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St Patrick’s Day – 2008: A parade in Willesden on Monday March 17th 2008 celebrated St Patrick’s Day. I came to it from a protest by the all-Irish environmental and social justice movement Gluaiseacht against the Corrib Gas Project in Mayo outside the Shell Centre, and had to rush away for a protest by Tibetans at the Chinese Embassy.

Brent St Patrick’s Day Parade – Willesden Green

Brent is one of London’s more diverse boroughs and has a large population of Irish and Anglo-Irish residents, particularly in what was sometimes called “County Kilburn“. As a borough it promoted various events to celebrate and unite its different communities, and among them I think was the only London borough to have its own St Patrick’s Day Parade.

Or it did until government cuts in funding to local authorities which hit particularly hard on boroughs like Brent meant it could no longer afford to support these community events.

London does now celebrate St Patrick’s Day with a march and event in Trafalgar Square on the nearest Sunday to the day itself, and I photographed the first of these, promoted by then London Mayor Ken Livingstone in 2002, though I only put a few black and white images on to My London Diary.

But the parade in Brent, though often involving some of the same people and floats was always a more interesting and intimate event, with the large local element giving it greater authenticity and I was sorry to see it go.

Local people came to view the parade, some waiting patiently on the pavement, others spilling out of packed bars drinks in hand as it arrived.

Local schools got involved, with children of all ethnicities becoming involved – and their families coming to watch.

I went to where the march was to start, at an Islamic Centre close to Willesden Green Underground Station, where the streets were most crowded and followed the procession as it made its way to the library in High Road Willesden where there were various musical performances and a bit of a funfair.

St Patrick was there of course, with the Mayor of Brent and others leading the parade. People walked with flags of the Irish counties (or at least the 26 of the 32 that are in the Republic of Ireland.)

I had to rush away shortly after the parade began to cover another protest.

More pictures at Brent St Patrick’s Day Parade.

Irish Protest Brings Pipeline to Shell – Waterloo

All-Irish environmental and social justice movement Gluaiseacht were in London for the weekend, and on St Patrick’s Day itself gathered outside the Shell HQ at Waterloo, bringing with them a very large pipeline.

The protest was over the Corrib Gas Project in Mayo in the north-west of Ireland, which the Irish Government has given at a knock-down price to Shell, Statoil and Marathon. It’s a project estimated to be worth over 50 billion Euros, but the Irish people will hardly benefit from the profits – and Shell gets the largest share.

Even worse the people in Mayo will suffer from the pollution around an inland refinery and a high pressure pipeline that will endanger local communities. Protests in Ireland have led to innocent people being jailed.

More text and many more pictures at Protest Brings Pipeline to Shell.

Tibet Vigil at Chinese Embassy – Portland Place

According to the Chinese Authorities, they “exercised restraint” in dealing with the Lhasa protests, using only non-lethal weapons and only killing 13 innocent civilians. Monday afternoon’s demonstration in Portland Place opposite the Chinese Embassy was timed to coincide with the midnight deadline in Lhasa for protesters to surrender.

After protesting for around an hour on the opposite side of the wide dual carriageway, one man jumped over the barriers and rushed across towards the embassy door waving a Tibetan flag. Others followed and police were unable to stop them.

The stewards from the protest tried to get them to make back and were eventually able to persuade them with some gentle pushing to make back to the central island in the road where the protest continued, with some of the protesters sitting down.

Eventually police reinforcements arrived and after failing to persuade them them to move an officer read out something over a loudspeaker. The protest was too noisy for me to hear it, but I think it was a warning that the protesters would be arrested if they didn’t go back to the pavement. The stewards then persuaded everyone to move back to the pavement to continue their vigil, and I went home.

Tibet Vigil at Chinese Embassy

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Gentrification, Life Jackets & Standing Rock: Three very different protests in London on Monday 19th September 2016

Save Brixton Railway Arches

Gentrification, Life Jackets & Standing Rock - 2016

Network Rail and Lambeth Council want to evict the small local businesses from the Railway arches, some of which have been serving the community for as long as anyone can remember. The sites will be refurbished and the rents trebled, so the new Atlantic Road ‘Village’ will be home to “loads of bland, overpriced, soulless branded shops that nobody wants“. This is clearly another disturbing step in the ongoing gentrification of Brixton being pursued by Lambeth Council.

