Soho Pride – 1st August 2004: Soho Pride was a festival celebrated in the streets around Old Compton Street from 2003-2008, a separate event from the annual London Pride parade which now takes over the whole area for after-parties on the day of the parade. You can read a little more about it # on the Historic England web site which has a “Self-Guided Virtual Heritage Walking Tour” 130 Years of Queer Soho (or thereabouts) which includes Soho Pride.
I paid the first Soho Pride a brief visit in 2003 on my way home from a busy 5th July after covering a protest calling for legal recognition of British Sign Language and the Somerstown Festival Of Cultures. There are just a few pictures of Soho and Soho Pride 2003 on My London Diary.
I spent rather longer at Soho Pride 2004, and here is what I wrote it on My London Diary – and all the pictures in this post come from the 2004 festival.
The first Soho Pride held last year was a great success, and this year's event followed the same pattern. Street closures, restaurant tables in the roadway, DJs and loud sounds, people out to eat, drink, dance and generally have a good time.
Even in mid-afternoon, the streets were beginning to get really packed, especially outside the more popular gay bars and around the club DJs.
Really it was one big party, and a party that catered for almost all tastes except in music, which was uniformly relentless club beats. Perhaps a pity that the Jazz On The Streets events had beat a retreat to Carnaby Street (surely forty years behind us with flower power.)
After a while I began to feel my age, and escaped to the Underground and home for a quiet and leisurely alfresco dinner with a few glasses of white wine.
Keep our NHS Public: Saturday 3rd March 2007 saw protests around the country against the increasing privatisation of the National Health Service and I managed to cover several of these events in London, a march in Camberwell followed by a march from Whitechapel to Hackney Town Hall where they joined others who had marched in Hackney. After finishing my coverage of these events I photographed the Hare Krishna in Soho and then went to the Photographers Gallery.
The march on its way to the Maudsley Hospital
Here I’ll publish what I wrote back then on My London Diary with the usual corrections to spelling and capitalisation. Reading what I wrote below again now I think I was far too generous to New Labour. Although some MPs may have been well-intentioned I think the policies were largely driven by those with personal financial interests in private healthcare and other sectors that would profit from them. The NHS (and us) are still suffering from their actions and I have little confidence in the changes the current Labour government is now making.
Keep our NHS Public – Saturday 3rd March 2007
Local MP Kate Hooey gave her support to keeping the NHS public
Although health workers and other trade unionists had called for a national demonstration in London, the union bosses declined to organise one, perhaps not wanting to embarrass an already beleaguered Labour government. What took place instead was a whole series of local demonstrations – including at least 7 in the Greater London area – across the whole country.
The overall effect was perhaps to make it more impressive, and certainly it seemed to get more coverage in the media that might otherwise have been expected, although there were few reporters and no TV crews at the three events I photographed (for some reason they preferred Sheffield.)
Largely well-intentioned attempts to improve the health service have failed to deliver as they should, with many services being cut. Part of this has been caused by a dogmatic insistence on making use of private finance with results that range from fiasco to farce, inevitably accompanied by long-term financial loss.
A second disastrous dogma has led to bringing in private enterprise to do the simple work at artificially inflated prices (they even get paid for work they are not doing) which has the secondary result of making the NHS services appear more expensive, as they are left to deal with the trickier cases.
Kate Hooey holds the main banner with others on the Camberwell march
Further blows to our national health service have been through the predictably disastrous IT projects; as well as going millions over budget, these have largely failed to deliver. Add the proliferation of management and expensive consultants, along with crazed assumptions in negotiating doctors’ pay leading to an unbelievably generous offer, and it it hardly surprising that the whole system is in financial chaos.
The government clearly lacks a real commitment to the kind of National Health Service many of us grew up with, run for the benefit of the people rather than to make money for healthcare corporations. The health service certainly needed a shake-up to reduce bureaucracy and eliminate wasteful practices, but instead new layers of both have and are being added.
Outside the Maudsley Hospital – reading the letter which a delegation then delivered
I started off in Camberwell, and had time for a short walk before the speeches and march began. It wasn’t a huge event, but there was strong support from those in the service, from patients and from pensioners, as well as local MP Kate Hooey. From Camberwell Green the march went down to the Maudsley Hosptial where a letter was handed in and I got on a bus and left for Bethnal Green and Hackney.
