London Walking Weekend: Most weekends since the 1980s I’ve spent at least one day walking around London, often on my own but more recently mainly with others carrying banners and placards. But Saturday 6th June 2009 was a little different as it was designated as the Walking Weekend of the Story of London Festival, and I went to a couple of free events put on by the Heritage of London Trust and Pevsner Architectural Guides in east London, as well as doing a little on my own.
London 2012 site
On Saturday morning I took a guided tour of St Mary Magdalene’s Church in East Ham led by Tara Draper-Stumm for the Heritage of London Trust, a charity which does a great deal of work in restoring buildings and sites in danger across the capital.
It was a great guided tour of one of London’s most interesting churches, Grade 1 listed and “claimed to be the oldest parish church still in weekly use in Greater London“, large parts dating from the first half of the 12th century but of course greatly added to, altered and restored over the centuries, most recently in 1965-6.
But I didn’t take any pictures, so nothing to post here from this tour. Back in the 1990s when I was a regular contributor to our National Building Record I often found myself waiting in the library there for my appointment and would pull a box file for an area of London from their shelves – to find it almost entirely full of photographs of old churches, many taken by their vicars back in the day when many were gentlemen of leisure with the money to take up photography. It rather put me off photographing them and on this morning I decided to simply experience the event, listen and look. But there is a fine illustrated tour of the church online.
London 2012 site
From there I had some time to spare before the afternoon walk and went to visit the huge building site on Stratford Marsh for the London Olympics, by then sealed off by miles of blue fence. It was something of a rush to take pictures to later make into panoramas as well as some other pictures before getting back on the DLR from Pudding Mill Station to Poplar.
Footbridge at Poplar Station – a similar panoramic image I took on this footbridge a years earlier was used wrapped around two sides of a 12 inch record, ‘Limehouse Link’and less impressively on the CD.
There I met someone whose name had been familiar for many years but I’d not met, Bridget Cherry, a leading architectural hisotrian whose name appears on the essential works for anyone with an interest in the subject, The Buildings of England, begun by Nikolaus Pevsner in 1951. She worked on many volumes, some with him, as well as becoming General Editor.
1930s streamlined moderne concrete at Constant House, refurbished and fitted with entrance doors
These books remain essential guides to anyone with an interest in architecture in England, and I walked most of the ‘perambulations’ in London from them, although my interests were rather wider than the buildings contained in them and my walks also took me to many other places. You can read more about this walk on My London Diary. Here I’ll include just a few of the pictures I took with captions and some brief comments.
The 1930s pub ‘The Resolute’ , named for HMS Resolute, one of the ships sent in 1850 and 1852 to search for Sir John Franklin, lost in the N W PassageRobin Hood GardensSome gardening going on with residents growing salad crops
Robin Hood Gardens, designed in the late 1960s by Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972, gained international recognition for its Brutalist architecture and was the highpoint of the walk. Its two long blocks enclosed a large garden area which was suprisingly quiet despite the site being alongside of one of London’s busiest roads. Neglected for years by Tower Hamlets council it was used to house many ‘problem’ tenants but by 2009 had largely recovered and become well regarded by those who lived there.
But the local authority had already decided to demolish it as a part of a ‘regeneration’ scheme. Attempts to list it scandalously failed – despite its international architectural significance – probably to protect the profits of the developers and demolition began in 2017 but was only finally completed in March 2015. Listing of large council estates became largely impossible under New Labour and expensive, highly profitable and environmentally disastrous schemes regeration schemes providing expensive but largely poorer quality buildings with little social housing have since obliterated estates – including some fine architecture – which could have been refurbished to modern standards at a fraction of the cost.
St Matthias Old Church built 1652-4 but exterior reworked in 19th centry and monument to Captain Samuel Jones
Protesting the London Olympics Bid: On Saturday 19th February 2005 I sent for a guided walk around the proposed Olympic site on Stratford Marsh and then joined others in a protest march through the area to Hackney Marshes which would also be affected.
Small industries giving local employment which will disappear
The favourites for the games were Paris, and although public opinion in Britain largely backed the bid, there was rather less support by locals both because of the effects it would have on the area and the high coast which would mean an extra £20 per year on council tax.
One of the larger industrial sites, and a building in use as artists studios
Paris accused London of violating the rules but the decision was was made by a small majority in London’s favour.
