The passage was probably built around 1859-63 when the West London Extension Railway was built, disrupting a local route that links what is now Cabul Road with Sheepcote Lane on the eastern side of Latchmere Road.
The railway was an important route crossing the Thames and the three lines that cross Latchmere Passage, each on its own viaduct and bridge, link it to the lines into Waterloo, to the north platforms of Clapham Junction serving lines out of Waterloo and those on the south side for the lines out of Victoria. The latter two bridges are now used by Overground and Thameslink trains.
Cabul Road is part of the estate here and to the west of Falcon Road developed as the Falcon Park estate by Alfred Heaver in 1879 – 1881, with street names taken from the battles of the Second Afghan War (1878–80) and the 1879 Zulu War. Almost all of the area was covered with small two-storey terraced houses, with the exception of this 1885 Milton Congregational Hall, designed by Searle & Hayes in a restrained Queen Anne style.
Congregationalists had worshipped at Milton Hall, Battersea since 1873, presumably in some earlier building and after its congregation combined with Battersea Congregational Church in the 1930s had various uses including as a film studio. It was recently redeveloped, retaining the facade, as residential properties.
A large part of the area was damaged by wartime bombing and after the war converted to open and rather featureless green spaces, Shillington Gardens and Falcon Park.
This is one of three semi-deatched pairs of houses on Falcon Road which date from around 1850 when the area began to be developed by William Willmer Pocock, an architect and prominent Methodist and Thomas Daniel Carter who owned much of the land. Carter had sold some of the land to Pocock as containing brick earth, and Pocock set up the Falcon Brick Works here. But the bricks were not too good and the area soon began to be built over.
Next door to the dentists was Grove End House, also built around 1850 and now rather altered as the Battersea Mosque.
Knowsley Rd, Battersea, Wandsworth, 1989 89-7o-24
I realised then that I had missed out the Poyntz Road triangle, a small triangle of roads between the railway lines to the east of Latchmere Road, and I retraced my steps to Latchmere Road, then crossed over into Knowsley Road.
The picture shows the end of the road just beyond its junction with Shellwood Road. The houses here were built in the 1870s and seem little changed now. The archway led through to a yard with buildings around it, I think workshops, though there is now a more recent block of flats. The Overground from Clapham Junction to Wandsworth Road runs on an embankment to the right of the houses here.
I took a couple of pictures on Latchmere Road, not on-line, and continued north up Battersea Bridge Road, where I made this picture of a doorway with a rather flimsy-looking railing and what appears to be a fairly subtantial tree. The house and doorway are still there and in rather better condition but there is no sign of the the tree and its hard to see where it could have been growing.
By now I was looking for a bus stop to take me back to Clapham Junction, just a few yards further up the street. This was the end of my walk in July 1989 though I returned to Battersea a few days later.
Thames Path, Tradescants, Leake Street – On Monday 10th November 2014 I went on a walk with some of my family in Lambeth, where my sister in particular was keen to visit the Garden Museum in the deconsecrated St Mary’s Church next to Lambeth Palace.
We began our walk at Waterloo station, making our way to the riverside path along by the Thames and walking west past St Thomas’s Hospital. A lttle beyond that in front of Lambeth Palace is a memorial bust of Violette Szabo, (1921-1945) standing on a monument to the SOE, the Maquis and the Norwegian resistance commandos, heroes of Telemark. Szabo, a Lambeth resident, was posthumously awarded the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre and was one of the 117 of the 470 agents the SOE sent to France who did not survive
On My London Diary I give some more detail about the setting up of this museum after Rosemary Weekes (later Nicholson) began her campaign to save the church and the fine tomb of father and son John Tradescant, 17th century plant hunters and royal gardeners in its churchyard as a Museum of Garden History. Her work together with her husband John Nicholson is commemorated in the garden with a plaque.
I posted a photograph of a sculpture commemorating the two John Tradescants – father and son – a few days ago in the post Old Clapham Road and South Lambeth – 1989 and wrote rather more about them later in another post on my 1989 walk, Tradescant, Old South Lambeth Rd and Caron, which began with a picture of houses on Tradescant Road, built on the site of their home in South Lambeth, and I’ll try not to repeat myself more than I need here.
