Horseman’s Sunday, Wallenberg & Car-Free Festivals: Sunday 19th September 2004 was a rather strange day for me with some very varied events across London.
Horseman’s Sunday
Horseman’s Sunday is apparently celebrated at several places in Surrey including Tattenham Corner at Epsom as well as in central London at the Church of St John’s, Hyde Park Crescent,where the The Hyde Park Pony Club met for the occasion.
Despite being ‘Horseman’s Sunday’ there were relatively few men taking part, mainly children and a few women along with the befrocked celebrants. As I noted on My London Diary, “fortunately the rite was Anglican, so everyone left the singing to the choir, avoiding scaring the horses.”
This was a curious example of the different world inhabited by the rich and priveleged in London. I’ve not felt moved to go back to photograph the event since.
Just around the the corner, a small group was remembering one of the heroes of the Second World War, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved perhaps a hundred thousand jews from the Nazi holocaust in Budapest, himself dying in a Russian jail.
There are monuments to him around the world including this one outside the West London Synagogue and close to the Swedish Embassy.
Hackney Mare De Gras Cancelled
I travelled out to Dalston, where I found a notice that the Hackney Mare De Gras Procession had been postponed because of a murder in Mare St.
Shoreditch Car Free Festival
I walked down Kingsland Road to Shoreditch where a festival and car-free day was getting underway, with the London School Of Samba dancing through the streets and other events including the Secretsundaze Sound System.
On the way I took a few pictures including some of the graffiti which by 2004 seemed to be covering most of the walls in Shoreditch.
On Curtain Road people were trying out various different designs of bicycles, particularly recumbents. Though these may be comfortable and efficient I’ve never been attracted to riding at the level of vehicle exhausts and feel the low riding position gives a very restricted view compared to a normal bike, dangerous in city traffic. Perhaps if I lived in a remote area with empty roads I’d try one.
Part of the street was a carpeted area with benches where you could sit and enjoy tea from an anarchist tea bar with a revolutionary tea urn.
The Shoreditch Golf Club was set up for a chess competition, though I didn’t see anyone actually playing chess, and there were various theatrical performances on the street – and of course more graffiti to photograph. I spent some time taking pictures there before tearing myself away to catch the tube from Liverpool St to Leytonstone.
“Leytonstone was also enjoying a car-free day, and one of the highlights there was the Rinky Dink cycle-powered sound system, bringing back memories of April’s march to Aldermaston, where this accompanied us on the last few miles.“
There was more music too, as well as various a childrens’ arts project and entertainment, and a rather unrelated political element from protesters against the Chinese persecution of Falun Gong practitioners.
Thames Day: I probably won’t be going to Thames Day which takes place this year next Sunday 22nd September 2024, organised by the Thames Festival Trust and the City of London Corporation as “An exciting day of free family activities, Thames Day celebrates World Rivers Day and the significance of the river Thames to the nation’s capital city.”
Thames Day is a part of the larger Thames Festival which began in 1997 when it included a high wire walk across the Thames, and until 2012 organised activities on and around the river between Tower Bridge and Westminster Bridge.
“In 2013, Thames Festival was relaunched as Totally Thames, a month-long season of river and river-related events along the whole 43 miles of the River Thames riverfront in London, from Hampton Court Bridge in the west to the Dartford Crossing in the east.”
Back in 2005, it was the London Mayor’s Thames Day and I spent much of Sunday 18th September photographing some of the range of activities taking place, though I left before the fireworks. Here’s what I wrote at the time, along with some pictures from the day.
“Thames day reminds London of its river, and its heritage, as well as providing some free entertainment. Some of the activities that make it up perhaps lack visual interest, and it didn’t help that the day was grey and dull. The flotilla of boats disappointed, although the sight and smell of a coal-fired screw steam tug in the upper pool brought back some memories.
The river police also were obviously having a good day, showing off the fairly impressive speed of their launches, and it was good to see the river looking almost crowded at times.
The barge race seemed rather false, relying more on weight and fitness of a crew rather than the traditional skills of watermen, who often managed such vessels single-handed.
Then there were various performances, including a large and enthusiastic children’s choir in The Scoop, and some Japanese drums and dance.
