On My Brompton in Essex: On Thursday 26th August 2004 I went for a ride on my Brompton in Essex on the north bank of the Thames, in an area sometimes known as the Thames Gateway. If anyone doesn’t know, the Brompton is one of the best folding bikes around, with 16 inch wheels, folding quickly to a fairly small package which can be carried onto trains and buses. I don’t ride it so much now, as I find it rather heavy to carry, particularly when loaded with my camera gear.
Chafford Hundred, Grays, Essex
I bought the Brompton at the end of 2002, and spent a lot of time riding it for exercise on doctor’s orders during recovery from a minor heart problem at the start of 2003. It coincided with the purchase of my first digital camera capable of professional results, the 6.1Mp Nikon D100 DSLR.
Royal Victoria Dock
For a year or two I worked with both digital and film, particularly because at the start I had only one Nikon lens, a 24-85mm zoom, giving an equivalent on the DX format camera to 36-128mm on full-frame, but I used a range of wider lenses on film. By 2004 I had added the remarkable Sigma 12-24mm (18-36mm equiv) to my bag, and many of the pictures I made that day were taken with that lens. I think it was the first affordable ultra-wide zoom, and certainly the results on DX format were very usable.
Channel Tunnel Rail link under construction at Purfleet
As well as the Nikon I also had a film camera, a Russian Horizon 202 swing lens panoramic camera. You can see some of the pictures I made with this among those on the Thames Gateway (Essex) section on the Urban Landscapes site.
Dartford Bridge and Channel Tunnel rail link, Thurrock
I began taking pictures that day at Victoria Dock in Canning Town, having taken the Brompton on the train to Waterloo and then the Jubilee Line there, before cycling to West Ham station to catch the C2C rail service to Rainham, all on a Travelcard. It’s something of a blow that TfL now intends to discontinue the Travelcard, which provided relatively cheap and simple travel for most of my photography.
Here is what I wrote about the day back in August 2004 – with minor corrections, particularly changing to normal capitalisation.
I like to make good use of my Travelcards, so Rainham, the last station out of Fenchurch St in zone 6 is a good destination. I pointed the Brompton first to Purfleet, to take a look at the state of play on the high-speed rail link, and also a new development in the old chalkpits, then on towards the Dartford bridge.
The Bridge Act obliges the operators to transport cycles and pedestrians across free of charge, and I cycled up the path towards it to claim this right, before changing my mind and deciding i didn’t want to go to the other side. Instead I took the new road through the West Thurrock Marshes industrial area and on to St Clements church, now a nature sanctuary, in the middle of a detergent factory.
It’s a quiet and pleasant place to eat sandwiches, though the smell of the perfuming agent is pervasive. There I planned a route largely along side roads, cycle paths and footpaths to Upminster, taking in Chafford Hundred, South Ockenden and Belhus Park and woods. It made a pleasant ride, though I had to make a few detours, and the B isn’t too stable on slimy mud, so some paths made for interesting riding, with the added pleasures of bramble thorns and nettles.
My London Diary
All of the pictures on this post were taken on the Nikon D100. There are a quite a lot more on My London Diary.
Some of my thoughts about the UK railway system and my experiences of it with pictures from a protest on Thursday 20th July 2017 about the real problems faced by disabled rail users.
I’ve spent quite a lot of my life on trains. Not many very long journeys, though I did once go to Marseilles from Victoria long before the age of Eurostar and TGVs and I’ve always taken the train on my visits to Paris, Brussels and Scotland as well as most trips around England as I don’t drive. But the great bulk of my rail journeys have shorter commutes to photograph in and around London.
It was really the advent of the Travelcard in 1983 and its later extensions that made much of my photography of London practicable. Before that going Waterloo (or Vauxhall) had been easy for me, but getting around in London was a nightmare of buying tickets for individual journeys on trains, underground and buses. Well paid photographers could use taxis, but I was making little for most of the time and used them only rarely – mainly when others were paying or we could share.
The Travelcard also significantly reduced the costs of journeys involving several forms or transport or even several buses, and for those of us coming from outside London gave us freedom to travel within all six zones of Greater London. So news that it is to be ended for those living outside the boundary is not at all welcome.
More recently, engineering works at weekends and rail strikes have also affected my photography. There have been days when I’ve decided not to try to get into London as the though of perhaps an extra couple of hours or even more sitting on trains and buses have just made it not seem worthwhile.
Of course I support the rail workers. The government’s approach to the disputes, forcing the various rail companies into confrontation rather than trying to find solutions is totally ridiculous and unsupportable. At the root of the problem is the fragmentation of privatisation and the opportunities it gave and continues to give the companies – many owned by foreign state railways – opportunities to profit at the expense of the tax payer. Radical reforms are needed, almost certainly involving some bringing back of rail into public ownership and undoing at least some elements of splitting up the essentially indivisible.
And engineering work is essential, though I do wonder why it seems to happen now far more frequently than it used to. It does seem to be handled more efficiently in some continental countries and involve less disruption of weekend services.