The Tradescant tomb was first commissioned by Hester Tradescant, the widow of the younger John when he died in 1662 and had elaborate carvings depicting rather fancifully some of the specimens of various kinds from their travels in search for new plants around much of the world. These formed the basis of the first public museum in England – the Lambeth Ark – and were fraudulently stolen by a neighbour who pretended to support this who later presented them to Oxford University to establish the Ashmolean Museum.
By the mid-nineteenth century the original memorial was in very poor condition, probably attacked by the noxious acidic fumes from the many industries in the area, and in 1853 a replica was re-carved using limestone from Darley Dale in Derbyshire.
Also in the museum garden if the tomb of the notorious Captain Bligh of the Bounty, on whose ships the Tradescants brought back some of their plants. John Tradescant the Older had begun work as gardener to one of the wealthiest families in England and here there is a recreation of one of his Knot Gardens, based on designs for gardens at Hatfield and Cranbourne.
The museum is well worth a visit, particularly for keen gardeners, and has a pleasant cafe and of course a shop. The Tradescants also set up what was possibly the first garden centre a short distance away, though I think you would have then needed very deep pockets to buy any of their plants, many of which are now very common in our gardens.
We walked back through Archbishop’s Park, a public park with some fine trees and some green cyclists.
And came out on Lambeth Palace Road which has some modern buildings and a large metal sculpture, South of the River’ by Bernard Schottlander (b.1924) which was cast by British Steel in 1976 outside the offices at Becket House. As we went past the Lying-In Hospital (now just a frontage to a recent hotel) I found we had over 20 minutes before our train so I led our group down into Leake Street.
Although much of several parts of London are now covered with graffiti I think this tunnel remains the only officially sanctioned area for artists. I’d been there on various occasions but I think it was the first time the others in our group had been there
It wasn’t the fastest way to get into Waterloo Station, and took us to the far end from where our trains now run from the former Waterloo International platforms, but we still caught our train with time to spare.
Many more pictures from the walk and museum garden – including more graffiti – on My London Diary at Lambeth Walk.
Gun & Knife Crime, Equiano & St John’s: I went to two events in North London on Sunday 14th October 2007, a local march against gun and knife crime and then a Black History Month event in Abney Park Cemetery. And on my way home I stopped to take a few pictures of the church opposite Waterloo Station.
Communities Against Gun and Knife Crime, Hackney
In the 2000’s a stretch of road between Upper Clapton and Lower Clapton attracted the title ‘Murder Mile’ in the press after eight people were shot dead on the street or in the streets just off the main road over a period of two years. Of course there are some other cities around the world – including in the USA – where that number of deaths in a week or even a day would not be unusual. But London is generally a very safe city and Clapton is one of a number of areas which has more than its share of gun and knife crime.
This is an area with a number of night clubs and where drug dealing is common and a large proportion of the shootings and deaths are related to these, often involving people from outside the area.
But young people who live in and around the area are also caught up in gun and knife crime and one death is one too many, particularly when it involves your friends or family. Like many areas of London it houses a wide social mix, and these crimes particularly involve the poorer members of the community, many of whom are black.
The march organised by Communities Against Gun And Knife Crime appeared to have no support from either of the two London Boroughs concerned – Hackney and Haringey – or from the Met police, who did escort it. The only other organisation which I could see was supporting it was Hackney Respect, a local group of the left-wing Respect party.
The march began at Clapton Pond with a prayer by a Black Church Sister, and then moved slowly north up the Lower Clapton Road and across the Lea Bridge Roundabout and up the Upper Clapton Road. I had to leave before the end for my second event.
The march was smaller than I had expected with fewer than a hundred people taking part, and although it atrracted waves and shouts of support from people as it passed, few if any of them came to join it. As I commented, “marches like this are surely useful in raising community awareness, and it is hard to see why there was so little support from either the public, local authorities or other local groups – including the other political parties, churches and other community groups.” Apart from myself there was a photographer from a local paper reporting on the event, but no other media interest. I don’t think any of the pictures or my report which I filed to an agency were ever used.
