My London Diary | >Re-PHOTO

Christian Aid Trade Justice March to the Treasury – 2006

London, Thursday 14 Sept, 2006

I like to bring back to life many of the posts I wrote in the first six or seven years of My London Diary not just because of their interest and that many of the issues are still very relevant 20 or more years later, but also because as the site developed it became harder and harder to locate things and to find both images and particularly the text I had written about them.

These problems with My London Diary were largely resolved with a redesign of the site for new posts in 2008 which kept pictures and text together and a search facility. I also moved away from the lower case only text which had seemed appropriate when the site began around 2000. Revisiting posts from back then on >Re:PHOTO allows me to reunite text and some of the pictures (with links to the rest) and also to correct the many typos and misspellings from them. So here with these minor corrections is what I wrote back in 2006.

In Mary Harmsworth Park, waiting for the Christian Aid organised March On The Treasury to start I bumped – literally – into the Archbishop Of Canterbury. He looked even more distracted than usual. A couple of minutes later I returned to take his picture. Moving in his direction I took my eye off him for a second, and he vanished, leaving not even a cloud of smoke. Later we were told he had another appointment and so couldn’t stay.

*And the Mad Hatter was having his tea party*

However there were plenty of other people to photograph, perhaps a couple of thousand in all. We were there to march on the Treasury, to demand that the government withhold funding from the International Monetary Fund, because of the unfair economic conditions they impose on countries that want loans. When the IMF insists on free trade in agricultural produce for example, cheap EU subsidised tomatoes from Italy can flood local markets and put the local tomato farmers out of business.

Daleep Mukarjee, Christian Aid’s Director was able to tell us (as most had heard on the radio earlier in the day), that Development minister Hilary Benn had announced that we were holding back £50 million for that reason. It would stretch belief to think that this announcement, coming on the day of this major demo, had no connection with the six-month campaign leading up to it. Of course it is only a first small step in what needs to be done.

Among the other speakers was former Boyzoner Ronan Keating, (since going solo he has an impressive list of top ten singles and albums, though I’ve never knowingly heard any of them.) He gave a decent speech and spoke movingly about his trip to Ghana for Christian Aid.

Then we were on the march, across Lambeth Bridge and up past the Houses Of Parliament to Whitehall, where the two thousand or so of us paused outside Downing Street while a small group went in to deliver an African drum and the Christian Aid petition to Gordon Brown’s door.

*People in the Treasury were listening – But will more action follow?*

The parade came to a halt outside the Treasury Offices in Whitehall Place, with more drumming and speeches. At least some of those inside took a little interest in what was going on, breaking off from their tea break to listen to the speeches.

Many more pictures beginning here on My London Diary.

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Muslim Extremists Call For Sharia Zones – 2011

Muslim Extremists Call For Sharia Zones: On Saturday 30th July 2011 I photographed the march by around 70 men from ‘Muslims Against Crusades’ who marched from Leyton to Walthamstow calling for the setting up of Sharia Controlled Zones in the UK which ‘Islamic rules’ would be enforced by Muslims.

As I stated, “Muslims Against Crusades are a very small extremist fringe Muslim organisation led by Dr Anjem Choudary, a follower of the jailed Omar Bakri and co-founder with him of al-Muhajiroun, banned by the UK in 2005, spokesman for Al Ghurabaa, proscribed in 2006, and former leader of Islam4UK, banned in 2010.”

I go on in my post on My London Diary to briefly examine the other ten or so organisations that were claimed to support the march, all of which were linked to Choudary. They included some set up after al-Muhajiroun disbanded when threatened with a UK ban in 2005, though the actual ban only came in 2010. Muslims Against Crusades were banned shortly after this march in Novermber 2011.

I’d been photographing Choudary, at other extremist Muslim events for some years, and listening to his speeches and like many others had concluded that he was allowed to continue (and perhaps even funded) by our security services as someone who let them easily keep tabs on other Muslim extremists in the UK.

The authorities patience with him finally ran out in 2015 when he was charged with inviting support of Islamic State, a proscribed organisation and sentenced to five years in prison in 2016. Released on licence in 2019, by 2021 he was again involving himself in Muslim extremism.