Going up the Cambridge Heath Road in the centre of Bethnal Green, I saw the march from the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel to Hackney in the distance. Unfortunately the bus was held up in the traffic behind it, taking almost five minutes to reach the next stop before the driver would open the doors and let me off. Some things were a lot easier with the Routemasters.
This was a smaller march than that from Camberwell, and after a few minutes I felt I’d photographed all I could, so I ran ahead and caught a bus for the centre of Hackney, arriving there just a couple of minutes before the Hackney march, which had come from Homerton Hospital, had returned to the town hall. I photographed them arriving and then the rally that ensued.
The Hackney march was a little larger, perhaps around two hundred, and there were quite a few speakers, including local councillors and representatives from the various organisations that had helped to organise the march.
A big cheer went up as the march from Whitechapel arrived, swelling the numbers in the square at the town hall.
Lindsey German who lives in Hackney
Among the better known speakers taking part were George Galloway, whose speech lived up to his usual high standards of wit and common sense. Lindsay German, a hackney resident well known for her work for ‘Stop The War’ also spoke with feeling on the issues of health and the NHS. Several of the other speakers were old enough to have known the problems before the health service was set up.
As the meeting began to wind down, I caught a bus to Bethnal Green and then the tube to Tottenham Court Road. Just to the north of Soho Square I got to the Hare Krishna Temple just as the annual Gaura Purnima [Golden Full Moon] procession was arriving back from its tour around the area.
Churchill and an entrance to a stairway with a red light
From there I went to the Photographers’ Gallery to have a good look at this year’s photography prize contestants. I hope the prize goes to one of the two photographers on the shortlist, Philippe Chance or Anders Petersen. [Neither won.] Walking through Soho and Westminster I took a few more pictures.
Chinese New Year – Soho: On Sunday 13th February 2005 I went to Soho to photograph the Chinese New Year Parade and festivities in Soho’s Chinatown. It wasn’t quite the last time I photographed the event, but was the last time I tried to cover it seriously – the following couple of years I did go and take a few pictures in Soho, but 20 years ago this was my last major coverage, and the piece I wrote for My London Diary explains why.
Like all of my posts at the time it was published without capitals and separated from the pictures which accompanied it, making it rather less accessible. It had made some kind of sense when I started the site around 2000, but as I began to put longer articles and more pictures on line the site was in need of a redesign, which I finally got around to in 2007-8.
Ken Livingstone, the leader of the Greater London Council from 1981 until its spiteful abolition by Margaret Thatcher in 1986 leaving London without effective overall government for 14 lost years had beaten the Labour Party and the Tories to become Greater London’s first Mayor, running as an Independent in 2000, and London began to come together again.
The Year of the Rooster – Chinese man on bicycle with rooster
The success of his first term in office led to him being adopted as Labour candidate for the 2004 Mayoral election. Despite his opposition in many areas – notably the Iraq war – to New Labour, the party knew they could not beat him, and he had had another successful term for London.
But by the end of the term some of his policies had become unpopular among many and a highly successful campaign for Boris Johnson – complete with false allegations and misinformation – led to his defeat in 2008. Standing again for Labour against Johnson in 2012 he lost again, defeated largely by media bias and false claims by the Johnson campaign that he was guilty of tax evasion and by some Jewish Labour supporters of antisemitism following some careless remarks.
Livingstone put much effort into bringing London’s varied ethnic groups together, giving official support – as he had in the GLC – to anti-racism policies and various cultural events. By pedestrianising the North Terrace of Trafalgar Square in 2003 he revived the space for Londoners to celebrate diverse cultural events including St Patrick’s Day and the Chinese New Year. But this also changed the nature of these celebrations.
Here is the piece I wrote in 2005 – with the usual corrections.
Chinese New Year – Soho,
Sunday 13th February 2005 London was celebrating the Chinese New Year Of The Rooster which started the previous Wednesday. Happy 4702 to all. As a rooster myself I was pleased to read my horoscope for the coming year. Not that I believe such superstitions for a moment.
I used to enjoy the rather anarchic celebrations in Chinatown, but it’s now more of an ordeal, with far too many people coming in to watch and too much organisation.
Ken may be proud of having got something done about Trafalgar Square and be keen to have as many official events with various communities as possible, but it was better when various groups just did what they wanted to.
This year we had a procession down the Charing Cross Road with crowds penned behind barriers.