Here is my final comment from my 2007 article:
The real challenge in cutting youth crime – and gun and knife crime is mainly youth crime – is getting people, and especially young people – real jobs that offer training and possibilities for advancement. At the moment there are too few jobs for young people, and many pay below a living wage, especially a living wage for London. While crime offers the only way to money, prestige and apparent success, many will take that route.
Equiano Society – His Daughter’s Grave – Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington
I joined a Black History Month walk led by Arthur Torrington OBE, the secretary of the Equiano Society which ended around the grave of Joanna Vassa, the daughter of Olaudah Equiano.
As the web site Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the African shows he was a truly remarkable man. Probably born around 1745 in what is now Nigeria he was kidnapped and sold into slavery as a child and taken to Barbados. In 1745 he became slave to a captain in the Royal Navy who renamed him Gustavus Vassa, and taught him to be a seaman and also sent him to school in London to learn to read and write. Later was bought by a Quaker merchant in Philadelphia who set him to work on one of his trading ships. Equiano was also able to engage in some trading for himself, and in four years made the £40 that his master had paid for him and was able to buy his freedom.
After various adventures in 1743 he came to London and became involved in the fight against slavery, although at first he was engaged in projects to set up black colonies in Central America and Sierra Leone, becoming for the latter the first black civil servant – but after he pointed out corruption among some officials he was quickly sacked.
He then wrote the book which made him famous, ‘The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the African‘ which was an autobiography, a description of the horrors of slavery and a polemic calling for its abolition. It was a success when published in 1789 and he earned a considerable income from it. In 1792 he married an English woman, Susanna Cullen, at Soham in Cambridgeshire and they had two daughters, one of whom after his death in 1797 inherited his estate of £950 (equivalent to around £100,000 now.)
Joanna Vassa later married the Congregational minister, Henry Bromley, and in 2005 their joint grave (also of Henry’s second wife) was discovered in Abney Park Cemetery, fallen down and covered by moss and undergrowth. Much of the inscription was worn away, but the names remained and the stone was restored and re-erected.
St John’s Church, now opposite Waterloo Station was one of a number of churches built in the years of national triumph following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 with money granted by acts of Parliament to the Church Building Commission in 1818 and 1824 totalling £1.5 million. A total of 612 new churches were built by the Church Commissioners, mainly in the new and expanding industrial towns and cities, but initially “particularly in the Metropolis and its Vicinity“.
London south of the river was expanding rapidly, with new industries and a great deal of housing. The church was designed by Francis Octavius Bedford and built in 1822-1824 in a Greek Revival style – as were his other churches for the commissioners in Camberwell, West Norwood and Trinity Church Square, Southwark.
The site chosen, close to the foot of Waterloo Bridge was a difficult one, being a pond and a swamp, and John Rennie the Younger was consulted for advice about the foundations. This has proved sound as the building, despite being badly bombed in 1940 and standing in ruins until 1950 and the construction of the Jubilee Line underneath is still sound. It was restored and rededicated in 1951 as a part of the Festival of Britain, and again controversially in recent years which removed some of the later features.
I think I probably had just missed a train home from Waterloo Station opposite, a later development which opened as Waterloo Bridge Station in 1848, and had some time to wait for the next. Soon I was on a train home.
Sunday December 14th 2008 was a cold and cloudy but bright winter day as I made my way from Waterloo Station to Columbia Market, stopping to take a few pictures of the young men jumping around the street structures by the Waterloo roundabout before catching a bus to Bethnal Green to photograph in Columbia Market.
The market was busy with people buying Christmas trees, decorations and flowers, but I hadn’t really come with the right camera to work unobtrusively, but was using the DSLR-size Nikon D300 with the rather bulky original DX Nikkor 18-200mm zoom, a versatile combination but not the best for this kind of work. I wandered around taking a few pictures before leaving to walk to Brick Lane.