It livened up the day for lots of Londoners (and tourists) and the fireworks (i didn’t stay for them) will have given them some evening entertainment too.”
Blackpool & Minwear Wood: More holiday snaps. We could have walked to Blackpool from where we were staying in Narberth. Not of course the Blackpool in Lancashire but the very much smaller Blackpool in Pembrokeshire.
It would have been a pleasant walk along country roads and through Carnaston Woods, perhaps 5 or 6 kilometres, but we wanted to go a little beyond Blackpool to Minwear Woods for a walk there, and together with the walk back would have been too much for some of us.
Blackpool isn’t a very large place. It has a bridge, Blackpool Bridge, a large house, Blackpool and Blackpool Mill. One road to nowhere very much, woods around and several footpaths including the Knights Way.
The bridge takes the Knights Way over the Eastern River Cleddau, close to the limit of the tide coming up the river from Milford Haven and at the highest navigable point of the river.
It has an inscription stating it was built around 1830 by Baroness de Rutzen; she was the daughter and heiress to Nathaniel Phillips, the owner of the Slebech estate and of Blackpool Mill. I think it may have been rebuilt then rather than entirely new though it may have replaced a ford a short way upstream.
Mary Dorothea Phillips (1797-1860) had met Charles Frederick (1795-1874), Baron de Rutzen in Rome in 1821 and they were married in 1822 in England. Later they became Lords of the Manors of Slebech, Minwear, Newton, Narberth and Robeston Wathen, and of the Manors or Reeveship of Lampeter Velfrey and Llanddewi Velfrey.
Usually described as German, de Rutzen was born in what is now Latvia and the family had extensive estates in Lithuania and you can read a great deal more about him on Geni.com, including his description of his first meeting with the charming daughter of Mrs Phillips, who was a notable pianist. After the marriage the couple lived in Brighton and London for some years, moving to Slebech Hall after Baroness de Rutzen became joint owner of the estates there as well as in Jamaica in 1830. It was a happy marriage and they had seven children.
There is no sign of a pool on either old maps of Blackpool or the current OS maps, but I think the name may come from a creek of the Cleddau immediately upstream of the bridge. The were some dramatic views of this overgrown area from the track leading to the bridge, but a footpath there was closed as too dangerous to enter.
Blackpool mill was built in 1813 on the site of a wharf and a former ironworks and is a remarkable Grade II* listed building, recently beautifully restored as a “Heritage Dining” restaurant, Black Pool Mill, by the nearby holiday park. We didn’t go inside as we had brought sandwiches which we ate at a picnic table in the woods but the restoration has retained the machinery of the mill virtually intact. Originally powered by a large waterwheel using water from a mill race coming from around a mile up-river, the waterwheel was replaced by more efficient turbine in 1903. The mill race is a feature in front of the mill which is set back from the road.
Minwear Woods are a short distance to the west on the slopes above the river and we walked around the clearly marked trail. Trees obscure any view of the river except at a recently constructed viewpoint just off the trail. A short distance to the west the view from an earlier viewpoint is now completely blocked by trees.
Working Lives – Lower Marsh: Last Saturday, 14th August 2024, was an unusual day for me, which I’ll perhaps write more about in a later post. But I’d finished photographing a protest a little after 1pm, rather earlier than I’d expected and sat down on the riverside path by the Thames at Nine Elms to eat my sandwiches and wondered what to do next.
One of several things that came to mind was the Working Lives Retrospective Photography Exhibition, organised by International Arts and Pedalling Arts, “highlighting points of connection in the working lives of people in Britain and Ukraine from the 1960s to the 1980s” with a set of photographs “from London and Kyiv and Odesa providing fresh insights into street and theatre culture in both cities.”
The show continues until until next Sunday, September 22nd and the Street Photography section of this is located in a series of pictures in shop windows along Lower Marsh, a street close to Waterloo Station. It and features images taken in Lower Marsh in the 1970s and 1980s as well as some from Ukraine. The London pictures include three by me, and others by Paul Carter, Jini Rawlings and from unnamed photographers in the Lambeth Archives.