Spectacle rather than event. I did the official bit in Trafalgar Square last year – dotting the eyes on the dragons and all, decided to give it and those horribly ingratiating speeches from local dignitaries and politicians, all keen to say “Kung Hei Fat Choy!“, a miss.
However, if developers Rosewheel get their way, Chinatown may not survive for much longer. Today in Chinatown things were much as before, swirling crowds and lots of excitement.
I joined them to photograph a couple of lions in action, then felt I’d had enough and went home.
J11 Carnival against Capitalism: Ten years ago on 11th June 2013 we saw one of the worst examples to date of police opposing the right to protest in London. The day had been billed by protesters as a Carnival Against Capitalism and was intended in the week before the G8 talks to point out that “London is the heart of capitalism, and to expose the offices of companies they think are brutal and polluting or exploitative, financiers who are holding the world to ransom, the embassies of tyrants and the playgrounds of the mega-rich.“
The organisers had said it would be “an open, inclusive, and lively event” and it would certainly have been noisy and high-spirited, theatrical in some ways but unlikely to cause a great deal of damage.
The police, almost certainly under political pressure had decided to treat it as a major insurgency, leaking invented scare stories to the media and getting a Section 60 order for the whole of the cities of London and Westminster which gave them the power to stop or search anyone on the streets without the need to show any suspicion. These orders are only meant to be put in place for a clearly defined area over a specific time when a senior officer believes there is a possibility of serious violence, or weapons being carried, and this seemed to be a considerable and probably illegal overkill.
This was not a huge protest, probably expected to involve less than a thousand protesters. Quite a few had gathered the previous day at a large squatted former police station in Beak St. Police invented a story that those inside had paint bombs and intended to cause criminal damage and used this to get a search warrant, entering the building early on the day of the protest.
Police turned up intending to arrest all those inside, and came with a couple of double decker buses to take them away.They sealed off a long stretch of the street and held the people inside, preventing them from joining the start of the protest, but the search found nothing.
Along with the rest of the press covering the story I was kept out, and could only see a little of what was happening from a distance, photographing with a very long lens. The police were blocking an number of side streets too and I had to make a lengthy detour to get to the other end of the block where the view was little if any better.
Police were stopping people on the streets and searching them, particularly anyone dressed in black or otherwise looking as if they might be a protester. Most were searched and released but there were a number hand-cuffed and led away. The only arrest where could find the reason was when a woman was arrested and put in a police van on Regent St for having a small marker pen in her handbag.
The protest from Piccadilly Circus began much later than intended. Around a couple of hundred people had eventually made it there, including a samba band, and left for their intended tour of the offices of some of the most powerful and greedy companies, “oil and mining giants, arms dealers, vulture funds, companies that launder blood money, invest in war and speculate on food supplies, and the offices, embassies of tyrants.”
Police kept stopping the protesters and when they did there were some short speeches and the samba band played. Police occasionally rushed in and grabbed a protester, and there were some scuffles as people tried to protect their friends. Police vans blocked some of the major roads in the area, turning what would have been relatively minor traffic stoppages into long major disruptions.
The tour stopped outside the Lower Regent Street offices of arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin for speeches against its activities – including making Trident missiles, after which the samba band began to play. One of the police ‘Liaison Officers’ came and told the band that they needed a licence from Westminster Council to play music in the street and would be committing an offence if they continued to play. He was greeted by shouts of derision from the crowd, but the band were clearly worried and held a consultation before deciding to continue on to protest outside BP around the corner in St James’s Square.
Westminster licences buskers not music on the streets. Many processions and protests take place with marching bands – including military events, the Salvation Army, Orange Lodges and many other protests. This warning was clearly another attempt by the police to harass the protest by applying laws inappropriately.
The protest moved on to the offices of BP in St James’s Square, where after a few minutes I left them, I’d been on my feet too long. The protesters still had a number of calls to make and doubtless the police would keep up their harassment.
The Stop G8 protesters had despite the police carried out at least in part their intention to “party in the streets, point out the hiding places of power, and take back the heart of our city for a day.” The police had wasted huge amounts of public money, provoked some minor disorder, disrupted traffic for much of the day in a large area of London and shown themselves happy to lie and act outside the law to support the interests of the rich and powerful.
Sunday 30th March 2014 I was in Westminster for three very different protests, opposite Parliament in Old Palace Yard, on to Downing Street and finally to Soho and Piccadilly Circus. Only the first was related to it being Mother’s Day.