In 2023, Canada and the US became involved, and he was charged with “membership of a proscribed organisation and directing and encouraging support for a proscribed organisation” and in 2024 he was found guilty of “directing an organisation concerned with the commission of acts of terrorism” and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 28 years.

It seemed to many of us that this trial could have been held in 2010 when the UK government banned Al-Muhajiroun.

Muslims Against Crusades (one of a whole string of organisations set up by Choudary as others were proscribed) had told the press before the event that there would be around a thousand of them on the march, but only around 2 arrived by the time it was due to start, with another 70 or so turning up later – some having had problems in finding Leyton.

Before the event there had been for some weeks “a poster campaign in several East London Boroughs including Waltham Forest, with small posters being stuck on bus stops and lamp posts declaring the area a ‘Sharia Controlled Zone’

These stickers stated that the area was now under ‘Islamic rules’ and that these prohibited drinking alcohol, drug taking, smoking, prostitution, gambling, musics, concerts and pornography.” Of course

A picture showing one of these became one of my most pirated images, published without permission or payment on right-wing extremist web sites around the world as if these zones every really existed. Unfortunately although I was able to get a few taken down by Internet Service Providers they simply appeared again on other hosts; getting payment for my work proved financially unfeasible.

A speech by Choudary before the march made clear that Law in these Sharia zones would be enforced by the kind of cleric-led officers and vigilantes that we see in countries such as Iran, although he did not make clear if we could expect to see stoning, hanging and amputations.

The march was through an area with a high Muslim population and many stopped to watch it, though I saw no expressions of support. As one shopkeeper told me, activities such as this give Muslims a bad name.

*Police kept some who wanted to protest against the march shut in a pub*

There were a couple of places where a few right-wing extremists had come to oppose the march though many had followed the advice on most right-wing web forums to ignore it. Police kept them away from the marchers and I saw no incidents.

*Bill Baker of the English Nationalist Alliance*

Police did allow a few members of the English Nationalist Alliance to protest on the opposite side of the street as the march reached central Walthamstow and I went across to photograph them and talk with their leader Bill Baker who was holding several placards. He asked me to make clear that they are not an anti-Muslim organisation but simply opposed to the kind of Muslim extremism represented by Choudary, and proposals to bring Shariah law to Britain.

Again, more about them on My London Diary, where I quote one of their placards:

Sex, Drugs, Beer & Rock and Roll, it’s our Western way of life, so get over it or leave, simple as that.

As I commented, ” I’d prefer to leave off those last five words and simply call for toleration.”

The march ended with a lot of shouting between the two groups, but was generally peaceful, and I think the few scuffles at the rally involved young Muslims objecting to the extremists.

You can read more and see many more pictures in the much longer account on My London Diary: Muslim Extremists March For Sharia Zones

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Rhubarb-Rhubarb 2007

Rhubarb-Rhubarb: In July 2007 I was a reviewer at the photography portfolio review festival Rhubarb-Rhubarb in Birmingham, then one of top four or five such events around the world.

The event, based on the first this type of event, FotoFest in Houston, Texas which had been founded in 1986, had begun in Birmingham as a portfolio day as a part of a ‘Seeing the Light‘ festival for photographers in 1997, named after photographer and educator Rhonda Wilson‘s 1993 book ‘Seeing The Light: The Photographers’ Guide to Enterprise‘.

Following the success of this review, Wilson went on in 1998 to organise the annual 3-day Rhubarb-Rhubarb International Festival in Birmingham which drew photographers from around the world to have their portfolios reviewed by a mixture of well-known photographers, educators, magazine editors, photography critics and others. And in 2007, me. And although I wasn’t going there to take photographs I did wear my Leica M8 with a 35mm f1.4 lens and couldn’t resist taking a few snaps.

The 2007 event attracted many mainly young photographers, including some who have gone on to be very successful in the photography world. I was invited to take part as a reviewer as for around seven years I had built up one of the largest and most followed photography sites on the web as ‘Photography Guide’ on one of the many micro-sites of About.com. On it I had tried hard to write about many well-known photographers and to write about photography in countries around the world.

