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Glasgow Visit 2008

Glasgow Visit 2008: In August 2008 with my wife and elder son and friends I went to Iona. The journey up from London is a long one and we decided that rather than try to do it in one day we would take the opportunity to spend a few days in Glasgow on our way, staying in a hotel close to the School of Art in the centre of the city, named after Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

We were in Glasgow for only five days but managed to see quite a lot of the city and some of its surroundings as my pictures show. Looking back I’m surprised at the variety of subjects in the roughly 2000 images I took, working over a 12 hour day on most of the 5 days we were there.

Only a fairly small fraction of the pictures are on My London Diary – partly because this wasn’t London and I then felt a bit embarrassed about posting work from another city. But the web site – which I updated regularly from around 2000 to the start of 2022 except during the lockdown and is still on line was very much my personal diary and so does include at least some of my pictures from outside London.

All were taken on the 12Mp Nikon D300, a DX format camera which I had bought earlier in the year. It was a very usable camera with decent autofocus and nothing that came later from Nikon was really much of an improvement, though the sensor size and pixel count increased. Should you want a good, cheap DSLR a secondhand D300 would still be a good choice, so long as the shutter count was well below the rated 150,000.

I think I had both a wide-angle and telephoto zoom with me. The Raw images I made have suffered a little from the processing to produce jpegs – software has improved significantly since 2008, and I think all of them could benefit from being made a little brighter. But life is too short to re-process them all.

For convenience I divided the pictures into eight rather arbitrary sections to post them on My London Diary, and I’ll include the direct links to these at the bottom of this post. But you can start at ‘My Pictures’ and click the link at the bottom of each page to go through the complete set I’ve posted.

This wasn’t my first visit to Glasgow, but I don’t think any pictures from my earlier visit when we spent a week there are online, and on the brief visit with friends back in around 1962 I took no pictures – I think I’d finished my holiday film on Skye, where my holiday also almost ended as I fell down a mountain.

Mmong other holidays in Scotland I’ve also spent a couple of weeks in Edinburgh – including once for the festival. And though I enjoyed both cities, I found Glasgow interested me more. If I ever return to Scotland it will be to Glasgow, as I now feel too old to walk the West Highland Way.

Glasgow 2008

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Housing For Need Not Greed

Housing For Need Not Greed: Mostly my posts here look at old work, either from a few years ago or my work on London back in the 1980s and 90s. But I’m still goining out at taking pctures if not quite as often as I once did. So this post is about one of the two events I photographed last weekend.

Last Saturday, 8th July 2023 was National Housing Action Day, and a march from the Elephant to the Aylesbury Estate was one of 16 across the country on National Housing Day. Others were taking place in Lambeth, Islington, Kensington, Cardiff, Glasgow, Abbey Wood, Wandsworth, Harlow, Merton, Ealing, Cornwall, Folkestone, Devon, Birmingham, and Hastings.

Housing For Need Not Greed -Tanya Murat - Southwark Defend Council Housing — *Tanya Murat – Southwark Defend Council Housing*

The Southwark protest demanded Southwark Council stop demolishing council homes and refurbish and repopulate estates to house people and end the huge carbon footprint of demolish and rebuild. They demanded housing for need not corporate greed, refurbishment not demolition, filling of empty homes and an end to the leasehold system.

Housing For Need Not Greed — *Marchers at the Elephant on their way to the Aylesbury Estate*

Demolition and rebuilding of housing produces huge amounts of CO2, and whenever possible should be avoided now we are aware of the real dangers of global warming. Instead existing buildings should be insulated, retrofitted and refurbished and properly maintained.

Southwark Council’s estates have for well over 20 years been deliberately run down and demonised with some being demolished and replaced. Around 1000 council homes on the Aylesbury Estate have already been demolished buy around 1,700 are still occupied but currently scheduled for demolition.

*Marchers on Walworth Road on their way to the Aylesbury Estate*.

These homes were well built for the time to higher standards than their replacement and could easily and relatively cheaply be brought up to modern levels of services and insulation with at least another 50 years of life. The estate was carefully designed with open spaces, natural daylight and a range of properties, many with some private outdoor space. The planned replacements are at higher density, less spacious and unlikely to last as long – and only include a small proportion at social rents. Current tenants are more secure and the properties are far more affordable.

*People on the street watch and video the march*

Many of those whose homes have already been demolished here and on the neighbouring Heygate estate have been forced to move outside the area, some far from London as they can no longer afford to live here.

*Bubbles and Marchers on Walworth Road on their way to the Aylesbury Estate.*

Although the developers have profited greatly from their work with Southwark Council here and in other estates, and some officers and councillors involved have personally landed well-paying corporate jobs and enjoyed lavish corporate hospitality, the schemes have largely been financial disasters for the council and council tax payers.

Fight4Aylesbury was formed in 199 as Aylesbury Tenants and Residents First, and has been fighting Southwark Council’s plans to demolish the estate since then. While these schemes – part of New Labour’s regeneration initiative – have always been destructive of local communities and disastrous for many of those whose homes have been demolished, we now see that they are also environmentally unsupportable.

You can watch a video on YouTube of Aysen Dennis, Fight4Aylesbury and Tanya Murat, Southwark Defend Council Housing talking about the protest, and FIght4Aylesbury recently released a newsletter, The Future of the Aylesbury with more details on the estate and their proposals. A few more of my pictures from the event are in the album Housing For Need Not Greed – National Action Day, London, UK and are available for editorial use on Alamy.

12 Years Ago – our journey to Iona

Twelve years ago today (I’m writing this the day before posting) we – myself, my wife and our elder son – were on our way to Iona. We’d enjoyed 5 nights in Glasgow at a Rennie Mackintosh hotel – more pictures here – and seen the sunset over the Clyde but had got up early to leave the hotel to catch a bus to Oban in the rain which continued to drive against the windows throughout the 3 hour journey.

Near Inverary – this was the clearer view from the bus on our way home

It was still raining as we queued to buy tickets for the two ferry journeys. We were fortunate to reach the bus when the ferry landed at Craignure in time to get a seat, while some unlikely people were left standing in the rain, waiting for 5 hours for our bus to return for a second journey.

We could see Mull from the ferry on our journey home. Outward we only saw rain

*The ferry we had arrived on from Oban at Craignure. seen from the bus windo*

The rain eased off a little for what is quite a spectacular journey across Mull to Fionnphort, around 35 miles on what is rather jokingly called the A849, mostly single track with passing places. It was around an hour and a half before we arrived at the landing slip there for the ferry across the strait to Baile Mòr on the island of Iona.

The jetty at Fionnphort and Mull. The ferry has just started across the strait.

From the slip we could see the island clearly, though there was still a little light rain, and watch the ferry making its way across the 0.85 miles of water, and very clearly see the Abbey where we were to spend a week.

Technically our stay at the Abbey was not a holiday but a retreat and we were there with around thirty friends sharing in the life of the Abbey, including sharing the chores as well as taking part in its religious life including shared meals. But this left plenty of time to enjoy and explore the island, 3 miles long and at its widest point only 1.5 miles wide and virtually car free. I’ll perhaps write more about that later this week.

The Bishop’s House and the Abbey – where we were to stay – from the ferry

A week later we were on our way home, and the weather was much better, and I was able to make a few more photographs, a couple of which I’ve used here.

The ferry approaches the slip at Baile Mòr on Iona

Today, sat at home and still only venturing out for exercise and the very occasional shopping for essentials it’s good to re-live a little from 12 years ago. We’ve had to cancel our holiday this year which would have been in Wales – and hope to make it there in 2021.