Mothers Against Fracking – Old Palace Yard
As I pointed out in My London Diary, “fracking is something the world cannot afford. Increasingly we are aware that we need to move away from fossil fuels and the carbon emissions they cause to avoid further dangerous climate change, and fracking has an even higher carbon footprint than normal natural gas. Increasingly we need to keep carbon – and in particular difficult carbon sources such as this and tar sands – in the ground if we hope to save the planet and its population.”
Mothers Against Fracking had brought together a number of campaigners from around the country for a Mother’s Day rally opposite the Houses of Parliament, particularly from the various camps and protests where drilling had begun. It is an issue that brings together local residents and environmental campaigners and as I commented was “causing mayhem even in the Tory heartlands such as Balcombe in deepest Surrey. “
I listed and photographed many of those who came and spoke, “including Vanessa Vine of BIFF (Britain & Ireland Frack Free), Tina Louise Rothery of RAFF (Residents Action on Fylde Fracking), Louise Somerville Williams (Frack Free Somerset), Green Party leader Natalie Bennett, Eve McNamara of REAF (Ribble Estuary Against Fracking), Julie Wassmer (East Kent Against Fracking). Dr Becky Martin (Mothers Against Fracking) and Tammy Samede from the Barton Moss Camp in Salford.”
But this relatively small protest attracted rather more interest than most from the press, bringing some photographers I’ve never seen at a protest before because of the presence of Bianca Jagger, who took a leading part in the event as my pictures show, and gave an excellent well-prepared and written speech.
As I also pointed out, her speech “lacked the kind of intense personal involvement of many of the others” who spoke. And I wrote “I admire Bianca for her support of this and other campaigns but wish the media would show more interest in causes rather than personalities.”
The Sindhi are an ancient culture with their own Sindh language and Sindh is now the third largest province in Pakistan. Many Sindh who were Hindu went over the border to India at partition, while other largely Urdu speaking migrants moved into Sindh, on the Arabian Sea between India and the Indus River. The province contains much of Pakistan’s industry and its largest city and former capital, Karachi.
Until 1988 the area was normally referred to in English simply as Sind. When General Charles Napier conquered it for the British Empire in 1843 he famously sent the Latin one-word telegram “Peccavi” (I have sinned) to the Governor General.
The World Sindhi Congress is a human rights organisation for Sindhi people based in Canada, the UK and the USA which organizes cultural events, rallies, seminars, protests and conferences around the world.
They had come to Downing St to protest against the extra-judicial killings of Sindhi human rights activists by the Pakistani security agencies and called on the UK to press the Pakistani government to stop these violations.
The protest followed the assassination in Sindh of two Sindhi political activists, Maqsood Ahmed Querishi and Salman Wadho, one of the latest in a series of atrocities against Sindhi nationalists allegedly carried out by the Pakistani intelligence agencies. The killing on 21 March was followed by protests and riots in Sindh and the closure of shops, markets and several universities in many cities and a strike on the following day.
Qureshi was the leader of Sindhi separatist movement Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz (JSQM) and was involved in organising a ‘Freedom March’ to be held the Sunday after he was killed (which was Pakistan Freedom Day) in Karachi to inform the international community of the continuing violation of the human and civil rights of the Sindhi people.
Sindh separatists point out that the province has not been given the autonomy it was promised and that despite generating 70% of the country’s revenue and providing 60% of it natural resources it recives only around an eighth of national expenditure. But Wikipedia suggests there is relatively little popular support for separation from Pakistan.
The event at Piccadilly Circus was something of a hybrid one, part protest and part film set for the latest music video by singer songwriter The Soho Hobo (Tim Arnold.) As I wrote:
This was the only protest I’ve ever attended that came with a clapper board, with its title ‘Picadilly Trot – Soho Hobo’ (sic) and where those taking part had to go back and dance across Piccadilly Circus for another take, and then doing it again without the musicians. I assume they’ll manage to spell the name right on the final edit and I hope it gets the protest more publicity, but I don’t think its a good way to run a protest and I wasn’t amused at having to stay out of shot while taking pictures.
Mainly off the film cameras but very much on mine were protesters with placards from the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) and Queer Strike calling for an end to the raids on flats used by women sex-workers. The protesters are there at the back at some scenes in the finished video, but I doubt if anyone watching could get any idea of who they were or what they were protesting about.