Unfortunately although my work on About.com received many positive responses from photographers and collectors around the world – and some of my words were widely pirated on gallery sites and helped earn many students their degrees, the whole of About.com had recently been taken over by the New York Times, which saw it simply as a way to make a quick buck to finance their other activities. My micro-site had been a part of the fifth largest site on the web but a few years later the whole site had essentially disappeared.

Until then I had worked with great and supportive editors. My new editors didn’t like what I was doing. They didn’t want any serious writing about photography and had no interest in anything that was happening outside the USA. They wanted short easy pieces which would appeal to a wide American audience – taking pictures of your family, babies, Thanksgiving, July 4th etc – and more importantly to US advertisers. Readers in Australia, Bangladesh, Chile, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Honduras, India, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Mexico, Norway etc – and I had them in many other countries too – were of zero interest to them.

I fought with them for around seven months, making some small concessions but continuing to try to write – as I had been engaged to do in 1999 – for serious photographers, collectors and people with a real interest in the medium, while also providing some of the things the editors demanded. But by the time I arrived at Rhubarb-Rhubarb I was just out of a job.

I’d started Re>PHOTO a few months earlier, anticipating my sacking, largely as a site on which I could publish my thoughts on photography when I was no longer writing for money, though over the years it has slowly changed into being a site almost entirely about my own past work.

*Barry Lewis set up his white tent and photographed people*

Almost immediately I returned from Rhubarb-Rhubarb I posted a short piece on it, ‘Rhubarb Rhubarb: Three Canons‘, the title and structure referring to a short text with 3 pictures by Minor White. My ‘Three Canons for Reviewees’ based on my experience as a reviewer are perhaps worth repeating:

Three Canons for Reviewees

Be still, let your work speak and your reviewer think. Say only what is necessary.

When making your pictures think for yourself; when preparing to present your work, think of your audience.

Erase the word memory from your memory, your statements, your discourse. Let your work be memory, if so, then no one will need to be reminded.

*Curzon St Station, Birmingham’s first station for trains to London, viewed from the London train*

Rhubarb-Rhubarb in 2007 was held in the former Curzon Street station in Birmingham, a fine building which was Birmingham’s first railway station in 1838, but closed in 1966. It may open again around 2038 as the terminus of the ridiculously over-budget and emasculated to pointlessness HS2 line from Old Oak Common.

At the end of my 2007 >Re:PHOTO post I promised to write about some of the photographers whose work I reviewed – and I did. You can find more about them and Rhubarb-Rhubarb 2007 in August 2007 posts on >Re:PHOTO.

The last Rhubarb-Rhubarb was in 2009 and was the largest and most successful of them all, but the recession and the withdrawal of Arts Council funding put an end to them. Sadly Rhonda Wilson died in 2014 having been ill for several years.

You can read more about the 2007 event with many more of my pictures at Rhubarb-Rhubarb.

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Beltane Bash – Pagan Pride 2005

Bloomsbury, London

Beltane was an ancient Gaelic Festival to mark the beginning of Summer and was celebrated in Ireland and Scotland on May 1st, but the whole month of May was the month of Beltane, and this London celebration on Sunday 29 May 2005 took place on the last Sunday of Beltane.

It was when cattle were taken to higher Summer pastures and various fires and rituals were performed “to protect cattle, people and crops, and to encourage growth.” There was also a great deal of feasting and merry-making.

Beltane was still celebrated in many places in the Victorian era and attracted the attention of folklorists recording its dying practices. But the mid twentieth century saw its revival in cultural festivals in some towns including in the Gaelic diaspora.

Celebrations have also been revived in Neopaganist events such as this annual event in London which I photographed most years from 2004 to 2010, but there are other celebrations in various venues across the country and wider, mainly around the start of May.

I’m unsure if the Pagan Pride Parade still takes place in London. The first was in 1998 and there was a parade in London in 2019, but I don’t know if there have been more since Covid.

Here’s the text I wrote in 2005 – and a link to more pictures from the day:

Beltane Bash – Pagan Pride

Bloomsbury

The Beltane Bash takes place annually in London during late May, and is a gathering of “pagans of all traditions, whether they be witches, wiccans, druids, odinists, asatru, shamans and Egyptian traditions” to celebrate the changing seasons of the year.

