 2023 in my Facebook Albums.
Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos
All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.
Christmas Greetings From My Flickr Albums – There are only 17 pictures out of the roughly 30,000 on my Flickr account which have the tag ‘Christmas‘, and some of those are only because I’ve mentioned the festival in my description rather than for anything in the picture. Although I’ve taken many pictures of Santas on the streets of London, almost all of these have been in the last 25 years, and so far I’ve mainly put pictures from earlier times onto Flickr – mostly from 1970-1994 and mainly of London. Wishing you all a happy Christmas. But if you get too fed up with the nonsense on TV or even with family and friends there are plenty of pictures on-line to look at!
I took this in 1983, looking through the window of a cobblers shop which had recently closed but still had posters with the message ‘It wouldn’t be Christmas without Pirelli’. Santa Claus wasn’t entirely the invention of Coca-Cola though his popularity and appearance owes much to their Christmas advertising from the 1930s. The article on the link to Wikipedia above has more about Santa than you will ever want to know. This year I produced a short run of poorly printed versions of this picture as Christmas cards for selected personal friends, mainly photographers. This picture is in my album London 1983 and also appears in Tower Hamlets – Black and White.
In my Hull Black and White album you can find this picture and the long description below:
An unprepossessing 20th century industrial building on or close to Wincolmlee where electrical harnesses – bundles of cables and connectors – for various makes of cars and other vehicles were made. Apparently Auto-Sparks Ltd Hull dates back to an electrical business founded by Mr Henry Colomb on Beverley Rd in the 1920s. Auto-Sparks Ltd was incorporated in April 1942 and a history page on the web site of its successor company, Autosparks reproduces the original company logo from 1954 when it was registered as a trade mark.
After the original owner and manager retired in the 1980s Auto-Sparks got into difficulties and collapsed in 1991. It was bought and moved to Sandiacre Nottingham by R D Components who were specialists in classic motorbike and car harnesses and they took over the name as Autosparks, and in 2005 became Autosparks Ltd.
This picture was taken in December, and my attention was drawn to the building by the Christmas decorations drawn on its first-floor windows. And by wondering whatever an electric harness was.
Hull Black and White
The SI unit of electric charge is of course the Coulomb, named after Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, so this electical business founded by Mr Henry Colomb would appear to be a remarkable example of nominative determinism.
In 1990 in Brent I took two Christmas pictures in 1990, one in black and white in the album 1990 London Photos of a Santa holding a number of figures and with a Harrods tag ‘£22’ standing on a box containing a caravan TV aerial kit.
The second picture from 1990 Brent was a café window in colour with Christmas decorations and an advert posted in it for flats to let in Station Road. Also in the window is a poster for Sickle Cell Awareness Day, 15th December 1990, to the left of which you can see part of me reflected as I made the image, along with reflections of a parked van and the shops and flats on the opposite side of the road. This is one of many pictures in my album 1990 London Colour.
From a South London used car showroom in the album 1991 London Photos is a 1987 car with its features and price described in notices on the windscreen complete with Christmas decorations. Usually when photographing interiors through windows I tried to work close to the glass and eliminate reflections so far as possible, but here I deliberately moved the black glove I was wearing to include the church across the road.
In 1986 I took a few colour photographs at night around Piccadilly Circus just before Christmas which are in both 1986 Colour – London & the Thames and in Westminster – Colour 1985-92.
Pictures at night are so much easier now with digital cameras as you can work with much shorter exposures – this was probably taken on ISO400 film, while now at night I often work and get better results at 4 stops faster – the ISO6400 setting on my camera. Also being able to see what you have taken immediately makes it much easier than having to wait until the film was processed and printed.
In the same albums and taken within a minute or two of the previous picture was this picture of Eros and the advertising display. The clock tells us that I made this at 16.06, around 15 minutes after sunset. Of course Eros isn’t really Eros, but Anteros, designed by Sir Alfred Gilbert to commemorate the philanthropic work of Lord Shaftesbury and called by him ‘The God of Selfless Love‘ – “as opposed to Eros or Cupid, the frivolous tyrant.”
But Piccadilly is a place at Christmas where some like to come and celebrate drunkenly and Anteros needs boarding up for protection and instead of seeing the fountain we see the hoardings with vintage Christmas images and greetings from The London Standard which featured Eros on its masthead.