Pudding Mill River and Old River Lee
After the success of the bid in July 2005 there were fears around the rest of the country that the extra spending on the games would mean diverting funds for more necessary work away from the rest of the country – which it did.
City Mill River and Warton House, formerly the Yardley perfume company’s Box Factory – preserved
And locally many suffered from the disruption of the works over an extensive area – with local businesses and some residents being forced out of the area.
This bridge had a local message for Seb Coe who heads London’s bid for the 2012 Olympic Games
Here I’ll reproduce – with appropriate minor corrections – the article I wrote along with some of the pictures I took on the day.
Site Walk, Bow Back Rivers
Saturday 19th February saw me in the Bow Back Rivers again, on another guided walk looking at the areas threatened by the London 2012 Olympic Bid. We walked along The Northern Outfall Sewer from Stratford High Road to Old Ford, then along the Old River Lea and back down the City Mill River.
Traditionally an area for dirty industries on the east of the city, a health and safety hell-hole, now with plenty of derelict land, but still providing local jobs that will all disappear if the bid goes through.
Much of the area will disappear under concrete, almost all redundant after the big event, with plans for its after use unpublished and unfunded.
At the moment it’s a rich wildlife environment, but all that will go, and the tidal Bow Back Rivers are likely to be lost or severely altered.
If the bid goes ahead it will severely distort a regeneration that needs to be based on local needs and priorities, and the trumpeted increased investment will largely create unwanted facilities that will be future millstones.
Hackney marshes. Football pitches will be concreted car parks for the Olympics
Not to mention the disruption over perhaps 15 years as the site is developed and then (if finances materialise) restored for use.
No London 2012 Olympics March
More local businesses that will close on Waterden Rd.
After the walk, we went to join the demonstration and protest march that was forming in Meridian Square outside Stratford Station. It wasn’t a huge event, with just over a hundred marchers, but I was surprised at the positive response from those hurrying by to catch trains or go shopping, many expressing support.
The march, on a bitter, dull afternoon, ended on Hackney Marshes, where considerable local sports facilities are due to be covered by car parks if the bid succeeds, with people playing games and a very spirited sack race.
View from the walkway over Carpenters Lock
I walked back to Stratford, again through the Olympic site, crossing over the Lea at one of the locks and along the side of the Waterworks River, with often dramatic lighting and the occasional light flurry of snow.
Hackney Wick & Manor Gardens: On Tuesday January 16 2007 I took a walk in Hackney Wick on my way to what was to become one of many casualties to the London Olympics, the Manor Gardens allotments, for an open day when the press and public were invited to see the vibrant site that was under threat.
Here with a few corrections and some of the pictures is what I wrote about the day. Many more pictures are still on My London Diary.
Hackney Wick remains one of the more interesting areas of London, and I took a few pictures despite the light rain on my rather meandering way to the Manor Gardens Allotments off Waterden Road.
A bridge over the River Lea led to Manor Garden Allotments
The Manor Gardens Allotments were another of the charitable provisions that came out of the link with Eton College and the Eton College Mission set up in Hackney Wick.
Arthur Villiers was one of four Old Etonians (the others were Gerald Wellesley, founder of the Eton Manor Old Boys Club for over 18s, Alfred Wagg and Sir Edward Cadogan) who in 1924 set up a charitable trust to keep the clubs running.
Villiers, who was a director of Barings Bank, had previously in around 1900 provided the Manor Gardens Allotments on an adjoining site as a means of providing both healthy exercise as well as suitable nutrition for the young men of the area. The land was provided for the community to use in perpetuity.
Since then it has continued in use, with a short break when the area was used for a wartime gun battery. At least a couple of the allotment ‘sheds’ are heavy concrete structures left over from this use.
Over the years it has been a thriving community of cultivators, recovering in recent years from some slight loss of interest, with the current renewal of interest in green and healthy living and eating.
Then came the London Bid for the 2012 Olympics, which put the allotments within the site. It could have been seen as a golden opportunity to give the games some green credibility behind the lip-service the bid gave to biodiversity and sustainability, and certainly as a commitment to the post-2012 legacy of the games – to leave sites such as Manor Gardens and the adjoining nature reserve as a green centerpiece to the site. Unfortunately the architects and developers seem hell-bent to create a brown Olympics, creating an irredeemably distressed site that will only be economically recoverable when all the concrete has crumbled.
The New Year Feast was an Open Day at Manor Garden Allotments, inviting the public and press to see the site and the 80 plots for themselves. A rather low-tech ‘Olympic torch’ was carried across the bridge to the site and used to start a bonfire.