There is a map on the web site you can download (or pick up at the Walrus) with a list of the names of the 27 shops and offices taking part, mostly with one photograph, but a few with two. And the picture at the bottom of the web page is one of mine.
A few months ago an old friend who lives a few streets away from Lower Marsh had emailed me asking if I had taken any pictures on Lower Marsh, a busy market street back then. I did a search of my albums on Flickr and found a few pictures, mainly from 1992 and sent links to the exhibition organiser. Three were selected for the show and I supplied files for A1 prints to be made.
I’ve been out of London for some time and then busy with other things so I hadn’t found time to see the show. And until I walked onto Lower Marsh I hadn’t realised that one of my pictures was being used as the poster image.
Another part of the show was that the theatre photographs were to be screened on giant screens on a van parked in the street outside Cubana at the east end of the street where most people enter it from 2.30pm – 10.30pm on selected days. Walking towards it from the west in Saturday’s bright sunlight the images were almost invisible, but suddenly I found my poster picture appearing. I walked to the shaded side and everything became clear.
The same picture of a man carrying a rolled up carpet (and a walking stick) on the street also appears on a nicely printed postcards produced for the show which you can buy at the Walrus.
I found the show an interesting way to look at photographs. It’s now a vibrant street with cafés etc, rather different from the old market, but interesting to walk along and search for the pictures. And being spaced out as they are draws your attention to every picture and gives you more time to think about it than in a run on a gallery wall. At one or two places I felt a little uncomfortable when I had to peer at them over people sitting at cafe tables, but I don’t think they minded.
You can also see all square cropped versions of all of the street images on the web site accompanied by short audio clips of memories from English or Ukranian locals. You can also play these on your phone on the street from QR codes on the picture captions.
Save Hospitals & Secular Europe: On Saturday 15th September 2012 almost two thousand people marched from Southall to meet others at a rally in Ealing to save Accident & Emergency Services at their local hospitals. Later I photographed humanists, atheists and others marching in Westminster.
Thousands March to Save Hospitals – Southall
A large crowd had come to Southall Park for the start of a march against the the closure of A&E and other departments at Ealing, Central Middlesex, Charing Cross and Hammersmith hospitals. Another march was going from Acton to the rally in Ealing.
A few days ago Keir Starmer talked about the crisis facing the NHS, and how it will take perhaps eight years to put it on a firmer footing for the future. He and Health Secretary Wes Streeting blamed its current parlous position on the reforms criticised by Lord Darzi as “disastrous” introduced by the coalition government in 2012 and the lack of investment in infrastructure under the Tory-led years of cuts since 2010.
Of course both these things are true, but not the whole picture and they say little that was not said by those working in the NHS and almost every commentator at the time about Andrew Lansley’s controversial Health and Social Care Act which came into force under his successor Jeremy Hunt, as well as lack of proper funding.
But they also leave out the disastrous effects of the many PFI schemes introduced under New Labour which landed the NHS with huge debts and continue to impose severe costs on many hospitals with excessive maintenance and other charges. PFI did provide much needed new hospitals, but did so at the expense of the NHS, transferring the costs away to make government finance look better; avoiding short-term public financing but creating much higher long-term costs.
New Labour also accelerated the privatisation of NHS services, which has of course increased greatly since the Tories came to power. Both parties became enamoured of a move away from the original NHS model to an insurance based system modelled on US Healthcare, a system that leaves many poorer US citizens with inadequate access to healthcare and is responsible for around 62% of the two million annual bankruptcies in the USA when for various reasons people’s insurance does not cover their treatment costs.
We in the UK spend almost a fifth less on health than the EU average, and only around a third of the per person spending in the USA – according to a 2010 article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine comparing the two systems.
We all now have complaints about the level of service provided currently by our overloaded and cash-strapped NHS. Waiting times are sometimes ridiculously long and appointments hard to get. We need a better NHS, and to pay more for a better NHS, one that is better integrated rather than divided by Lansley’s competitive marketing-based model. But I have little confidence that our current government will make the right changes for either the NHS staff or the people.