The previous October I photographed a protest outside the Soho Estates offices in Greek Street after a number of women were evicted from their flats in Romilly St. Because these flats are self-contained and housed only a single sex-worker they were not legally brothels, but police and Westminster Council threatened to prosecute the landlord who refused to stand up for his tenants and simply evicted them.
The women involved say that the flats provided a much safer environment and they are much less safe if forced to work on the streets.
Campaigners say that the evictions are a part of a wider threat to the unique character of Soho, which has long been reputed for its cosmopolitan nature and various and often risqué entertainments of various kinds. The ECP say “if sex workers are forced out it will lead the way for other small and unique businesses and bars to be drowned out by major construction, chain stores and corporations.”
The police (and Westminster Council) are widely seen as being agents of the property developers who want to make billions from knocking down Soho and redeveloping parts of it as hotels and luxury flats, destroying the unique atmosphere of the area.
On Sunday 10th of February 2008 I photographed protests against the Church of Scientology before going into Chinatown for the Chinese New Year celebrations.
‘Anonymous’ Protest – Church of Scientology – Blackfriars & Tottenham Court Road
This was the first time I’d come across protesters wearing the ‘Anonymous’ masks that became a common feature at protests in the following years. This grinning Guy Fawkes mask was designed by illustrator David Lloyd for the 1980s graphic novel by Alan Moore and 2005 film ‘V for Vendetta.’
Placards refer to the high costs and unfair attacks on opponents
When hacktivists set up Project Chanology to campaign against Scientology at the start of 2008, they realised that like all other critics of the movement they would face vicious and intensive personal attacks from the group and needed to protect their identities both on-line and in person.
Some wore photocopy masks of Scientology’s founder L Ron Hubbard
So those behind Project Chanology decided to call themselves ‘Anonymous’ and hide themselves behind these masks when protesting. The London protest was one of over 50 protests in cities around the world at this time in which many of those taking part wore them.
As I wrote at the time “I’m just amazed that Scientology is still around, despite having been comprehensively exposed so many times over the years. You can find out more about it on Wikipedia.”
Xenu.net reveals much of the uglier side of the cult
Wikipedia records that “The Church of Scientology has been described by government inquiries, international parliamentary bodies, scholars, law lords, and numerous superior court judgments as both a dangerous cult and a manipulative profit-making business.”
To my surprise round 4-500 had come for a peaceful protest on the walkway facing the Church of Scientology building in Queen Victoria Street at Blackfriars. After the protest there many of them went on to a second demonstration opposite the Dianetics & Scientology Life Improvement Centre in Tottenham Court Road, where those passing by are often lured into the building to take tests and pressured to join the cult, which demands large financial contributions from members.
Things were festive in Chinatown which was packed with visitors celebrating the Chinese New Year.
Though many of those who work in the area it was a very busy day, selling Chinese decorations, toys and food.
Performers were going around the area as Chinese lions, leaping up to grab salad vegetables hung at shop doorways and bringing good luck to the businesses in exchange for cash.
Gerrard Street at the centre of Chinatown was thronging with crowds, though my ultrawide lens meant I could still work even though it was difficult to get a clear view. But soon I just had to leave for some quieter back streets for a while.
There was a money god, but he was only handing out entry forms for a competition to win a return ticket to Hong Kong
martial arts demonstrations…
and a dancing dragon carried by children from Surrey. But I soon tired of the noise and the crowds and as I commented “there are 51 other weekends of the year when its probably more interesting to come and see Chinatown how it really is.” And I went home. I think this was the last year I photographed the festival.
More pictures at Chinese New Year Celebrations, Soho on My London Diary, where you can also find images of the festival from 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 using the search box at the top of the page.
Another busy day for me in London on Saturday 2nd November 2013, though I spent quite a lot of it in a pub with zombies who were putting on a rather late Halloween appearance. But there were more serious things as well.
Free Kieron & Arctic 30 – Russian Embassy, Notting Hill. Sat 2 Nov 2013
Family, friends & supporters of freelance videojournalist Kieron Bryan, one of the 30 arrested on Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise, held a silent vigil at the Russian Embassy, delivering a petition signed by over 1000 journalists calling for his release.
There was intense media interest in the event, with several TV crews, radio journalists and photographers, perhaps because the imprisonment of a journalist is a threat to all journalists around the world. Unusually the Russian embassy had agreed to meet Kieron’s brother and take the petition, and although no photography is permitted in the private street in which it (and the Israeli embassy) are situated I was able to photograph him standing in the gate to the street holding it.