Then we had a party around it, with a couple of speeches and some tasty refreshments. There was support from some celebrities, as well as the opportunity to meet some of the plot-holders, some of whom have raised crops here since the 1940s – and those whose parents had plots in the 1920s. There are also many newer tenants, very much reflecting the multicultural nature of the surrounding area.
It would be a great shame to lose this splendid facility for four weeks of use in 2012, when it could easily be built around. It isn’t in a critical area but will simply be under concrete as a footpath, and probably also the site of a huge advertising ‘scoreboard’ for the games sponsor.
What will it say about the 2012 Olympics for a site that is currently a beacon for healthy green eating to be selling Big Macs?
The planning application was to submitted on 1st Feb 2007, with eviction expected on 2nd April 2007. it is unlikely that the replacement site offered at Marsh Lane can be ready before 2008. Hopes are not high, but it would certainly be a great green miracle if the allotments survive.
Of course the miracle did not happen, and the Olympic juggernaut took its course, destroying the allotments and much else. By June 2008 allotment holders were struggling to grow crops on a new site on common land at Leyton. The move was expensive and the contractors used to prepare the site had ruined it by sterilising and compacting soil with heavy equipment and much of the site was waterlogged, with the only healthy crops being grown in grow-bags.
The allotment holders had been promised they would be able to return to their old home after the Olympics, but this promise was not kept. Eventually in 2017 some were able to go to a much smaller new site at Pudding Mill Lane. It’s future came under threat in 2022 by plans for extensive development around its edges which will overshadow it restricting cultivation on much of the site.
Around the Olympic Site: Thursday 4th January, 2007 looked like being a pleasant enough day for a bike ride around the area where preparations were getting into full swing for the London 2012 Olympics to see how things were going in the area. So I wrapped up warm and put my folding bike on the train to make my way to Stratford.
Clays Lane travellers site, Park Village and Clays Lane estate
Most of the central area of the site was already closed off to the public, but I was able to cycle to various parts of the perimeter and take photographs, though I was disappointed to find large areas where nothing was yet taking place already fenced off. From Stratford I went around in an anti-clockwise direction and on My London Diary you can read a fairly long piece about where I went and my opinions about what was happening.
Eastway Cycle Circuit now fenced off
It was becoming more and more clear that many of those who lived and worked in and around the area were being very shabbily treated, with nothing being allowed to stand in the way of the Olympic juggernaut. People were being lied to, promises being made and then abandoned.
Bully Fen Wood is Community Woodland no more
Probably the worst case of this was with the 430 residents of the Clays Lane Housing Co-Operative who were first promised they would be rehoused in conditions “as good as, if not better than” their present estate but were later told “at least as good as in so far as is reasonably practicable.”
Everything on Waterden Road was later demolished
The tenants there had already suffered from their cooperative estate with its strong community being transferred against their wishes to Peabody Housing following an adverse Housing Corporation inquiry, losing their mutual status. After their eviction under the Olympic Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) they were dispersed and many found they were having to pay much higher rents and living in worse conditions in places that lacked any of the feeling of community of Clays Lane.
Carpenters Lock and part of the closed area
I’d hoped to visit the Eastway Cycle Circuit and the Bully Fen nature Reserve, but both were fenced off, as were some of the footpaths I had hoped to cycle down, resulting in some fairly lengthy detours. Some of the closures claimed to be “temporary” – but some were still closed ten years later.
Samuel Banner, inventor of white spirit, founded the company in 1860. It relocated to Teeside
I commented “Parliament smooths the way for the Olympic Delivery Authority at the expense of people and environment, enabling them to slough off the inconvenience of democracy and justice. The situation for some of the local people – particularly those living in Clays Lane – can only be described as Kafkaesque.”
Huge areas were being flattened
I rode down Marshgate Lane and went onto the Greenway and then returned and went on to Hackney Wick, pausing to eat my sandwich lunch in a sheltered suntrap by the lock on the Hertford Union Canal before riding on the Greenway, turning back where this was blocked and coming back to the Lea Navigation towpath and on to Stratford High Street.
Bridge over Pudding Mill River to Marshgate Lane, Stratford Marsh.
From here I was able to go along a short length of footpath next to the Waterworks River before returning to the Greenway on the other side of the High Street, past some more areas covered by the CPO.