We also need much better industrial relations, and the efforts by the new Labour government to sort out the disputes with healthcare workers deliberately engineered by the Tories which led to the strikes are encouraging. But many more changes to improve staff morale and retention are necessary. To remove the reliance on agency staff there needs to be an improvement in the treatment of NHS employed staff – and a number of simple measures including the removal of staff parking charges would help. And of course we also need to train more healthcare staff at all levels and in all specialities.
The rally on 15th September 2012 was supported by local councils and local MPs and there were many speakers with years of experience in the NHS who gave short speeches about the effects the closures would have – and the inevitable deaths that would result, particularly from the longer journey times through often highly congested streets to the remaining A&E services. Fortunately most of the politicians were told they would have to wait for the rally at the end of the march to speak. So I missed them as I walked a few hundred yards with the marchers along the main road towards Ealing and the rally, but then left them and walked to the station to take a train into central London.
Around 250 humanists, atheists and others marched from Storey’s Gate, next to Methodist Central Hall and across the road from Westminster Abbey, both in their different ways reminders of the links between the state and states and religion. And I presume the rally venue in Temple Place was chosen for the same reason.
They had come protest against the privileged status of religion and call for a truly secular society with freedom of religion, conscience and speech with equal rights for all in countries across the world, but particularly in Europe.
They demanded a secular Europe with complete separation between church and state and with no special status on grounds of religion, one law for all without execeptions.
The main banner read ‘For Universal Human Rights‘ and marchers chanted slogans including ‘2,4,6,8, Separate church and state‘ and of course ‘What do we want? A Secular Europe. When do we want it? Now‘, as well as stating that Women’s rights (and Gay Rights, Children’s Rights etc) are Human Rights.
But perhaps the most popular chant was one directed in particular against the Catholic Church, ‘Keep your rosaries Off my ovaries.” And at the rally in Temple Place Sue Cox of Survivors Voice, reminded us not just of sexual abuse of children by priests, but also of the continuing failure of the Catholic Church to deal with this, as well as the sinister power that that church still wields in countries including Italy.
As the march arrived at the rally there the London Humanist Choir performed some Monty Python songs before a number of speeches from Peter Tatchell and others. As he said, many people of faith also support both equality and the separation of religion and state, and that “for every bigot there are also people of faith who are with us.”
Trans Pride & Anti-Racist March in Brixton: Five years ago today on Saturday 14th September I photographed the start of London’s first Trans+ Pride march before taking the tube to Brixton for an anti-racist march and rally.
London’s First Trans+ Pride March
Hundreds met at Hyde Park Corner to march along Oxford Street to Soho Square in London’s first Trans+ Pride March, was both a celebration and protest for trans, non-binary, intersex, and gender non-conforming individuals and their family, friends and allies.
They marched to increase the visibility of the trans+ community and to protest against the continuing discrimination in the UK and around the world against trans people.
Many carried placards and posters with messages such as ‘Trans Rights Matter‘ and ‘Trans Rights Are Human Rights’.
There has been increasing transphobia in British media, with trans people being attacked on the streets, and this has continued to grow since 2019.
The charity Stop Hate UK reports that in “2020/2021, 2,630 Hate Crimes against transgender people were recorded by the Police, an increase of 16% from the previous year” though they say the actual number of incidents is much greater as 88% of transgender victims of serious incidents did not report them.
Incidents reported to Stop Hate UK were of “verbal abuse, threatening behaviour, harassment and anti-social behaviour, such as having derogatory terms shouted at them, having invasive or inappropriate questions asked of them or facing harassment from neighbours, co-workers or strangers. “
In 2018 Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists had disrupted the Pride March in London with an anti-Trans protest and there were fears they might try to disrupt this march. There were many feminists supporting trans rights on this march.
I took the tube from Green Park to Brixton where Movement for Justice and Lambeth Unison Black Workers’ Group were protesting against the continuing persecution of Windrush family members and other migrants.
They called for freedom of movement, the closure of immigration detention prisons, and an end to Brexit which is being used to whip up immigrant-bashing and nationalism to establish a Trump-style regime in Britain under Boris Johnson.
I missed the start of the rally in Windrush Square, but heard several of the speakers including Eulalee who has been fighting the Home Office for 16 years to remain in the UK with her family and was wearing a ‘More Blacks! More Dogs! More Irish‘ t-shirt.