The event starts with a Pagan Pride Parade around Bloomsbury, with a dance and a certain amount of splashing around the fountain in the middle of Russell Square. The fountains have a number of jets which rise and fall, and some play is made of this in the proceedings.

The procession, led by the Green Lady, includes the Jack In The Green – a dancing bush – along with a whole band of Green Men, the Bogie drummers, Giants including Herne, Lord of the Forests, the Ravens and much more.

Beltane Bash is also a fund-raising event, helping to ensure the future of an area of 25 acres of ancient woodland, Raven’s Wood, near Tring in Buckinghamshire.

There are more pictures on My London Diary on most May pages from 2004 to 2010. Those from 2005 start here.

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Christian Aid Sponsored Walk – London Churches – 2007

Christian Aid Sponsored Walk – London Churches: Soon after we moved to our present address in 1974, Linda took over as Christian Aid organiser for the area, only retiring from this in recent months. Over the years she has gone on a number of sponsored walks for them and some related organisations as well as organising some in our area.

I’ve often walked with her on these, as well as sometimes sponsoring her, largely to keep her company, but sometimes to make sure she didn’t get lost despite the clear maps given to walkers and the large numbers of people following the walks. But also because the routes took you to and past some interesting places and sometimes into churches or areas of them seldom open to the public.

Although I have had a great interest in architecture I’ve never had a great interest in photographing church interiors, partly because they have been so much photographed by others, and the photographs I made on these walks were very much pictures on my days off. Often I carried very little equipment, though Sunday 20 May, 2007 was something of an exception as together with my Nikon D200 I had Nikon wide and telephoto zooms and a fisheye.

On My London Diary you can see over a hundred pictures I made on the walk, some of very well known and much photographed parts of the City of London, others less so. There are captions identifying most on those pages, but here I’ll post them without them – and just a couple of clues to the more difficult.

*The plaque marks where Dositey Obradovich, first Serbian Minister of Education lived in London in 1784*

*The bird a pelican, though to me it looked like a swan.*

If you can name all these I’ve posted above, you must surely be a certified London Green Badge Guide – and I think anything over half shows a fairly intimate knowledge of the City. I think all the answers are in my post on My London Diary at Christian Aid walk – London churches.

And finally, one I can’t remember where I found it – perhaps someone can tell me in a comment.

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Rain Hit May Queen Festival – 2010

Rain Hit May Queen Festival: Saturday 8th May 2010 was a day of cold rain in southeast London, and the organisers of the London May Queen Festival had to abandon the usual procession by several hundred girls around the village of Hayes.

Instead the ceremonies went on in a crowded Hayes Village Hall, though there was room only for the London May Queen’s retinue, the 26 realm queens and small groups of their attendants, along with their family members. I’d photographed a number of previous events had been invited by one of the mothers to come and take photographs.

Photography was a little of a challenge as the light was fairly low and rather mixed, with cloudy daylight coming through the windows of the hall and long fluorescent tubes coming down from the roof of the hall. Though I did take some pictures by available light, the great majority of these were made using flash as the main source. Fortunately the Nikon SB-800 Speedlight with its i-TTL through the lens metering was an incredible advance on older flash systems and performed (with a little help from me) admirably.

Because we were packed into the hall, most of the time I was working very close to at least some of the people I was photographing and using my Nikon wide-angle zoom. This creates problems with uneven lighting – a person 1 metre away from the flash will receive 9 times the light of someone 3 metres away.

The main hall didn’t have a ceiling I could use to bounce light from (I could in some side rooms), but I did have a small diffuser and sometimes was able to angle the flash away from the near subject to give greater illumination on people further away. Edge fall-off from flash is normally a problem in wide-angle pictures, but sometimes you can put it to use.

Nowadays it is far easier to apply some compensation for uneven lighting in post-processing, but then it was still rather tedious and I don’t think I did so on any of these. As usual I took all pictures as RAW images, adjusting them in software (Lightroom) for contrast, colour balance and exposure. I think all are uncropped; it isn’t a religion for me, but I do like to get things framed right when I expose.