The Arctic 30 had sailed to the Russian Arctic on the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise in September 2013 to protest peacefully against Gazprom’s plans to start oil production in the Arctic. The ship was seized and they were kept in custody for two months before being released on bail in November – after the Netherlands had filed a case at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea which led to an order for the crew and Dutch-registered vessel to be released while the case was being considered. Although Russia ignored this ruling they did release the journalists, activists and crew, and six months later, the ship. Probably protests such as this helped to persuade them to do so.
The Dutch government filed complaints at the European Court against the unlawful detention of the Dutch-registered ship and the protesters also took a case claiming that hey had been detained unlawfully and their right to freedom of expression had been breached.
Gurkha Veterans Hunger Strike for Justice – Downing St, Sat 2 Nov 2013
Gurkha wives and widows support the campaign for justice
Although high-profile earlier campaigns supported by Joanna Lumley and others in the broadcast media have led to increased support for former Gurkha soldiers, elderly Gurkha veterans did not benefit from these and most live here in extreme poverty.
After submitting their petition to Prime Minister David Cameron and the Nepalese Prime Minister in April and getting no satisfactory result and they had “with a heavy heart” begun a series of hunger strikes. These had begun in late October with a “13 days relay hunger strike in the name of the 13 Ghurka VCs” which was in progress when I took these pictures, demanding equal pensions, compensation, a preserved pension for those made redundant, the right of settlement in the UK for their adult children and free medical treatment in Nepal.
Five days later some began a hunger strike until death, and after two weeks the government offered talks and this was halted.
I met with around a hundred zombies in Waxy O’Connor’s pub on Rupert St, where they were drinking for a couple of hours occasionally emerging into the dim daylight of Wardour St for a fag break.
Around 4pm as dusk was falling the multitude of undead staggered up the stairs to begin their crawl around Londinium in search of brains and booze. I left them to it.
Among those on Gerrard Street were a group of Zombie Police whose warrant cards carried the message ‘A pint of Cider and Black Please’.
Announced as the seventh consecutive year for this event, it followed on from some earlier ‘Crawls of the Dead’ which began in 2004.
Inside the pub the lighting was low and I needed to use flash. While the Nikon flash gun I was using in the hot-shoe of my camera is generally a great performer I had some problems. While it is OK with the camera in landscape mode, turning the setup through 90 degrees for portrait format images isn’t really very successful. And I also found myself unable to use the usually magical i-TTL mode, not because of some zombie spells, but as later searches through the fat manual at home revealed it is incompatible with the camera mode I had set for the dark interior. I think the camera and flash manual have a total of well over 500 pages – these things are just too complicated for mortals.
City Link & Cleaners at John Lewis – Oxford St, Sat 2 Nov 2013
As the final zombies staggered out of the pub to crawl Soho I rushed away to Oxford Street where cleaners were holding a protest outside the flagship John Lewis Store, and were today joined by City Link workers who deliver goods for the company.
City Link was sold off earlier in the year to Jon Moulton’s private equity group ‘Better Capital’ and face pay cuts, enforced overtime, loss of bonus scheme and other changes. They were protesting with John Lewis’s cleaners who are fighting to get a living wage and better working conditions. Unlike other staff in the store who are directly employed by the company as ‘partners’ and share in the profits through a bonus scheme, cleaners are outsourced to a cleaning company and paid less than a pittance, with unsocial hours and poor conditions of service. John Lewis management wash their hands and say it it nothing to do with them.
Although the immediate cause of this protest was the eviction of sex workers from flats in Romilly Street where they were operating within our laws restricting prostitution, the evictions were not at base about the activities of the women concerned but a result of property developers seeing enormous profits to be made by emptying properties in the area and redeveloping them.
Soho is particularly at risk from hugely profitable development as hotels and luxury flats because of its reputation and unique ambiance, which has largely derived in the past from its association with such risqué activities as strip clubs and models offering personal services as well as its restaurants and shops offering foreign delicacies unknown in the UK outside its boundaries.
Of course times have changed, and much of Soho is now Chinatown, but still its old reputation and some of those old activities remain, though many are fast disappearing. And while the tourists flock in, much of what attracts them is no longer there.
Sex remains a powerful attraction, and it was noticeable that there was far more media attention to this protest than most. Most of the masked women taking part in the protest were supporters of the ‘working girls’ from groups including the organisers of the event, Women Against Rape and the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) who I knew from other protests.