People picked up their posters and marched the short distance to busy Brixton Market.
Here they stopped for more speeches, with many shoppers stopping briefly to listen and taking the fliers that were being handed out.
The protest seems to get a very positive reception in the market.
Green MEP for London Scott Ainslie joined the protest to speak about his ‘LDNlovesEU‘ campaign calling for an end to Brexit.
After his speech the protesters picked up their posters and moved on along Electric Avenue,
and turned into Atlantic Road,
They then marched down Brixton Road back to Windrush Square where the protest ended with some brief speeches and photographs.
An Afternoon At The Seaside: Last week I was staying with friends in a holiday cottage in Narberth, Pembrokeshire, and on Sunday 1st September after a late lunch we drove the roughly seven miles down to the coast at Saundersfoot.
Saundersfoot is a small seaside resort a few miles from its much larger neighbour Tenby but despite its size seems to have everything needed for a day at the seaside, including something that seems rare these days, sewage-free bathing, with a good sandy beach that gets cleaned by every high tide. But none of us swam there.
There were at least five coal mines in the area in the nineteenth century, producing some of the finest quality anthracite, with tramways bringing it down to the beach for shipping out. In 1829 Parliament gave permission to the Saundersfoot Railway and Harbour Company for the building of a harbour to export coal and other local goods, bringing in iron ore to produce pig iron.
The mines have long closed but the harbour is still there, now with private moorings, and still used by a few fishermen and for pleasure trips around the bay, as well as the sailing club.
Saundersfoot is also almost on the railway, with a station over a mile to the north bearing its name, but with so few trains to be almost useless. And in winter the trains are often replaced by buses.
We were able to park on the seafront, with just a footpath between us an the beach and decided to walk the short distance to the harbour.
We walked along the pier to the mouth of the harbour, then back to the town where we found a shop selling proper ice cream in a number of interesting flavours.
Then we walked along the other side of the harbour to the harbour mouth. There is another smaller beach to the south of the harbour.
Back in town (or rather large village) we followed the map on the detailed leaflet we had on Saundersfoot to look at its three nineteenth century chapels. The Congregational one is now converted to residential use, the Wesley Methodist still in business and the Baptist had a small notice announcing a temporary closure and inviting people to instead worship with the Methodists.
On our way into the village we had passed the parish church around three-quarters of a mile from the beach but didn’t stop to look at this Grade II* building with a medieval tower.
When we returned to the beach and lent on the promenade railings to look at the beach, now almost all covered by the sea. I took a few last pictures, though it’s now probably regarded as a crime to photograph people – particularly children – enjoying themselves at the seaside.
The previous day we had shared a rail replacement taxi from Carmarthen with a woman who was travelling to visit her daughter in Kilgetty, the next village to Saundersfoot and probably the only person apart from our group in Pembrokeshire that we knew. We found her looking out over the sea from same railing as us and had a short conversation.
Corbyn Victory & Refugees Welcome: Saturday 12th September 2015 was a day of hope when Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership election with a landslide victory, getting more than three times the vote of his nearest rival, Andy Burnham. Several hundred Corbyn supporters met at Speakers’ Corner before the Refugees Welcome march to listen to the results of the Labour Leadership election.
Victory Party for Jeremy Corbyn – Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park,
Tension built as the Deputy Leader results came and then erupted with Jeremy Corbyn’s first round victory.
Corbyn had only been able to stand in the election because some Labour MPs who did not support him were prepared to nominate him so that the Labour left would have a candidate in the ballot and not feel it was rigged against them. They thought he would only get a miserably low percentage of the votes.
According to Wikipedia, the release of opinion polls before the election which showed Corbyn in the lead prompted “high-profile interventions by a number of prominent Labour figures including Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Jack Straw, David Miliband, and Alastair Campbell, among others” who felt Labour with Corbyn as leader would be unelectable.
These interventions almost certainly increased support for Corbyn, and although these and other Labour figures such as Peter Mandelson, along with most of the media and press did their best to try to get rid of Corbyn, including various plots and mass resignations from the Shadow Cabinet, he remained popular in the country.