I was early for the protest which was to take place there, and took some pictures, mainly of graffiti while I was waiting. As I noted, “Somehow the people seem less interesting than in the old days, less eccentric and dodgy characters, and,except on the very fringes, the market seems rather more commercial in character.”
But the market was also useful for me, as I was getting a little cold, and when I put my hand in my coat pocket found my woolly hat was no longer there. ” A couple of stalls along I found a new one for a quid, with a label calling it a fashion hat and a £9.99 price tag. And there were fancy chocolates like the ones I couldn’t bring myself to pay the ridiculous prices in Waitrose going for around a quarter of the cost… ” But there wasn’t room for anything else in my camera bag.
Solidarity with Whitechapel Anarchists! – Brick Lane, 14th December 2008
The previous week members of Whitechapel Anarchist Group were harassed by police while distributing their newsletter at the top of Brick Lane and had called for support this week to carry out their entirely legal activities here.
This week a largish contingent of police had come along to watch, obviously expecting trouble, but at first they mainly stood on the opposite side of the road, observing and photographing the protesters. When one protester stood in front of an officer taking pictures he was hauled off a short distance down the road and questioned before being marched away to a waiting police van. I photographed this, taking care to keep at a distance where I was clearly not obstructing the police. Apparently they decided to arrest him for swearing when he was being questioned, although this Is clearly not an offence.
The police spent rather a lot of time photographing and videoing me during the event, in a way that was obviously meant to harass me, as well as similarly harassing the protesters. This happens regularly at protests, and the police have at times admitted keeping a photographic database in which they can look up people and see which demonstrations they have attended. Though as I noted, all those I go to are recorded in My London Diary.
Police search a woman – I think just someone passing by the protest
Some time later I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Metropolitan Police to try and find out what photographs and videos they had in their files showing me, giving a list of some of the occasions where I knew they had taken pictures. The response denied they had any pictures of me.
As my account ended, “Clearly their activities around Brick Lane today were a waste of public money, and worse than that. They don’t make us any safer and were not combating any real threat to public order. If they have an agenda it seems purely political.”
Solidarity with Revolt in Greece – Dalston, 4th December 2008
I arrived outside Dalston Kingsland station at 2.30pm to find a group of around 50 protesters waiting on the pavement outside station for a protest march in solidarity with protests by Greek anarchists following the killing of a 15 year old youth by the Athens police.
The police had come in force to the starting point of a march which would have walked peacefully along the streets to the peace mural on Dalston Lane for a rally with some speeches and some noisy chanting. It would only have caused a few minutes stoppage to traffic as they had marched the short distance along the road.
At the end of the rally the couple of hundred who had turned up would probably have dispersed to their homes and local pubs and the event would have ended with no trouble. But police decided to provoke a confrontation by taking action against people wearing scarves across their faces – part of the anarchist ‘uniform’.
Another protester is arrested and searched
But this makes it hard for the police to take photographs for the database that they usually deny they have. Section 60(4A) of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, Act gives the police powers to require the removal of face coverings that an officer is satisfied is worn wholly or mainly to conceal identity, provided that an officer of or above the rank of inspector has given an authorisation for such action within a given area for a period of up to 24 hours.
So either they were acting illegally or clearly they had decided in advance to obtain this authorisation and were determined to make use of it. Obviously this was going to cause trouble. They began by approaching one of a men beside a banner with the message ’15 YEAR OLD SHOT DEAD BY GREEK COPS PIGS KILLERS’ and told him to remove his mask. An argument ensued and eventually, still wearing his mask he was led away.
Police then grabbed another protester who was alleged to have punched a policeman, ppushing him to the pavement and searching him. Other people protested at the violence being used and I think at least one of these was also arrested. Others held up a banner with what seemed now to be a rather appropriate slogan for London as well as Greece, ‘TERRORISM IS THE POLICE IN OUR STREETS’.
A police officer who apparently failed to photograph me :-)
More masked protesters were grabbed by police, though I’m not sure how many were actually arrested. Police began to form a cordon around the protesters in front of the station and photographers were made to go outside this – and there were quite a few protesters now on the opposite side of the street – being photographed and videoed by police.
