Sir Robin Wales | >Re-PHOTO

Big Brew, Childrens’ Carnival & London Bridge: On Saturday July 11th 2009 I’d been commissioned to photograph a bishop at fair trade events in Finchley, then rushed to Newham for a children’s carnival procession. Gettingg back to London Bridge for its 800th birthday celebration was made difficult by the planned closure of both District and Jubilee lines and I only made it minutes before the event ended.

Big Brew

Finchley and Edgware

The Diocese of London had organised a day of ‘Big Brew’ events at Anglican churches across Greater London promoting fairly traded goods, particularly tea and coffee. Fair Trade is a movement and system that ensures the farmers and other workers get a fair return for their work, safe working conditions and ensures that money from their products gets invested into their local communities for healthcare, education and other development opportunities. Both I and my wife had been active supporters of the movement since our student days, long before the Fairtrade certification mark was first introduced in 1988.

I had been persuaded to photograph two events organised by the parish churches in Finchley and Edgware which the Bishop of Edmonton, the Right Revd Peter Wheatley, a strong supporter of the fair trade movement would be attending.

St Mary’s Finchley had tables and chairs on the pavement with tea, coffee and a large assortment of delicious looking cakes. As well as the bishop, Barnet Mayor Councillor Brian Coleman and the leader of the opposition were there too.

But for me the main attraction were the waitresses in caps and aprons and the ‘Mad Hatter’s Tea Party’ performed by children from the Church’s drama group.

Things were a little quieter at St Margaret’s Edgware, where I went on with the Bishop. We met the local MP Gareth Thomas and were offered the chance of ringing the church bells. Or at least they posed for a photograph pretending to ring them. It was very dark and needed a tricky bit of flash.

More pictures on My London Diary: Big Brew

Newham Childrens’ Carnival Procession

East Ham

Newham Carnival seemed rather smaller than when I photographed it in 2007, but it was still a lively procession, with lots of kids having fun. The Mayor, Sir Robin Wales, came and joined in, though I found his performance rather embarrassing.

Keir Hardie was the country’s first Labour MP, elected in West Ham South in 1892. The County Borough of West Ham, now a part of Newham, elected England’s first Labour-controlled council in 1898. And in 2009 every one of its 60 councillors was Labour. Robin Wales became council leader in 1995 and became its elected mayor in 2002. In 2018 he was de-selected as Labour’s mayoral candidate following a bitter dispute inside Newham Labour party and is now a leading member of Reform UK.

Wales seemed very much to regard Newham as a personal fiefdom and used events such as this very much as PR opportunities.

In the Wikipedia article you can read a little – in a very bland fashion about some of the controversies of his reign as local dictator. Under his leadership Newham gained large amounts of high cost private developments but failed to deal with the incredible housing problem in the area – telling people if they couldn’t afford to live in Newham they should move. As his critics said, we want social housing not social cleansing.

I walked some way with the carnival procession, but then took a bus, which was held up even more than usual by the traffic congestion the procession created. Normally I would have taken the District line, but this was closed for engineering work. And at Canning Town, rather than the Jubilee line (also closed) I had to use the much slower Docklands Light Railway, so I arrived rather late for my next event.

Newham Childrens’ Carnival Procession

London Bridge – 800

London Bridge

The Romans had built bridges across the Thames but these wooden structures did not survive. As I wrote (with minor corrections) in 2009:

“It was Peter de Colechurch who decided a stone bridge would be a better bet well over a thousand years after the first bridge, and started building one in 1176. It was a lengthy job, and was only finished 33 years later, and it was also very expensive.

To get back the cost houses were built on the bridge (as well as a chapel in the middle) and it soon became a thriving medieval shopping centre. There was actually very little space left for traffic to get across it, traffic moving in both directions on a 12 foot wide roadway (and in 1722 we got our first Highway Code, with the Lord Mayor laying down that carts coming from Southwark should stick to the west side, and those going south from the City drive on the east.)

*This was part of the roadway across the 1209 London Bridge*

You can get a good idea of its width from going to the church of St Magnus the Martyr, as its entrance porch is the only remaining part of the bridge, and if the church is open you can go inside and view (sometimes through a rather thick haze of incense) a large model of the whole bridge.