The government and rail companies are now proposing to get rid of most of the rail ticket offices. We have a hugely complex ticketing system with many anomalies and which ticket machines and online ticketing are unable to process. Even the workers in ticket offices can’t always get things right. But before cutting back on their services which many – particularly the old, disabled and less frequent travellers – find essential, we need first to unify and simplify rail ticketing.
We have seen some improvements of our rail system since I first began using it back in the 1960s. There have been considerable improvements in rolling stock, begun under British Rail as did our faster services and Inter City lines, some electrified at that from London to Manchester. Design improvements have also changed our commuter trains (though in some areas these are still sadly out of date) making my journeys into London much less noisy and smoother.
I do miss not being able to open windows and doors, but can see the reasons for this. But though we no longer have to wait at stations while the guard or station staff rush along the platform to close doors thoughtlessly left open by exiting passengers making the stops at stations a minute or so shorter, and though the newer trains have better acceleration and faster maximum speeds and are running on smoother rails, travel times have actually increased.
The reason for the slacker timetables is clear. Train companies have to pay for trains that run late. So they add a minute here and a minute there to the schedules. They also close train doors before the time the train is due to leave, sometimes 30s, sometimes a minute. So my 9.59 train is now a 9.58:30 train, often leaving passengers who should have just caught it fuming on the platform. And instead of the journey taking 28 minutes it now takes 34 – or even 38 at weekends.
DPAC/RMT ‘Right to Ride’ protest – Dept of Transport
But my problems and moans about trains are trivial compared to those faced by those in wheelchairs or otherwise requiring support. On Thursday 20th July 2017 I was with DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) and RMT members outside the Dept of Transport, calling for disabled people to have the same right to use rail services as others.
DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) had called this protest during their week of action while the London World Para Athletics Championships was taking place. DPAC say the government uses this and similar events to try to show it is highly supportive of the disabled while actually they are highly discriminatory against all those who are not high-performing para-athletes.
Many of the changes which the government is trying to impose on our railways, including Driver Only Operated trains, the removal of guards from trains and rail staff from stations all threaten the freedom of disable people to travel. DPAC have joined with RMT staff on picket lines for industrial action against these changes which discriminate against the disabled and threaten rail safety.
Disabled people requiring support to travel – such as a ramp to board a train – have to give a day’s notice, and even then are sometimes stranded when staff fail to turn up – often being left on the platform or taken to the next station. London buses now have driver-operated ramps, but no trains have these fitted.
After speeches and delivering a petition demanding the right to ride on trains without having to give a day’s notice they blocked the road outside the ministry in protest for ten minutes. DPAC are now protesting with rail workers against the proposed ticket office closures.
I do like to get my money’s worth from a Travelcard. Because of some Tory gerrymandering in the 1960s the area where I live was the only part of Middlesex not to become a London borough, which means that despite my age I don’t qualify for a ‘Freedom Pass’ but am still paying for rail and underground travel.
I do of course get a national bus pass, which does save me a great deal, and a Senior Rail Card gets me a third off my rail fares except during the morning peak – and is a bargain at £70 for 3 years. But still the travel to and around London working costs me around £1500 a year – yet another reason to curse the Tories.
The Freedom Pass was introduced by a Labour GLC in 1973, largely pushed through by the effort’s of Ken Livinstone’s Deputy Illtyd Harrington. Welcome though it was for pensioners, transport in London remained a difficult and expensive business for those of us younger at the time, with journeys generally requiring the purchase of a separate ticket for each stage in any journey.
Again it was under a Labour GLC that the Travelcard was introduced in 1983-4 (the later year for the one-day version) although its use was restricted until the Capitalcard in 1985 added rail travel to Underground and buses. This was replaced by a revised Travelcard in 1989 which included rail and DLR services, which despite changes in London’s governance and travel systems remains in use with only minor changes today.
The Travelcard made my extensive photography of Greater London from 1986-2000 possible, or at least greatly simplified the logistics, particularly in removing the need to queue at tube and rail stations to buy a ticket for each stage of the journey. Improvements in providing information about services, and latterly the online Journey Planner and Googlehave also greatly simplified the process, which previously had meant much tedious work with paper timetables and tube and bus maps as well as the London A-Z. Though with a little intelligence it often remains possible to find faster routes than those suggested online, which occasionally verge on the bizarre.
On April 30th my Travelcard first took me to Waterloo, and then on the tube to Westminster. After photographing the protests there it was back on the tube to London Bridge and then by rail to New Cross and a short walk to Goldsmiths. I then returned by train to London Bridge, again taking the tube to Westminster, where I photographed a protest by XR Families at the Treasury. I walked back to Westminster station and again took the Jubilee Line, this time to Finchley Road, with a short walk to cover a protest against a fundraiser to recruit young people to the Israeli army at the JW3 Jewish Community Centre. This is close to Finchley Road & Frognal station from which I caught the Overground to Richmond for a South West Railway train home.
I think the day would have needed a combination of 5 or 6 single or return tickets for the various stages in the pre-Travelcard era, each involving queing to buy a ticket from a clerk in the ticket office. I don’t think I could have contemplated a journey like this and had I done so it would have been expensive. I felt my Travelcard had served me well.
More about the last two protests of the day and of course more pictures:
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.
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