Hastings | >Re-PHOTO

Hastings Old Town Carnival – Hastings, Kent

Hastings Old Town Carnival: On Saturday 20th August 2005 I went to Hastings to photograph the carnival there. I’ve never really been that interested in carnivals like this, but several of my friends are and have carried out projects on the English Carnival.

I think you can blame Tony Ray Jones for this, as before his tragically early death only 30 in 1972 he had photographed a number of them around the country in the late 1960s, with some of the pictures being amount the 120 images published in the posthumous book ‘A Day Off – An English Journal’ published in 1974.

This volume was arguably the most influential English photographic book of the 1970s, with a copy on every youngish photographer’s bookshelf, including my own. You will be lucky to find a secondhand copy now for less than £100, although there are now much better printed and selected and more informative books on his work available, but all rather expensive. Probably the best is that produced for the 2004 show at the Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford, ‘Tony Ray-Jones’, by Russell Roberts. Digital scans then enabled rather better prints to be made from some of his negatives.

The best way to see examples of his work on the web is to use Google’s image search and put in his name, Tony Ray Jones, which will turn up pictures from various web sites, as I don’t think there is any single site with more than a handful of examples of his work.

Ray Jones is better known now, but for many years was a ‘photographers’ photographer’ and little known particularly outside the UK. In 2005 I gave a talk at the first FotoFestival in Bielsko-Biala in Poland in which I looked at his work along with that of another British photographer, Ray Moore. Sitting in the audience was the director of the Krakow Photomonth who told me afterwards that he hadn’t really known either of their work. In 2010 a show of the work of Tony Ray Jones was the major show of the main programme on British Photography. Though I was also offered a show in Krakow that never materialised.

I was influenced by both of those two British photographers, as well as others. And one of my major projects was sparked by a single image in A Day Off, of the London May Queen Festival. You can see the results in the preview of my Blurb book London May Queens – and there is a nice selection on Lensculture.

My own tastes in carnival were directed largely towards Notting Hill, which I photographed regularly for around 20 years. You can see some of my pictures from there as well as carnival pictures by of some of my friends on the web site from a show we put on at the Shoreditch Gallery in 2008. But the picture above was from Hastings.

The pictures here are all from my second visit to this carnival in Hastings on 20th August 2005, but there are also some from the previous year on My London Diary. I don’t think I’ve been back since.

More on this and another couple of other carnivals on the August 2005 page of My London Diary, with links to many more pictures.

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.

Carnival Time 2005

Years ago much of my photography was of public events other than protests, partly because there seemed to be fewer protests, or perhaps it was simply harder to find out about when and where they were taking place.

Although social media existed, back in 2005 few groups that were organising protests had began to make much use of it. There were some groups that had web sites on which they published information, and a few wider organisations, particularly Indymedia that had some listings but finding information was still largely a matter of reading printed newsletters and flyposted posters along with lengthy sessions on the web, going through a long list of web sites and searching – and back in 2005 Google had just begun to be the hugely dominant search engine.

But I was also more interested in cultural events, both traditional English events and those that had been brought to us by our migrant communities. And in London many events involved people from all across our now very varied communities, whether their roots were in this country or abroad.

Cultural events change more slowly than political events, and many, particularly religious events tend to follow a set pattern and become less interesting to photograph for me. Though I might still enjoy going, for example, to Notting Hill Carnival after perhaps a dozen times I found I had little new to say. Though it was a knee injury that prevented me from getting there in 2005. I dragged myself painfully to the station, but fell down in agony on the steps and decided it wasn’t a year for dancing and began the painful journey home.

Earlier in the month I’d accompanied fellow photographers to a couple of more traditional English carnivals in Hayling Island and in Hastings, as well as photographing the Shoreditch Festival Parade and the Latino Carnaval del Pueblo in Southwark. The pictures in this post come from those events. That month I also found time to visit Brian Haw and to cover another protest in Parliament Square over new protest laws and one calling for a tax on foreign currency exchange transactions.

Back in 2005, My London Diary was in a slightly less developed state. My comments were still all in lowercase and there are no links to individual events. And although all the pictures on-line are digital colour I also took some pictures in medium format on black and white film.

In 2008 I took part in a show with 3 other photographers, English Carnival, and the web site from this remains on-line. My pictures are a black and white set from Notting Hill in 1990-2001, but those by the others – Paul Baldesare, Dave Trainer and Bob Watkins – are from traditional English events, and include several taken at events I was also photographing.

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.