That bridge – with pretty well constant repairs and several major disasters – lasted until 1831 when a new bridge designed by John Rennie opened for business, around 100 ft upstream… The current bridge opened in 1971″

London Bridge – 800

Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos

All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.

*Jasmin Stone speaks at rally outside Newham Police station*

Focus E15 Occupy Police Station for Newham Show – Sunday 10th July 2016

*At the street stall outside Newham Town Hall*

It says something about Newham’s elected Mayor from 2012 to 2018 that the major public event in the borough was called The Mayor’s Newham Show. It should of course have been the People’s Newham Show or even just the Newham Show. But Newham was a monolithic Labour fiefdom, ruled by Sir Robin Wales, and the event, paid for by the people, was very much a PR exercise for the Mayor.

*A worker for street homeless in Newham speaks*

Housing action group Focus E15 were ejected from the Mayor’s Newham Show in 2014 when they approached the Mayor with protesting the borough’s housing policies – and Robin Wales was found guilty of a breach of the code of conduct by Newham Standards Committee.

The following year the council ordered private security to stop campaigners handing out leaflets at the show and members of the Focus E15 campaign were very forcibly thrown to the ground and evicted from the park in East Ham where the show is held.

*They march the few yards to the police station*

So in 2016, instead of trying to leaflet inside the Newham Show, the Focus E15 Campaign set up a stall outside Newham Town Hall on Barking Road close to the park and spoke and handed out leaflets to people walking to the show in Central Park. Their campaign began when they faced eviction from the Focus 15 hostel in central Stratford when Newham Council axed the grant and the council attempted to disperse them to private rented properties in cities including Liverpool and Manchester and to Wales.

They refused, demanding to be rehoused within reach of families, friends and facilities they were familiar with, protesting the council’s policy of social cleansing, though various marches, high profile protests and occupations of empty council properties. Their campaign, which included a weekly street stall on Stratford Broadway widened from being a personal campaign into a ‘Housing for All’ campaign against Newham and other councils who are failing in their duty to provide housing for ordinary people across London.

*A woman on her way to Newham Show says everyone should kick the Mayor*

Focus E15 continue to speak out and defend tenants from evictions and get suitable rehousing for those made homeless in Newham, while continuing to attack the council’s failure to provide adequate housing in Newham for long-term residents while hundreds of council homes have been empty for over ten years and the council encourages the building of huge areas of luxury flats for overseas investors and rich newcomers.

*‘Room for Everyone – No Room for Racism’*

Among the many empty properties in Newham was the former police station on the corner of Barking Road opposite the Town Hall on High Street South leading to Central Park. After an hour or so of campaigning from the street stall they moved the short distance to this and four people climbed onto the two balconies with banners while the others held a rally in front of the building.

Police came to look at the protest, and tried to persuade the four on the balconies to come down, telling them they were worried that these were unsafe. There was nothing to suggest there was any risk at all as the building was still in good condition despite being unused. Police who want photographers to move also always lie to us and tell us that it is for our safety – and it almost never is, and sometimes actually results us moving into greater danger.

Almost certainly the people on the balconies were safe for the next twenty years or more – or until the building was demolished, and after they told police they would come down in a short time when the rally ended, the police gave up the pretence and simply watched from the opposite side of the road.

Support for the Focus E15 protest came from the Revolutionary Communist Group, Feminist Library, Boleyn Dev 100, Tower Hamlets Renters and Newham Green Party. Among the speakers at the rally was a woman from East End Sisters Uncut who talked about their occupation of an empty property in Hackney as a community resource in protest against Hackney Council’s housing failures.

In 2015 Newham sent 244 families families out of London, claiming it had no space or money to house them here. The borough then had the largest number of empty properties of any London borough – around 1,318 with a total value of around £470 million. Although Sir Robin Wales has now been replaced as Mayor, Newham’s housing policies are still failing the people, and the police station, last in use around 8 years ago, is still empty and firmly sealed against occupation. The Focus E15 campaign continues.

More at Focus E15 Occupy Police Station.