Finally in 1988 in Shepherds Bush and now the first image in my album 1988 London Colour. This shop was a pet shop and the window is full of Christmas Stockings for cats and dogs and boxes of ‘Good Boy’ treats. Even the scratching post has some green ribbon attached. Along with some rather horrible artificial tree-like objects complete with blue and silver hanging balls. It seemed a particularly bleak image of the capitalist commercialisation of a religious festival.
Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos
All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.
Unless you were a reader of Private Eye, one of the last bastions of investigative journalism in the UK, or a reader of Inside Croydon, which has been casting its critical on-line eye of the dubious activities of the local council since 2010 you would probably have been unaware of what was happening in the Borough when Class War held this protest in 2016.
Things came into more general light a few years later, particularly after the council collapsed into bankruptcy in 2018, largely due to attempting to become a major housing developer with poor governance and few financial controls , as well as some risky investments to become a property developer. These led eventually in September 2020 to chief executive Jo Negrini leaving with a golden handshake allegedly worth £440,000 for her failures and to council leader Tony Newman resigning after 6 years in charge of this Labour run council.
Inside Croydon quotes Private Eye that “… thanks to the wonder of revolving doors, ‘Negreedy’ has resurfaced as a ‘cities and development consultant’ on the books of Arup, the giant engineering and planning specialists”. This was one of the firms that “she favoured so lavishly when she was frittering tax-payers’ money“, and a textbook example of the careers of may who have left well-paid council employment to move into the private sector.
And as they say, her Brainchild Brick by Brick, and its £200million borrowings produced precious few new homes. Negrini also oversaw the “£70million Fairfield Halls refurbishment, which delivered rich profits for a handful of consultants but little in the way of the long-promised improvements to the much-loved arts centre.” In 2022 Croydon Council’s report on possible fraud linked to Fairfield Halls and council-owned developer Brick by Brick was passed to the Metropolitan Police, despite determined efforts by some councillors to keep it private. Croydon Council then took Inside Croydon to the High Court for having published documents and information about the report. The case was thrown out, with Private Eye describing it making the council “a national laughing stock.”
Class War has strong links with the London Borough of Croydon, and with the South Norwood Tourist Board who on 21st December 2020 organised a Solstice ceremony “sacrificing Croydon Council to the Gods, so that the sun may once again rise on our benighted borough.” Unfortunately I was unable to attend that event bacause of Covid restrictions but there is an impressive short video on their web site, also available on YouTube. Apparently two Conservative Councillors objected to the video and had it removed from the Facebook page of the Save South Norwood Library campaign. Previously held by Labour the council now has no party with an overall majority, 34 Labour councillors, 32 Conservative councillors, two Green councillors and one Liberal Democrat councillor.
Class War came to the recently set up Croydon Boxpark on Tuesday 22nd November 2016 to protest against property developers and council leaders who were attending the Develop Croydon Conference, aimed at transforming Croydon into a desirable metropolitan hub with luxury apartments, prestige offices and the capital’s latest Westfield.
The lunchtime protest demanded that Croydon be developed to meet the needs of the inhabitants rather than to line the pockets of developers and become a piggy bank of largely empty flats and offices owned by overseas investors. Their protest led conference organisers to cancel a scheduled walking tour of Croydon and few of the attendees came to the boxpark where they had been scheduled to lunch, probably finding plusher restaurants in the town centre. The few councillors and property developers who did arriave and walked past the protest to enter the site and were greeted with shouts of ‘Scum!’ and ‘Snouts in the trough!’
Class War had no issues with the boxpark, though some considered it a rather hipster venue, but it is clearly a leisure facility for the people of Croydon. Box Park owner Roger Wade came to talk with the protesters and invited them to come and talk with him at a later date as he felt they had views in common about the future of the town.
A short thunderstorm brought a temporary halt to the protest, with some of us sheltering in a bus shelter before returning to picket. Some used a banner as an umbrella and marched to the East Croydon Station entrance to the Boxpark for a brief protest there, while others continued opposite the conference. Mark Eaton, seen as the BBC developers’ apologist got a noisy welcome as he walked back into the venue for the afternoon session. A security office came out to harass Class War as the area in front of the offices is private land – and told me I could not take picture. I continued to do so. Police soon moved the protesters back to the opposite side of the road where they had been protesting earlier. Soon after the protesters decided that everyone would now be inside the conference and ended the protest. I walked with them to the Dog and Duck before leaving for home.
More at Class War Croydon ‘Snouts in the trough’.