Bow Back River. Both sides in the foreground are part of the CPO area
By now the light was beginning to fade, but I rode on to Canning Town and took a brief look (and some rather dark pictures) of the Pura foods site then being demolished before riding over the Lower Lea Crossing to the station for the Jubilee Line back to Waterloo.
Overground, Olympics and a Christmas Card: Like most of my posts on My London Diary before a redesign of the site in 2008, my contributions for Thursday 13th December 2007 are a little difficult to read and navigate, with the text separated from the pictures. But at least by then I had discovered the capital letters when I was writing about my activities. So I’ll repost them again after the introduction here.
On 13th December 2007 I began with a morning protest by the RMT union over the privatisation of the East London Line, previously run by London Transport. They wanted the line to remain run, like the Underground run by a publicly owned body – the Underground is run by London Underground Limited (LUL), a statutory corporation wholly owned by Transport for London (TfL).
Although TfL is still responsible for the Overground it is was until recently run by Arriva Rail London which was owned by the German national rail company Deutsche Bahn from 2010 until June 2024. It was then sold to I Squared Capital, a US-based private equity firm with global investments mainly in infrastructure. The Elizabeth line is run by a subsidiary of MTR Corporation, largely owned by the Hong Kong government.
Both Overground and the Elizabeth line have been considerable improvements to transport across London, but we can still question whether it makes sense to have so much of our infrastructure run by foreign companies – and so much land and buildings becoming owned by overseas investors.
The RMT protest ended shortly before noon and in the afternoon I walked from Stratford High Street to Hackney Wick past the Olympic area around Stratford Marsh.
RMT Protests East London Line Privatisation – City Hall, Southwark
Improving our transport system in London should be good news, although the closure of the East London Line for almost three years from 22 Dec seems excessive (and of course the Shoreditch end has already been closed for some time.
Looked at on the map, the new overground routes, from Dalston (and later, Highbury and Islington) down to Crystal Palace and West Croydon (and perhaps eventually also to Clapham Junction) seem mainly a matter of connecting together existing routes, and adding a couple of new stations at Hoxton and Haggerston.
But what upsets the unions – and almost three-quarters of Londoners – is that when the line reopens after great public expense, it will have been privatised, paying profits to eight different companies for various aspects of its running – including some involved in the Metronet failure.
Part of those profits will come from paying staff less – and worse working conditions. The unions are also worried about possible safety problems as the signalling on the route will be shared between London Underground and Network Rail systems.
A hundred or so demonstrators from the RMT union, Respect and others marched around City Hall several times, led by a coffin for the line carried by ‘undertakers’ to represent the private contractors and a tuneful 3 piece jazz band, before a short rally.
And although there are various replacement bus services during the years of closure, these leave a gap at the most essential part of the current route – across the Thames between Wapping and Rotherhithe. It is apparently beyond the wit of Transport for London to find buses that can use the Rotherhithe tunnel – or even provide a ferry service (the ferry downriver at Canary Wharf takes 3 minutes, but costs £1.90 if you have a travel card or over £500 for an annual season.)
Unless you bring your own canoe, the quickest alternative is probably to swim, though swallowing the water might be fatal. On the tube it takes one minute; the alternatives the TfL web site suggests on a weekday are mainly around an hour. Surely not acceptable.
My shadow falls on one of the few remaining buildings on Marshgate Lane
The ‘Greenway’ path on the top of London’s Northern Outfall Sewer reopened recently after a temporary closure during the nearby demolition works, and as it was a fine day I took a walk along it from Stratford to Hackney Wick.
Almost all of the buildings on the Olympic site have gone, with just occasional bits of wall or outbuildings left, and there are some pretty huge piles of earth or whatever. Gone too are most of the many trees, particularly the willows by Marshgate Lane and all the wild areas – as well as the tyre mountains and other car parts.
Northern Outfall carrying London’s sewage over the Lea Navigation
The light under the Northern outfall where it crosses the navigation was interesting, low sun bouncing up from the water and giving the structure a golden glow.
I went on over the lock at Old Ford to ‘Fish Island’ and then through the red circle footbridge to Hackney Wick, taking a few pictures from the station footbridge while waiting for the train back to Stratford. The line also gives some views of the vast building site.
For once I’ve printed and sent my Christmas cards before the last date for posting, which is a pity, because if I’d waited I think the picture of two Santas at the Christmas Fair next to Tower Bridge [taken while waiting for the RMT protest to begin] would have made a good image. I think it’s the third figure in red at left of picture that really makes it work.