In my account on My London Diary for 2010 at Merrie England & London May Queen I give a fairly detailed description of the day. You can find out more about the history of the event and the texts of the event in earlier posts (or in the preview of my book London’s May Queens) and pictures of the event as it took place in fine weather in other years including 2005 elsewhere on this site.

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Return to Hull – 2017

Return to Hull: Monday 20th February 2017 was the last day of a short visit to Hull, the city where my wife was born and grew up, and where I made my first sustained photographic project.

As I wrote in 2017, “I was trying to visit as many of the locations where I had photographed back in the 1970s and 80s for the show and the book ‘Still Occupied – A View of Hull’ and which I’m currently putting on the ‘Hull Photos’ web site, a day at a time throughout Hull’s year as UK City of Culture.“

You can still see those photographs on my Hull Photos site, though there are now larger versions and more pictures in my Flickr albums – links at the end of this post.

In 2017 didn’t want to do a straightforward “then and now“. My earlier pictures were not simple topography but a more personal view of the city, and both it and I had changed in the 45 or more years and I was determined to look at things differently – and with different photographic parameters.

While I had then photographed mainly in black and white and with only a moderately wide 35mm shift lens, in 2017 all of my pictures were in colour and my main interest was in the much wider scope of a roughly 140 degree panorama rendered with a cylindrical perspective which I had been using for some years in my personal urban landscape projects.

I’ll post here under the various headings in my 2017 posts for the day on My London Diary. Here I’ll just post pictures but you can read much more on the links to that site I give for each section.

Gipsyville

Text and more pictures at Gipsyville.

Hessle Rd

Although I took quite a few pictures I didn’t stop to make any panoramic images in this area.

Text and more pictures at Hessle Rd.

St Andrew’s Dock

Text and more pictures at St Andrew’s Dock.

Ropery St & St Mark’s Square

Text and more pictures at Ropery St & St Mark’s Square.

City Centre & Beverley Rd

Text and more pictures at City Centre & Beverley Rd.

Sculcoates & River Hull

Text and more pictures at Sculcoates & River Hull.

We went on to visit some exhibitions and it was soon time for dinner, but our day had not ended and afterwards we walked into the Old Town and to the Humber Street Gallery where I took this picture looking over the rooftops to Holy Trinity.

Many of my older pictures from Hull are now in two of my albums on Flickr:

Hull Black and white
Hull Colour 1972-2000

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Bubbles, Hula Hoops, Hugs & Venus – 2011

Bubbles, Hula Hoops, Hugs & Venus: The 8th Reclaim Love Valentine Party on Saturday 12th February 2011 was a little different from usual, but like the others called for universal love and peace and opposed the incredible commercialisation of St Valentines Day.

This year 2026, there are plans for another Reclaim Love:-
“You are invited to join us on Saturday February 14th (St. V. Day!) at 2:30pm for a 3:33pm LOVE CIRCLE by Eros in London’s Piccadilly Circus.
YES! It’s back! RECLAIM LOVE!…”

I hope it goes well – and hope to be there.

Before the 2011 party I had photographed a celebration of the success of the Egyptian Revolution in removing President Mubarek. Unfortunately things have not gone well for Egypt in the years since that euphoric moment.

Reclaim Love Pavement Party

Piccadilly Circus & Green Park

Bubbles, Hula Hoops, Hugs & Venus - 2011 — *Reclaim love presents an alternative to the commercial messages about Valentines day on the hoardings in Piccadilly Circus, watched by Eros and a helicopter far above.*

This was the 8th Annual Reclaim Love Pavement Party, organised by Venus “to celebrate the Greatest thing on Earth and the Greatest thing we have inside…Yes, Love!!!” It almost didn’t happen, but Irish poet and love activist Venus CuMara had been persuaded by many who had come to previous events to arrange another despite feeling she needed to rest. But her incredible energy and spirit shows in the many pictures I made of her at the event.

But Piccadilly Circus where the event was normally held was being reorganised and although the persuasive charms of Venus managed to get the workmen to tidy up the area to make it possible to meet there, holding the great circle which is the climax of the event was impossible.

Instead Venus led the group to a circle of 13 tall plane trees in Green Park for the event, where carefully avoiding the daffodils in the grass the circle was formed.

