foreshore | >Re-PHOTO

Southwark Housing, Bermondsey & Rembrandt – 2014

Southwark Housing, Bermondsey & Rembrandt: On Thursday October 16th 2014 I photographed a march from the Elephant to Southwark Council Offices over the borough’s housing scandals, took some time off in Bermondsey to take some panoramic images and then covered a protest at the National Gallery against sponsorship of art exhibitions by companies such as Shell, G4S, BP and Serco.

Compulsory Purchase Orders for Southwark Councillors

Housing campaigners from Southwark marched from the Elephant and Council to Southwark Council Offices to serve ‘People’s Compulsory Purchase Orders‘ on the homes of the Council leader and other councillors who they say have accepted gifts from developers to sell off council estates at knockdown prices.

The shameful demolition of over 1200 homes in and close to the well-designed and largely popular Heygate estate has cost the borough dearly, with the costs to the council of ‘decanting’ the residents exceeding the knock-down price it charged the developers.

Of course the estate residents suffered more, losing their homes and being forced to move further out into the suburbs. Leaseholders were only offered roughly half the true market value of property in the area.

The demolition and redevelopment has meant the loss of over a thousand social homes, and the new properties on the site had already been advertised to overseas buyers in Singapore and elsewhere as second homes, investment properties, homes for wealthy overseas students studying here, buy-to-let etc. There are just a few so-called affordable units at 80% of market rates, still well above what most Londoners can actually afford.

The protesters met at the base of the Strata Tower, an ugly development of largely luxury flats with three wind turbines built into its roof for show – unable to produce electricity as when running they produce excessive vibration in flats at the top of the building. Facing them ‘One The Elephant‘ was going up, a 44 storey block of luxury flats with no social housing, and is being sold abroad, with ‘studio flats’ starting at around £320,000 or 640,000 Singapore dollars.

Southwark campaigners were joined by members of the Focus E15 ‘Housing for All campaign’ and their first stop for a brief protest was the Elephant Park Sales Office on the Walworth Rd. They then walked through several council estates to the north of the New Kent Road which are also attractive targets for developers who can make huge profits by demolishing them and building high price flats at much higher densities.

They continued through other council estates in the area to London Bridge Station and on to the council offices in Tooley Street, where they were stopped by security from entering the Council offices. Police were called and after much argument two of the campaigners who were Southwark residents were allowed in and waited to present letters containing ‘People’s Compulsory Purchase Orders’ for their homes to council leader Peter John and two other councillors.

They asked at reception to see the councillors and were told to take a seat and wait. They waited and waited. Eventually someone from the council came to tell them that all three named councillors were unavailable but took their letters promising to hand them over personally to them.

More at CPOs for Southwark Councillors.

Bermondsey Thames Panoramas – City Hall to Angel Wharf

I had some time before my next protest and took a short walk by the River Thames,

beginning in Potters Fields where ‘One Tower Bridge’ was going up close to City Hall.

Past Tower Bridge I took a short walk on the foreshore in front of Butler’s Wharf before continuing along Shad Thames and across the footbridge over St Saviour’s Creek.

I continued along the Thames Path past the moorings, and got as far as Angel Wharf before I realised I needed to catch a bus to get me back to Trafalgar Sqaure in time for my next event.

More pictures Bermondsey Thames Panoramas

Art Not Oil Rembrandt Against Shell – National Gallery

The Art Not Oil coalition had gate-crashed the press launch of the National Gallery’s Rembrandt exhibition to give a brief performance protesting against oil sponsorship of the arts and privatisation of gallery staffing.

On the evening of 16th October they met on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields before marching the few yards to give a repeat performance outside the gallery which was then holding a gala evening for special guests and highly ranked staff.

The National Gallery was making plans to privatise up to two thirds of the gallery staff and this exhibition was being guarded by a private security firm rather than the gallery’s own staff.

Art Not Oil held banners and placards and handed out flyers agains the sponsorship by Shell stating:

"The presence of unethical sponsors like Shell and the contracting of external security firms shows the growing influence the private sector is having over our arts and culture. With its meagre contribution to the gallery, Shell is buying social legitimacy for its dodgy deeds worldwide, including:

- its failure to clean up its multiple spills in the Niger Delta
- its reckless plans to drill in the Arctic for yet more oil
- its tar sands projects in Canada that are undermining Indigenous people's rights"

They sang a number of specially written songs and performed the short playlet they had previously given inside the gallery during the press launch.

More at Art Not Oil Rembrandt Against Shell.

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A Walk in the City – 2019

A Walk in the City: Take a walk around parts of the City of London with me and my camera five years ago on Wednesday 7 Aug 2019. The first part of the walk I was on my own, but later I met up with a couple of friends and we continued to walk around but visited several interesting City pubs before ending up with a meal at what must be the worst Wetherspoons in Greater London at Cannon Street Station. Though I suppose it’s handy if you want to catch the train.

I’d taken a bus from Waterloo to the City and got off at St Paul’s and walked down to St Andrew’s Hill where I wanted to retake digitally an image I had made on film over 30 years ago.

Taken from the steps of St Andrew’s by the Wardrobe Church, the view of St Andrew’s Hill and the Cockpit pub was a taxing subject on film with the foreground in Wardrobe Terrace, and I never quite managed what I wanted. Using digital gave me a rather better result with no problems.

I walked on down to the River Thames and made some views along the river with the Millennium footbridge and the Shard now rather dominating the scene.