So this picture comes with my Christmas Greetings for all of you who visit the site.
I think I used this picture on my 2008 Christmas Card. I’m still trying to find a suitable picture for 2024.
Serenading the Bomb Makers: Given the current increased tension over the possible nuclear escalation of the Ukraine war – something that would be disastrous to us all and totally insane and irrational, but if NATO keep poking the Russian Bear with a stick could be provoked – it seems appropriate to remember the lunchtime tour around the London offices of some of the companies involved in making the UK’s nuclear weapons on Friday 12th December 2008.
I don’t think I can improve on the piece I posted on My London Diary in 2008 – except by adding the odd word that somehow got missed out, so I’ll copy that here, with some of the pictures from the event. I got too cold standing around and left after an hour and went to take a short look at the work taking place on the Olympic site at Stratford Marsh as the light was beginning to fade.
‘Muriel Lesters’ Serenade the Bomb Makers
Lockheed Martin, Carlisle Place – A man sprawls in memory of the many deaths caused by atomic weapons; security men look bored.
Ten activists turned up in Victoria, London on Friday for a festive protest outside the offices of the US company behind the production of the UK’s nuclear weapons and the huge expansion of bomb production facilities at Aldermaston – costing £6,000,000,000 – which has never been debated or approved by Parliament.
They were the ‘Muriel Lesters*’, a London affinity group of Trident Ploughshares. Dressed in Santa suits, white nuclear inspector overalls and festive hats they called for an end to bomb production at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE).
Appropriately, their renditions of festive songs and carols with modified anti-nuclear lyrics were largely less than tuneful (one taking part was hear to say “I’m a Quaker, we don’t sing” and who could contradict him?) They called for a stop to the illegal activities of these companies in making weapons.
First to be serenaded by the group were the offices of the US arms giant Lockheed Martin, makers of ‘bunker buster’ and ‘cluster’ bombs, the worlds largest exporter of weapons and the leading member of the consortium set up to produce the nuclear warheads for the UK Trident replacement at Aldermaston.
After an hour or so of leafleting and displaying banners on Vauxhall Bridge Road just around the corner, the group moved to the front door of the building housing Lockheed Martin and several other companies in Carlisle Place for their half hour carol ‘concert’. It was a site I knew from the ‘Merchants of Death‘ tour by CAAT earlier in the year. A number of people came in an out of the building while this was going on and some took leaflets while others hurried past, often to waiting taxis.
Half way through the performance, a police car pulled up and dropped off two constables who came to talk to the protesters. They asked who was in charge (and of course nobody was) and for a mobile number they could use to contact the group, saying “it’s standard practice for protests“. Oh no it isn’t! They were handed a leaflet with the Norwich details of Trident Ploughshares, but that wasn’t what they had in mind.
The police were informed that the real criminals were in the Lockheed Martin offices, carrying out the vast expansion in UK nuclear arms, a breach of the UK’s obligations under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that they were involved in an illegal conspiracy with some groups we could name down the road in Whitehall. The police chose to ignore this vital evidence but eventually they went away, reminding the protesters that while they supported the right to demonstrate, it was important to keep the pavement clear.
As they left, one member of the group stretched out “dead” on his back on that pavement as a symbol of the many victims of nuclear weapons, including those killed in nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “bomb test veterans, and victims of leukaemias, lymphomas and cancers caused by exposure to radioactive discharges from AWE Aldermaston and AWE Burghfield in Berkshire, Sellafield in Cumbria, Rolls Royce Raynesway in Derby and other sites“
I left the group as it packed up and decided to take a short break before going on for a similar protest at the London offices of Jacobs Engineering and Fluor Corporation, two other US companies who are competing for the stake in the AWE bomb-making contract currently filled by the British Nuclear Group. The third player in the contract – the only remaining UK involvement – is SERCO.
Muriel Lester, (1883–1968), born in Leytonstone, was a leading Christian peace campaigner and writer. Among many other things she founded Kingsley Hall in Bow, was a friend of Gandhi, Travelling Secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and was detained for ten weeks in Trinidad and then several days in Holloway Prison for her activities during the Second World War.
Olympic Site & Budget Cuts: Wednesday 5th December 2012 was a cold day in London, with the temperature just three or four degrees above freezing during the day, but there was plenty of blue sky with a few clouds and it seemed ideal weather to wrap up and go and see what progress had been made in restoring the Olympic site, still largely off-limits some months after the end of the games. And later in the early evening I returned to Westminster for a protest against the cuts which had been announced by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne in his autumn budget statement.