The police who issued notices to the property owners alleging that the properties were brothels are widely seen as working on behalf of the prospective developers, and owners Soho Estates whose managing director came out to speak at the event also have a financial interest. They could have stood up to the police intimidation and investigated the situation so they could assure the police that the activities in the flats were within the law, but failed to do so.
A speaker from the Soho Society told the protest that the activities of the women were one of the oldest traditions of the area, and were causing no problems with their neighbours and the many other trades of the area. Previous similar evictions have attracted local petitions signed by thousands and the ECP press release stated “Many express fears that gentrification is behind attempts to close these flats and that if sex workers are forced out it will lead the way for other small and unique businesses and bars to be drowned out by major construction, chain stores and corporations.”
Gurkha Veterans Demand Justice – Old Palace Yard, Westminster
Elderly Gurkha veterans living in the UK did not benefit from earlier campaigns for fair treatment and most living here are in extreme poverty.
This was one of a number of protests every Wednesday and Thursday opposite the Houses of Parliament inviting the government to hold talks with them and if there was no progress by later in October they said they would begin a programme of nonviolent resistance (Satyagraha) with hunger strikes, beginning with a “13 days relay hunger strike in the name of the 13 Ghurka VCs which would then be followed by a fast-unto-death” if there was no progress.
I paid a short visit to the campaigners from the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign who earlier in the year been holding a lunchtime protest on the pavement in Parliament Square facing the Houses of Parliament, standing out in their orange jumpsuits and black hoods on every day parliament was in session.
Shaker Aamer, a British resident still then held at Guantánamo was one of the first to be sent there after having been handed over the the US authorities for a cash reward. Although there was no evidence against him he had suffered years of torture in which the UK intelligence services had been implicated. Despite being cleared for release in 2007 and again in 2010 he was still being held, probably because his testimony when released would cause severe embarrassment to both US and UK intelligence agencies.
This protest was the start of a new series of regular weekly vigils seeking to draw attention to the failures of both President Obama and David Cameron, as well as demanding a full Parliamentary debate about Shaker’s case.
Campaigners had come to College Green, close to the Houses of Parliament to call for reform of the laws about cannabis, in particular to allow its medical use for MS sufferers. Legal medical cannabis is mainly available here to MS sufferers who can afford to pay its very high price.
Unsurprisingly it was a rather laid back protest, beginning rather late and not really getting started the whole 90 minutes I was there before giving up and going home as they were still waiting for the megaphone or PA system to arrive.
By the time I left there were quite a few people sitting around on the grass smoking. As I commented in a caption, the photographs don’t show what they were smoking, but the smell was unmistakable, and after I while I began to feel just a little unusual. Perhaps the two police officers who strolled over to take a look had no sense of smell or perhaps they simply felt that there was little point in taking any action.
Years ago I had to give lessons against drug use to 16-18 year olds as a part of a ‘personal and social education’ programme, and was aware that many of them had rather more experience in the area than me. But the materials from the Home Office that I relied on made clear that cannabis was considerably less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. Addiction to anything is a bad thing, but so too is the criminalisation that results from our current drug laws, which also fuel an illegal and highly profitable drug business. Appropriate reform, which would certainly include easier access for medicinal use, is long overdue.
On Sunday 13th 2005, 17 years ago, London was celebrating the Chinese New Year of the Rooster which started the previous Wednesday – it was 4072.
Chinese New Year in Soho is something I’ve avoided in more recent years – as I wrote in 2005: “I used to enjoy the rather anarchic celebrations in Chinatown, but it’s now more of an ordeal, with far too many people coming in to watch and too much organisation.”
Trying to photograph in such crowded situations was a problem, and one I confronted in two main ways in 2005, something reflected in the two pictures above. At the top is a picture taken standing back some distance with a telephoto lens, while the lower picture is taken with a fisheye lens, both on a Nikon D70 DX camera.
De-fished version
Usually now when I use the a fisheye lens like this, I would convert the perspective to give straight verticals – as in the above image. But back in 2005 I didn’t have a good plug-in to do this conversion, and although it was possible with various programmes I was using for making panoramas it was a rather time-consuming process.
For this particular event I rather liked the fisheye effect, at least in some pictures. Although it does clearly misrepresent those faces close to the edges of the picture, for me it pulls the eye towards the centre of the picture and perhaps gives a greater impression of the crowding I was working in.