*Venus says it’s time to go to a very special place*

As well as this giant circle in London there were others forming to chant the same mantra “May All The Beings In All The Worlds Be Happy And At Peace” for around five minutes at the same time, 3.30pm UTC.

In 2010 there had been 7 circles in Ireland, 6 others in England, in Scotland, Wales, Pakistan, 2 in India, 4 in Spain, 2 in Italy, 3 in Germany, Austria, Iceland, France, Brazil, Argentina, 2 in New Zealand, 5 in the USA, Canada and Australia. And in 2011 for the first time there was to be one in Egypt.

After this as people began to party and dance in the centre of the tree circle – carefully avoiding the growing daffodils – two vans full of police drove up. Venus rushed to talk to them and explain what was happening and was told the the event was contravening a number of the bylaws of the Royal Parks, and it did not have the permissions needed.

Eventually Venus managed to convince the police the event was harmless and promised we would all leave the park by 4pm, and the police went away. I heard the officer who had been talking with Venus say to his colleagues: “I really thought I was in a parallel universe there” and indeed he had been.

And we did all leave, returning to continue to party around ‘Eros’ (Yes pedants, I know!). I was sorry to leave after after around half an hour, but the party apparently went on until late.

You can read a much fuller account of the event I wrote in 2011 on My London Diary, where of course there are many more pictures.

Reclaim Love Pavement Party

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Cleaners Protest at Tower of London – 2012

Cleaners Protest at Tower of London: On Saturday 3rd November 2012 the trade union Industrial Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) held a high profile protest outside the Tower of London as a part of their campaign to get the London Living Wage, better contracts and improved working condition and management for the workers who clean the Tower, one of London’s major tourist attractions.

The Tower of London is run by a charity, ‘Historic Royal Palaces’, which also runs other royal palaces on behalf of the Crown, but they employ no cleaners. Instead they were using the cleaning contractor MITIE to employ the workers who clean the Tower and make it fit for visitors. By outsourcing the work in this way they try to deny responsibility for the poverty wages, lousy pensions, holidays and sick pay, poor physical conditions, overworking and bad management of their workers.

The IWGB was formed by Latin American cleaners organising for better working conditions earlier in 2012 after they had become disillusioned with the lack of support for lower paid workers by some of our traditional unions as “a worker led union organising the unorganised, the abandoned and the betrayed.”

It remains a powerful grass-roots trade union, based on building workers’ power and developing leadership by its members, taking action through strikes, powerful protests and legal actions and developing solidarity across cultural and language barriers.

The union has developed significantly since 2012 and has had many victories in its campaigns to improve the conditions of low paid workers. It now “organises couriers, cycling instructors, charity workers, yoga teachers, cleaners, security officers, video game workers, nannies, university workers, foster carers, private hire drivers and more.”

I reported on many of the protests by the IWGB and other grass-roots unions including the United Voices of the World (UVW) over the years – and you can see many of my reports on My London Diary. There had been a number of protests by cleaners before these unions were formed, but they brought a new level of activity and creativity to the protests.

The campaign for a London Living Wage was started by London Citizens in 2001 and recognises the extra costs of living in the city – something that had long been recognised in professions such as teaching, where teachers in Greater London received a London allowance. The London Living Wage level is calculated independently and supported by successive Mayors of London, but companies are not obliged to pay the extra amount above the National Minimum Wage (rebranded the National Living Wage for those over 21 a few years ago.)

As I wrote in 2012, the London Living Wage “still meets with bitter opposition from some of the most profitable companies around who are low pay employers, including MITIE, who last year increased their profit margins to 5.6% and had a pre-tax profit of £104.5m.”

The IWGB’s campaign as I also wrote, is “not only about wages, but also about civil rights, dignity and respect. MITIE seems to be treating its workers and employment law with contempt. The cleaners demand justice and fair treatment, and say they are treated as medieval serfs. They are asking for:

• the London Living Wage of £8.30 per hour
• proper contracts which reflect the actual hours of work and provide
    holidays and other normal employment benefits
• adequate staffing levels to cope with the workload
• proper changing and washing facilities
• proper Health & Safety training for managers and workers, and risk
    assessments of tasks
• proper safety equipment including protective gloves etc"

MITIE’s response to the campaign was simply “to ban the IWGB. Senior HR Manager Kevin Watson-Griffin stated ‘IWGB representatives will not be permitted access to any MITIE site, including the Tower of London, Barbican etc. to support the IWGB members who are employed by MITIE.'”