Olympic Area Slightly Open – Stratford Marsh
Much of the area around the Olympic site had been closed to the public in May, including the Greenway, the elevated footpath on top of the Northern Outfall Sewer which runs close to the Olympic stadium, but this was now re-opened in part.
The section between Stratford High Street and the main railway lines which run from Liverpool Street station to Stratford and on further east was however still closed and would remain closed for years as work was now taking place for Crossrail – opened as the Elizabeth Line in 2022.
I started my walk in the early afternoon around the Bow flyover where the Bow Back rivers were still closed to traffic with a yellow floating barrier, but the footpath along the Lea Navigation had been re-opened. One improvement made presumably for the Olympics was a pathway and footbridge taking walkers under the busy road junction and across the canal.
Finding the new entrance to the Greenway meant walking between fences on the Crossrail site down Pudding Mill Lane, and probably I would have abandoned the route had it not been for signs put up by the View Tube café – though when I finally reached this I found I was the only person to have done so and the cafe was deserted.
There were still fences everywhere as you can see from my photographs but I was able to walk along the Greenway to Hackney Wick and then along the towpath beside the navigation. But the footpath beside the Old River Lea was still blocked off.
By then the light was beginning to fade and the Olympic stadium was gaining a golden glow. I walked a little further along the towpath and photographed the Eton boathouse as the sun was setting setting before crossing the canal and making my way to Hackney Wick station.
Several hundred students, trade unionists, socialists and others marched with UCU London Region down the Strand and into Whitehall shouting slogans against public service cuts, the rich, David Cameron and George Osborne in particular.
Opposite Downing Street they joined with others already protesting there including CND and Stop the War who were calling for the government to stop wasting money on the war in Afghanistan and vanity projects supporting the arms industry such as Trident and its planned replacement.
“The Afghanistan war — which everyone knows is futile and lost — is costing around £6 billion a year. The yearly maintenance costs for Trident are £2.2 billion a year. The cost of renewing the Trident system — which this government is committed to do — would cost up to £130 billion. Two aircraft carriers are being built at a cost of £7 billion. Then there’s the £15 billion to be spent buying 150 F-35 jets from the US, each of which will cost £85 million plus an extra £16 million for the engine.”
The rally began shortly after the marchers arrived. By now it was only just above freezing and speakers were asked to keep their contributions short because of the temperature.
Among the speakers were John McDonnell MP, Kate Hudson of CND, author Owen Jones, Andy Greene of DPAC, Green Party leader Natalie Bennett and others including a nurse from Lewisham Hospital threatened with closures, from the NUT, UK Uncut and other trade unionists.
Kate Hudson CND and Romaine Phoenix Coalition of Resistance/Green Party
Many of the speakers called on trade unions to take effective action against the cuts. calling for union leaders to stop simply speaking against them and take the lead from their members and start organising strike action. But of course few did and the cuts continued unabated.
Lea Navigation & Olympic Site: Saturday 1 October 2011 was a fine day and I decided to go early to Stratford and take a photographic walk around Bow & Stratford Marsh, before a meeting at the View Tube on the Greenway overlooking the Olympic site.
I took the Jubilee Line to Stratford and then walked over the footbridge leading to the Carpenters Estate and then on to Stratford High Street. A great deal of new building was taking place there, including a new bridge to carry the Olympic crowds across the busy road on a route from West Ham station along the Greenway. The bridge was demolished shortly after the games ended.
This section of the Greenway – the path on top of Bazalgette’s Northern Outfall Sewer rebranded in the 1990s – was closed off by fences and I kept on walking down the High Street. A few yards along was one of the few remaining commercial sites, though by then derelict and for sale. It was demolished and the site flattened for the Games, though it was only five years later than penthouses on the new block here were offered for sale.
A few yards off the High Street was City Mill Lock, now behind a row of flats. I continued on to the Lea Navigation. The industrial sites on the High Street had now been cleared and there were now huge advertising structures.
I had come mainly with the intention of making panoramic images, but these don’t display well on this blog, but you can see them larger on My London Diary. A footway now carries the towpath under the Bow Flyover and the High Street and then across the canal where the towpath continues on the opposite bank.