A small problem is that the image you see in the viewfinder is the fisheye one, and not that in the ‘de-fished’ version. But as you can see, the fisheye image which you see has the same horizontal limits at the centre of both the horizontal and vertical sides, with just a little of the image towards the four corners being lost. It’s still possible to frame accurately when working.
It’s not I think correct to call the effect of the fisheye lens ‘distortion’. It is simply a different way of recording the subject on a flat rectangle. Most fisheyes I’ve used (and I own four different examples, for DX and full-frame Nikon, for Fuji and for micro 4/3) seem actually to have rather less actual distortion than my ultra-wide rectilinear (i.e. ‘normal’) lenses.
In the de-fished image you can see that as well as the verticals of the building being straight, people at the edges of the picture are also shown naturally, unlike in the fisheye version. I was also taking some pictures with an ultra-wide 12-24mm lens (equivalent to 18-36mm full-frame) and with that at its widest faces at the edge would have been rendered a little stretched out horizontally.
I’m not sure what some major agencies would make of conversions using software like this, whether they would regard it as an unacceptable alteration of the image. For me its just one of many acceptable corrections of the image, but clearly it does alter the image as recorded by the camera. It would be possible to design a specialised wide-angle camera which carried out the correction in firmware but the market for this would probably be small. Rather it could be provided into normal digital cameras as an option – far more useful than all those special effects which clutter the menus on many cameras now.
More pictures on My London Diary – scroll down a little from the top of the page.
Back in 2008 I photographed the London celebrations in Chinatown for the Year of the Rat, which took place on February 10th, 2008, and wrote this short text:
Chinese New Year Celebrations, Soho
Soho, Westminster, London. Sunday, 10 Feb, 2008
The Chinese New Year celebrations in London have rather got out of hand, with more and more people flooding in to Chinatown, and an incredible amount of sponshorship for the event. There is strong evidence in the programme, now 120 thick pages mainly of advertising, along with some of the most tedious photographs you will ever see. The genuinely useful content in it could have been handed out on a much more user-friendly 2 sides of A4.
But if you can avoid the worst of the crowds, it’s still a fun event and at times spectacular. But there are 51 other weekends of the year when its probably more interesting to come and see Chinatown how it really is.
This year the celebrations are almost certain to be considerably more muted and mainly on-line. The Chinese New Year is actually in two days time on 12 Feb and in more normal times would have been celebrated next Sunday rather like in 2008 with crowds in Soho and a procession, with events in Trafalgar Square and Leiscester Square. But for the Year of the Ox I think you will have to make do with a virtual celebration – and perhaps a Chinese takeaway.
It’s a while since I’ve actually gone to the celebrations in Soho. Said to be the largest celebrations of the New Year outside Asia, the event has become far too crowded for me, and frustrating to try to photograph. Back in 2008 I went early, before the crowds built up, but later it became very hard to get the pictures I wanted.
Using a fisheye lens did enable me to find a little space where there was really none; some of these pictures I ‘de-fished’ to give straight verticals but others I left with the obvious curvature. But more of the pictures were taken with the 12-24mm Sigma lens, giving a very wide rectilinear view even on the DX Nikon D200 I was then using.
Some of the other images – including three here – were taken on a Leica M8, mainly with a 35mm Summilux F1.4 lens. Although this was fine when taking pictures, it was an older lens and required considerable fiddling with software to get usable results, as not only did the sensor vignette badly, but the vignetting came with colour casts.
The M8 was a good black and white camera, but something of a disaster with colour. Leica and most early reviewers had failed to notice that because the M8 sensor had no IR filter it recorded much black clothing as strongly magenta, and there were other incorrect colours. The company eventually supplied those who had bought the camera with two IR cut filters, but that limited my choice of lenses to two – and one of my favourite lenses could not take a filter.
Given those limitations, the M8 was fine to use, with a simple interface that enabled you to take still pictures without the huge thick manuals that most digital cameras need. But I soon get fed up with all the hassle of processing the images, and got rid of it. It was an expensive experience that soured my whole view of Leica, and why I now use Fuji cameras rather than Leica.
We can also wish ourselves Happy New Year “Xin Nian Kuai Le” or “San Nin Faai Lok” and hope for ‘Happiness and prosperity!’ doing our best to pronounce 恭喜发财 / 恭喜發財, something like ‘gong-hey faa-choy‘
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