The tide was very low and I went down the steps onto the foreshore, though I needed to be careful walking on the stones and mud as I was only wearing a light pair of shoes which were very much not waterproof. I walked along under the Millennium Bridge and on towards Queenhithe, taking quite a few pictures.

The foreshore can be dangerous and the tide comes in rapidly. Although anyone is free to visit it, searching in any way – metal detecting, ‘beachcombing’, scraping and digging etc requires a https://pla.co.uk/thames-foreshore-permits PLA permit. You are advised to wear sensible footwear and gloves – which of course I wasn’t – and to watch out for hazards including raw sewage, broken glass, hypodermic needles and wash from vessels. I stepped very carefully.

Buried below the sand and mud at Queenhithe are the remains of part of London’s Roman harbour and the later medieval quay. A scheduled ancient monument, it is probably the only existing Saxon harbour in the world, presented by King Alfred the Great in 883 AD to his brother-in-law Ethelred. It got the name Queenhithe later when the harbour dues became the property of the wife of Henry I, Queen Matilda. The dock was still in use mainly by the fur trade in the early 20th century, and there were still fur shops in the area around in the 1970s.

I didn’t stay long on the foreshore and couldn’t remember where the next set of steps up from it were, so went back onto the Thames Path where I had come down and walked east towards Monument Station where I was meeting two photographer friends.

One of my friends had planned this walk and I was just a little surprised to find we were going back to one of the places I had visited earlier, St Andrew’s Hill, though less surprised when we went into the Cockpit pub.

The pub is on a historic site, originally part of one of the gatehouses of Blackfriars Monastery. There was a pub here when Shakespeare bought a house nearby. And undoubtedly there was somewhere here where cock fights took place until cockfighting was banned – along with dog fighting, bear baiting and badger baiting – in 1835. But this is a Victorian theme pub, rebuilt around 1865, though some at least of its interior decoration almost certainly came from actual cockfighting venues. But punters never stood in the closed galleries here to watch fights. Now firmly on the tourist circuit it is still worth a visit, if just for a pint of Harvey’s Sussex Best Bitter.

Our walk continued through more of the streets in this area and then across New Bridge Street and on to Bride Lane and St Bride’s Passage and The Old Bell Tavern, once very much part of Fleet Street, the Street of Shame. The Old Bell Tavern is on the site where it all started, when in 1500 Wynkyn de Worde who had worked with William Caxton set up the first print shop on Fleet Street. The building is apparently derived from one that Christopher Wren knocked up for his masons when they were building St Brides, the journalists’ church.

Our walk more or less finished there, though we took a bus to Cannon Street Station for cheap food at the Wetherspoons, though I found it very disappointing. Spoons do much better almost everywhere else. I caught a bus from St Paul’s Churchyard, sat in the front seat on the top desk and it had unusually clean windows so I took a few more picture on the way back to Waterloo.

More pictures from the day at City & Thames.

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City and Thames

The area by St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe, an Anglican church a few hundred yards south of St Paul’s Cathedral fascinated me when I first walked by it in the 1970s, and of course I’ve tried to photograph it over the years with various success, though mainly failure.

This picture, taken from the steps up to a locked door into the church is one that I found impossible on colour film, with the gloomy alley – with a light on even in the middle of the day when I took this picture contrasting with the more brightly lit street with The Cockpit pub. But the day was overcast, reducing the contrast and the digital camera coped well, though needing some dodging and burning in Lightroom to give the results here.

I didn’t go into the church though I have been inside on at least one previous occasion, just following an Indian Orthodox service there, when the atmosphere was thick with incense. The site has an interesting history, with a church here for perhaps a thousand years or more, though the first written mention is in 1170 or . It became part of an ancient royal residence, Baynard’s Castle, and in 1361 Edward III or Edward IV moved his royal clothes and arms from the Tower of London to a more handy site in a building close by.

Like most of London it was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, and was rebuilt in 1695 to one of the simplest and last of Christopher Wren’s many church designs. Although it now looks ancient, it was mostly destroyed again by German bombing in 1940 and rebuilt and reconsecrated in 1961, with most of its internal decor being salvaged from previously demolished Wren churches. Among the memorials on its walls is a modern carved wood one for William Shakespeare, a parishoner for 15 years.

From the church I crossed Queen Victoria St and made my way down to the riverside walkway. There was an extremely low tide and I went down the steps onto the foreshore, which here is sand and shingle with many remains of wooden posts.

I walked the short distance along to Queenhithe, a historic monument as London’s first dock though the Roman and Saxon docks are now all buried beneath the mud and stones or hidden behind the visible more modern river walls and the area is surrounded by rather boring modern offices.

I went back and up onto the riverside walkway and then made my way to meet with friends for a short walk through the city, on which I took a few more photographs. One of the places we visited was where I had begun taking pictures, and this time we went inside The Cockpit on St Andrews Hill opposite the church, one of London’s smaller and more fascinating places.

Although the text for it’s grade II listing states tha the building is ca 1860, but the interior is in part older. The pub claims to have been established in 1787 and to have been rebuilt in 1842 and that it was once Shakespeare’s home – and certainly it is on the corner of Ireland Yard where he is known to have lived.

The interior is literally a ‘cockpit’ and the bar and seating is on the very floor where the pair of gamecocks, equipped with razor-sharp metal spurs would be set to fight to the death while gamblers looked on from the balcony above. Cock-fighting was banned in England and Wales by the Cruelty to Animals Act 1835 and the last fight in this pub was said to have been in 1849. Apparently there are still some illegal fights in the UK.

More pictures at City & Thames.

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