I made far too many pictures around this part of the canal before I could drag myself away, although the sky was not at its best for panoramic images and I would have prefered more distinct clouds rather than the large areas of blue. Only the first section of Cook’s Road was still open, but I could walk along beside St Thomas’s Creek to Marshgate Lane and then make my way to the bright yellow View Tube.
Here I was one of five photographers taking part in what was billed as a ‘Salon de Refuse Olympique‘, showing our artistic responses to the area. It was interesting to see the very different work that the five of us presented. You can read more about this in a post published here two days after the event in 2011, Northern Outfall Sewer 1990, 2005, 2010… which includes the three pictures I contributed for a forthcoming book as well as a lengthy text based on my presentation.
The Olympics have certainly changed this area, and the changes which were showing back in 2011 have continued. Many more pictures – both panoramic and normal aspect ration – in my post on My London Diary at Lea Navigation & Olympic Site.
Cable Car, Victoria Dock, Olympic Site & Torture: I was coming to London to photograph the ‘Say No to Torture‘ protest on the evening of Wednesday 26th June, but as it was a nice day and I came up a few hours earlier to take a ride on London’s cable car and then to take a few pictures around Victoria Dock and Silvertown before making quick visit to the Greenway to see what progress was being made in opening up the former Olympic site.
Emirates ‘Airline’ – Arab Dangleway – North Greenwich – Victoria Dock.
Now known officially since 2022 as the IFS Cloud Cable Car, the dangleway was never a viable transport system, with longer journey time and costing more than alternative routes on almost every conceivable journey.
It doesn’t quite connect up with the rest of Transport for London’s system, the south terminal being a short and slightly confusing walk from North Greenwich Jubilee and bus station, and another fairly short walk on the North bank to Royal Victoria DLR. Completed in June 2012 its cost of £60m made it the most expensive cable car system ever built.
As I noted “it should be promoted as one of London’s cheaper and more interesting tourist attractions” giving great views along the River Thames, although the journey is a relatively short on at 7-10 minutes. with London in the distance, Canary Wharf and the Olympic site a little closer and Bow Creek, Silvertown and the Dome both nearly underneath.
To my surprise, 11 years later the service is still running and TfL say that with the sponsorship deals it actually makes a profit.
I think the more interesting parts of the Thames shoreline here are not yet publicly accessible, but you can – at least most of the time – walk along by Royal Victoria Dock and across the high level bridge for some more interesting views. The area and bridge get closed off when they are flogging illegal arms at the Excel Centre fairs (if you represent a despotic government you’ll have a ticket to that anyway.)
Most of the pictures here were taken from that high level walkway across the dock, but I think I walked on to the stations on the DLR line to Woolwich (then only to North Woolwich) which are elevated and also give some interesting views.
I took the DLR to Canning Town, changed to the JUbilee to Stratford then back to the DLR for the short ride to Puddling Mill Lane, and walked up onto the Greenway, where I’d photogaphed many times in the past.
Progress in releasing the Olympic site to the public appeared to be very slow and there sre still routes closed off in 2024.
It was the ‘International Day in Support of Victims of Torture‘, the anniversary of the UN Convention Against Torture on 26 June 1987, and the London Guantanamo Campaign had organised a protest in Trafalgar Square.
The London Guantanamo Campaign had been active in calling for the closure of Guantanamo and other torture prisons including Bagram in Afghanistan since 2006. In particular the protest was to draw attention to Shaker Aamer, one of the 166 prisoners still held in Guantanamo. A London resident he was captured by bandits in Afghanistan where he was working for a medical charity and sold to the American forces, who tortured him – with the cooperation of the British Secret Service in Bagram, before illegally rendering him to Guantanamo where he continues to be tortured despite having been cleared for release.
In 2013 he was in very poor health having been – along with the majority of the other prisoners there – on hunger strike for 141 days. It was not until 30 October 2015 that he was finally released to the UK.
The US response to the hunger strike had been regular beatings, keeping those taking part in solitary confinement in bare cells and to use forcible feeding, strapping them into a special chair and forcing a feeding tube up a nostril and down into their stomach. The procedure is extremely painful and both this and the sensory deprivation of solitary confinement in bare cells also constitute torture under the UN definitions.
Many of those taking part wore orange Guanatanamo-style jump suits and black hoods and they held up banners an placards saying ‘No To Torture‘ in 30 languages. Some of those taking part were regular protesters with the ‘Save Shaker Aamer Campaign‘ which has been holding daily lunchtime vigils opposite the House of Commons to put pressure on the UK government to release him. Many think his continued imprisonment is because his testimony would embarrass both the UK and US security services who were clearly involved in his torture.