The 2017 election turned out to be a much closer contest than most had imagined, and it was only due to deliberate sabotage by Labour party officials that Corbyn lost. A leaked report in 2020 which demonstrated this led to the setting up of the Forde report into Labour party factionalism which although it called the earlier report “factional” confirmed many of its suspicions and conclusions – as well as criticising both sides in the party – remained secret until July 2022.
What shocked many of us was the evident relief shown by some leading members of the party as the 2017 election results were coming out that their party had lost. And the witch-hunt against the left in the party continues unabated.
On the 12th September 12th 2015 there was much more media interest in the few hundred celebrating Corbyn’s victory than in the huge Refugees Welcome march which followed, and in the media scrum I got knocked flying and my equipment scattered, but managed to gather it up and continue work.
From Speakers Corner I joined the huge crowd – at least 50,000 – filling Park Lane as far as I could see. This national march was a response to the many reports of refugees fleeing war and persecution, with people wanting to show their support for refugees facing death and hardship and their disgust at the lack of compassion and inadequate response of the British government.
On My London Diary is a list and photographs of some of the speakers before the march set off. I photographed the front of the march as it set up at the southern end of Park Lane and went with it for the first couple of hundred yards into Piccadilly, where I stopped to photograph the rest of the march as it came past.
The marchers were fairly densely packed and spread across the whole of the roadway (and sometimes on to the pavement too) and it took exactly an hour to go past me.
There were many at the protest who were not the usual protesters, people who said this was the first protest they had ever attended, as well as those that I knew from previous protests, and there were many interesting placards and banners to photograph – and many more pictures on My London Diary.
As the end of the march passed me I rushed into Green Park Station and took the tube to Westminster, arriving on Whitehall as it went very noisily past Downing Street.
I ran back to Parliament Square, and this soon filled up with people and banners. I sat down on the wall close to the Churchill statue, realising I was rather tired and hungry.
Many marchers left rather than stay and listen to the speeches, though the square was still crowded and I decided I would leave too.
9/11 Anniversary – EDL & Extremist Muslims: On Saturday 11th September 2010 the extreme right English Defence League marched to the Grosvenor Square memorial to pay their respects to those killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then stopped briefly at the American Embassy before going on to protest at the Saudi Embassy. Later Anjem Choudary and Muslims Against the Crusades came to hold a protest outside the US Embassy and the EDL returned to protest against them.
Around 150 EDL supporters met outside a pub close to Bond Street station to march to the 9/11 memorial in Grosvenor Square and posed there for photographers.
As well as the usual EDL St George’s flags there were also others on display, including one man with both Israeli and Portuguese flags and a Dutch Flag with the name of far-right Islamophobic Dutch politician Geert Wilders. He had been banned from visiting the UK in 2009, but the ban had been overturned on appeal.
One man proudly told the press that he had put a pigs head on a mosque, and later showed us his tattoos.
Another flag combined the US Flag and the Union Jack, with the message ‘Never Forget & Never Surrender‘ and some women carried wreaths which were laid at the memorial in Grosvenor Square with a two-minute silence before the marchers moved on for more photographs at the US Embassy.
The EDL the marched to the Saudi Embassy to show their feelings towards a country that is widely seen to have supported Muslim extremists and terrorist groups, including those involved in 9/11.
Here they burnt a number of black A4 sheets with white Islamic text which apparently included the name of Allah. There were also a number of clearly Islamophobic chants, including a blasphemous declaration of paedophilia.
I returned to the US Embassy where Anjem Choudary had arrived to protest with around a hundred extremist Muslims from Muslims Against Crusades.
They had called for the day to be made ‘International Burn The American Flag Day‘ after Florida pastor Terry Jones had threatened to burn a copy of the Qur’an on the anniversary. The regard the US flag as a symbol of unbelief and of war – military, ideological, social and economic – against the Muslim religion.
As I wrote:
“Muslims Against the Crusades (MAC) is widely seen as a successor to Islam4UK, banned in January 2010 and itself regarded, along with Ahl ul-Sunnah Wa al-Jamma (ASWJ) as a thinly veiled reincarnation of the previously banned al-Muhajiroun. Anjem Choudary, a UK born former solicitor was one of this organisation’s founders, and a leader of Islam4UK, ASWJ and MAC.”