*After an hour or so of noisy protest it was time to go – but with the message “***We’ll be back**“

On My London Diary you can read more about the protest at the Tower, including what actually happened at this very public, very visible and very noisy protest which received considerable support from trade unionists from other unions involved with cleaners including the PCS, RMT and Unison. I also wrote about some of the speakers and their speeches and the photographs include most of them including journalist Owen Jones.

More on My London Diary at Cleaners Protest at Tower.

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Mare De Gras & Choose Life – 2004

Mare De Gras & Choose Life: On Sunday 10 October 2004 I photographed two very different events on the Streets of London, a carnival in Hackney and and ant-abortion march. Perhaps the only thing they had in common was that both were misnamed.

Hackney Mare de Gras

Dalston, Hackney

Mare de Gras – Fat Tuesday – is a season celebrated in New Orleans as carnival season, from 12th Night at the end of Christmas on January 6 to Fat Tuesday itself, Shrove Tuesday, the day before the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday, 40 days before Easter. In England our celebrations are rather shorter and involve pancakes and pancake races.

But in Hackney it was the name adopted for the carnival which began there when some residents decided it would be a good thing for them to have a carnival like Notting Hill, and since the main street is Mare Street it seemed a good name, even though it took place in September.

It wasn’t the first carnival in Hackney – there is a tradition of English carnivals dating back mainly to the late 19th century, held in many towns and villages across the country, though most have now died out. Two of my friends got Arts Council money to document some of them – and I showed work from Notting Hill with them in a show, English Carnival, in 2008. Others are still going strong particularly in the West Country. Hackney had its carnivals way back around the 1900s but I don’t think they lasted too long.

Those traditional carnivals had one thing in common – “they received no core public funding. Many were almost entirely organised by volunteers; most also raised money for charities.”

For the show I wrote: “Carnival in England has been enlivened over the last forty or so years by the Caribbean influence, and West-Indian style carnivals have received considerable funding and become a popular celebration of our multi-cultural society within the larger metropolitan areas of the country, joined in recent years by Latin American, Asian and Central European communities.”

The revival of carnival in Hackney is thought to have started as the Street Carnival Theatre in De Beauvoir, organised by Centerprise, in 1973. Later came a new Hackney Carnival – Mare De Gras – bringing together many of the carnival groups that had their roots in Caribbean culture and had begun in the 1970s, 80s and 90s taking part in the Notting Hill Carnival.

In 2004, Mare De Gras in late September was cancelled after 16-year old A level student Robert Levy was killed on Mare Street, stabbed after he had tried to keep the peace in a fight between boys close to his home, and the event was rearranged for the 10th October.

Hackney Carnival continued in later years, though the name Mare De Gras was dropped soon after 2005. In 2024 there was a parade, but for 2025 there were only a number of activities and no real carnival.

More pictures from Mare De Gras.

Choose Life March

Westminster to Lambeth

I left the carnival in Hackney soon after the parade began to photograph a much more somber event, the Chose Life March opposing abortion. Again its name seems misleading to me – opposition to abortion is not about choosing life, and as I commented in 2004, “the misuse of language in using slogans such as ‘Choose Life’ disturbs me greatly, as an attempt to preempt rational thought.“

*One of the few parts of the march that did not seem lacking in life*

I also wrote “Nature is profligate, full of false starts, and life cannot sensibly be considered to begin at conception” which I suspect is a quote but cannot find the source.

Many other Christians and other religions do not accept the Catholic teaching on abortion but take more sensible and more scientifically bases views. But “this doesn’t mean we should take abortion lightly or allow scientists to play as they like with human genetic material. ” And of course our laws do have important safeguards on abortion and the use of human material in research.

More pictures, including a couple of Brian Haw and one of the River Thames as the march passed them on My London Diary.

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