Others were also protesting against torture, with Balochs in Pakistan being subject to arrests and other human rights violations including torture by the Pakistan authorities for campaigning for independence. The protesters held pictures of a number of Baloch activists who have simply disappeared, believed to be held or possibly killed by Pakistani forces.
And protesters also drew attention to the US treatment of award-winning British poet and translator Talha Ahsan who suffers from Aspergers syndrome. He was extradited from the UK and was currently awaiting trial in solitary confinement in a high-security state prison in Connecticut because of alleged association with an Islamic web site and publishing house said to have links with terrorism. He was eventually released after 8 years following a plea bargain in December 2013 when time already served in the UK and US prisons was ‘time already served.’
Global Civility and Stratford Marsh – On Saturday February 18th 2006 I photographed one of the continuing protests around the world which followed the publication by a Danish magazine of cartoons featuring images of the Prophet Mohammad in Trafalgar Square, then took the underground and DLR to Pudding Mill Lane station on Stratford Marsh to take more pictures of the area which was to be demolished for the London Olympics.
Proclamation for Global Civility – Trafalgar Square
Muslim protesters packed Trafalgar Square for a protest by the Muslim Action Committee over the publication of the cartoons which they regard as blasphemous, but also to publicise a ‘proclamation of global civility‘. The key points of this were the recognition of human dignity as a fundamental right, the need to good manners and etiquette in serious debate, a desire to avoid irresponsible behaviour and to underline the significance of mutual respect for a harmonious co-existence.
The protest in London was kept in good order by stewards who remonstrated with some of the demonstrators who were in some way not behaving as they thought they should, and also moved photographers away from them and some other groups. But other protests around the world were much less restrained and news agencies that same day reported rioting outside the Italian consulate in Benghazi, Libya in which at least 10 people were killed as well as the storming and burning of Christian churches in northern Nigeria with at least 16 deaths.
“As I pointed out in my report in 2006, human dignity was recognised as vital in “the preamble to the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 217 of 10 December 1948. That declaration also contains a number of important safeguards such as ‘the right to freedom of opinion and expression‘ and states ‘in the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.'”
There are still many countries around the world where the principles of human rights in that declaration are not observed, including in many in the Muslim world.
Manners and etiquette are clearly very different in different societies and different religions certainly have very different views, particularly over blasphemy and apostasy. In the west we now prioritise freedom of speech and look back in horror at the Spanish Inquisition and trails for heresy and blasphemy, although in England and Wales, the ‘blasphemy’ and ‘blasphemous libel’ laws were only abolished in 2008, and in Scotland in 2021, while they are still in force in Northern Ireland.
The last conviction for blasphemy in England and Wales was in 1977 when the editor of Gay News received a suspended prison sentence after publishing the poem ‘The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name’ by James Kirkup, and in Scotland it was more than a century earlier when a bookseller was jailed for 15 months in 1843, though until 1825 it had been punishable by death.
While we may find some of the cartoons that were published offensive, it clearly does not justify the irresponsible behaviour and criminal actions of some Muslim mobs protesting against them.
Away from the stewards as I wandered through the crowd I was generally welcomed by the protesters, with many urging me to take their pictures. I left as the speeches, most of which I could not understand as few spoke in English, were finishing and people were getting ready to march,
I’d first photographed Stratford Marsh back in the early 1980s as part of a wider project on the River Lea, once a large and important industrial area in London, but like most of British industry falling into decline, accelerated by the policies of the Thatcher government determined to transform Britain away from manufacturing and into services.
Stratford Marsh was then full of largely small businesses employing local people and many still remained in 2006, though already blighted both by government policies and the tax breaks given to the nearby Docklands area. Now Olympic blight had set in with the whole area to be remodelled, and there were also areas which would be demolished for Crossrail.
As I wrote back then and I think my pictures show:
It is still an intriguing area, where a few yards can take you from wilderness to industrial wasteland, from dereliction to busy workshops (though most were closed on a Saturday afternoon.) Parts are visibly closing down, with compulsory purchase orders hanging on lamposts, some footpaths closed and factories demolished.
There was one small sign of a kind of regeneration. the unusual lock between the Bow Back Rivers and Waterworks River at Baker Road, for many years derelict, at last seems to have been replaced.