When railways where built in London in the nineteenth century much of the land they ran across was already occupied by houses, shops and other businesses. Putting the rails on top of long viaducts was a cheaper and much less disruptive way of bringing the railways into the city then putting the lines at or below ground level.

This created long runs of arches below the viaducts as well as bridges over existing roads, and these arches were soon filled largely by small local businesses for which they provided relatively low rent premises. Many of them later became garages and other businesses connected with cars, lorries and taxis, but those in the centre of Brixton where the arches had frontages on Atlantic Road and Brixton Station Road were occupied by a whole range of shops.

Almost all of these were small businesses serving the local community – selling food, clothing, furniture, carpets, general stores, cafes, bars. Some well-known shops had been in the same arch since the 1930s.

Network Rail wanted to evict all these tenants so the arches could be refurbished and then re-let at hugely increased rents to increase their profits by replacing valued local businesses by the kind of bland high-price chains and franchises that have blighted high streets across the country. And Lambeth Council were backing them against a strong local ‘Save Brixton Arches’ campaign.

Few if any of the existing businesses could survive the long gap in trading for the revamping on the arches, and none would be viable at the increased rents. Many of them had decided to fight the evictions despite being threatened that if they legally challenged them they would not be offered leases after refurbishment.

On this Monday Network Rail had been intending to evict another of the traders, Budget Carpets, and people including from the local Green Party and the party’s co-leader Jonathan Bartlett, local Labour councillor Rachel Heywood and Simon Elmer from ASH had come to oppose the eviction. Rachel Heywood, a Labour councillor since 2006, was opposed to this and other policies such as library closures and council estate demolitions being pursued by the right-wing Labour cabinet and in 2018 was banned from the Labour Party for 5 years after it was announced she would stand as an independent.

The protest led to Network Rail postponing the eviction. The protesters then went into Brixton Market for a meeting where traders talked about how they have been bullied and their decision to fight the evictions.

More pictures at Brixton Railway Arches.

Life Jacket ‘graveyard’ – Parliament Square

The International Rescue Commission laid out 2,500 life jackets previously worn by adults and children refugees to cross from Turkey to Greece in Parliament Square as a reminder of the continuing deaths by drowning there.

The protest urged the UK to do more to welcome refugees to the UK and to meet the promises already made, and was criticised by a few bigots on the extreme right. Unfortunately instead the UK government has listened increasingly to the bigots and brought in even more repressive anti-migrant laws while failing to provide safe passages for migrants except for some very limited special cases.

Everyone wearing this lifejackets and those who have arrived in Europe since then in similar circumstances is now a criminal under UK law should they manage to get to this country.

At the protest I met again Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley who I had photographed earlier in Brixton. He told me his tweet about refugees and this life-jacket protest had attracted many extremely racist comments.

Life Jacket ‘graveyard’

London Stands with Standing Rock – US Embassy

Later in the day I went to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square where people attended a non-violent, prayerful act of solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe threatened by the construction of a huge oil pipeline close to their reservation in North Dakota and the Missouri River.

A protest at the pipeline which threatens the water supply of the tribe and 8 million people who live downstream has attracted several thousands from around 120 Native American tribes and their allies around the world and 70 have been arrested at gunpoint.

Although the protest has attracted many journalists who like the protesters have been harassed by police (and some protested) there has been very little press coverage. The pipeline had already resulted in the destruction of several sacred sites.

You can read more about the pipeline on Wikipedia. Legal injunctions on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe were denied. The Obama administration attempted to get some re-routing of the pipeline but one of the first things Trump did on coming to power was to approve its construction. It was completed later in 2017 and put into service. Despite various court rulings since that there had not been proper environmental reviews it remains in operation.

More pictures at London Stands with Standing Rock.

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St Patrick’s Day – 2008