The group, described by the Muslim Council of Britain as “a tiny, and utterly deplorable, extremist group” was finally banned in the UK in 2011. I still wonder why they were allowed to continue for so long.
The US flag they had brought proved to be fairly fireproof, although some paper copies and pictures of Pastor Jones burnt more freely, and with copious quantities of lighter fluid it did eventually melt and burn. I was in the front row of the large group of press surrounding the burning and got uncomfortably warm, though fortunately the wind was blowing the toxic smoke away from me.
Police had earlier led the EDL away towards Green Park Station, but some had managed to return to the US Embassy to protest against the extremist Muslims. At first they protested from behind the hedge to the Grosvenor Square Gardens and police cleared the area after a beer can was thrown into the centre of the MAC protest – fortunately no one was injured.
Police moved the EDL to a pen at a safe distance from the extremist Muslims and they continued their protest, shouting insults. The atmosphere was much more angry than in the morning, and at times there were threats made against the press as well as the MAC.
Police managed, with the assistance of some EDL stewards to keep the two groups apart, although I think there were some arrests. When I left an hour or so after the flag burning, police seemed very much in control, holding the EDL back while the MAC protest was continuing.
Ninety from Narbeth:Narberth (Arbeth to Welsh speakers) was until recently a place I had never hear of, a small town in Pembrokeshire with ancient origins. I spent a week staying there with a small group of friends at the start of September 2024, returning last Saturday.
Narbeth apparently grew up around the palace of a Welsh king and in the great collection of ancient Welsh stories preserved by oral tradition until first written down around 1350, the Mabinogion, is the chief palace of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed. There were ancient camps nearby and the Romans came – and went.
But it was the Normans who, having invaded England in 1066, a few years later turned their attention to Wales and left a great mark on the area, building more than 50 massive castles to invade and occupy the area. Thee wars here were a complex and changing situation and other castles were built by the Welsh to defend their land.
A castle was first built at Narbeth by the Normans around 1116, but rebuilt in stone in the following century. It formed a part of what is now called the Landsker Line, defending the territory they controlled against the Welsh. The castle is now in ruins but open to the public, though the buildings are fenced off for safety reasons.
The Landsker Line divided the largely English-speaking area of south Pembrokeshire, dominated by the Normans from Welsh-speaking Wales, and the area to the south of it was often called ‘Little England’.
Now only around a fifth of the roughly four thousand residents of Narberth are Welsh-speaking. For a town of its size it has a remarkable number of independent shops and particularly at weekends the place is crowded. Ten years ago The Guardian called it “a gastronomic hub for West Wales” and named it as “one of the liveliest, most likeable little towns in the UK.“
I can’t comment on the gastronomy, though I did help to cook some interesting meals for our small group staying there, but it does have a very fine shop making artisanal ice cream with some unusual flavours. And I only visited one of its many pubs, which was a very friendly place, though I just missed the live music there.
As well as more traditional shops, the town also has more than its share of arty shops and some with a hippy or ‘New Age’ vibe. And its certainly a very friendly place compared to suburban London and one of a number of locals we met in a pub shook my hand when I revealed one of my Grandmothers had come from Wales. I’m not surprised that Narberth was “named one of the best places to live in Wales in 2017“
It has an excellent local museum and of course a number of churches and chapels, though some now in other uses. These are among its 70 listed buildings, most of which I think are in the pictures I took, though many of the more interesting are unlisted.
It isn’t far to drive to many other attractions of the area – more castles, mills, the rugged coastal path and more sedate seaside resorts with some fine beaches. Friends took me to some of these but there were many more.
Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Narberth is the railway station, around three-quarters of a mile from the centre of town. On the map the railway seems useful, but in reality there are too few trains to be of much use. The station building is now a joinery though Platform 1 (and only) still stands, with an announcement telling us that this was a request stop, and we should indicate clearly to the driver as the train approached that we wanted to board. Fortunately it did stop when we began our journey home.
All the pictures here are from Narberth town centre, and there are more on Facebook in the album ‘Ninety From Narbeth‘. I’ll make some later posts about some of the places in the area we were able to visit during our holiday.