Arresting for arguing his legal rights
Police vans were then moved up between the photographers and the main part of the protect, conveniently hiding most of what was taking place from the press. But we saw a protester who tried to argue his legal rights with police being handcuffed – in a rather panotmime fashion in my series of pictures. Those protesters who were not yet held inside the police cordon then surged out onto the main road – a red route – and blocked traffic entirely until police – at least one officer using his baton – pushed them back.
By this time, many of the black-clad and masked anarchists who were not inside the police kettle had moved away leaving mainly Greek supporters of the protest on the opposite side of the road.
It seemed clear that the police had come to the event determined to turn it into a show of force between police and protesters – and that the police had won. But in doing so they had spent a small fortune in public money and caused an hour and a half of disruption to normal life and to traffic on one of North London’s main arteries. And what may I thought may have been meant as “some kind of political charade organised to increase public support for increasing surveillance and repressive legislation” had in fact rather suggested the truth of the largest banner at the protest’s opening statement ‘THE STATE IS THE ONLY TERRORIST’.
COP26 was in some respects a great disappointment, or rather would have been had we expected very much to arise out of it. But there were some advances, and just a slight glimmer of hope that it may prompt a little more progress in our efforts to save our future on the planet. But that it happened at all and in the way it did is very much down to the efforts of people on the street to raise awareness of the realities of climate change.
Without groups that have been campaigning for years we would have no hope at all, and whatever people think about some of the policies of Extinction Rebellion, it has been one of the more effective movements in bringing the message to the attention of the media, politicians and the public.
Even in the unfortunately toned down words of the COP26 final resolution, the message from the banner in the assembly at the top of this post is now clear: ‘FOSSIL FUEL ERA OVER’ though it still remains to be seen if it can be brought to an end fast enough for us to survive.
On Saturday 17th November 2018, Extinction Rebellion rebels managed to block five of the bridges in central London: Lambeth, Westminster, Waterloo, Blackfriars and Southwark. It was an ambitious project that brought much of London’s traffic to a standstill and gauranteed extensive media coverage. You can march 50,000 through London and it won’t merit a mention on the BBC unless windows are broken or police injured – but this was something that could not be ignored, and despite the interests of the billionaire media owners, at least some journalists began asking the right questions and writing the right answers.
I tried to photograph events on as many of the bridges as possible, though with no buses able to run in central London this involved rather a lot of walking. In the end I failed to make it to Lambeth Bridge, where some of the more robust actions by police against the protesters took place.
Here’s my description of XR from one of the three posts I made about them that day:
Extinction Rebellion is a non-violent rebellion against the British government for its criminal inaction in the face of the climate change catastrophe and ecological collapse which is currently on course to make human life extinct. They demand the government tell the truth about the climate emergency, reverse their inconsistent policies and work to communicate and educate everyone, that they bring in legally binding policies to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025 and reduce our consumption of all resources, with a national Citizen’s Assembly to oversee the changes and create a real democracy.
More protests will be needed around the world to make politicians do what needs to be done – and I was photographing Extinction Rebellion in London last Saturday when they protested in the annual Lord Mayor’s Show.
My day was made busier as there was another unrelated event taking place that I also wanted to photograph, a Unity against Fascism and Racism march from the BBC to a rally in Whitehall calling for unity against the rising threat of Islamophobia and Antisemitism by far-right groups in the UK, with a level of support for fascism not seen since the 1930s. I missed the start but spent around half an hour taking pictures as it came down Regent St.
More on all these and more pictures on My London Diary:
The cake came outside the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) where PCS members who work as cleaners and catering workers were beginning the first ever indefinite strike at a government ministry, demanding they be paid the London Living Wage, and get decent conditions of employment.
It was the third anniversary of the founding of the BEIS, and also the third anniversary of the campaign to get the workers there decent pay and to be employed directly by the BEIS, rather than outsourcing companies ISS and Aramark whose only concern is cutting costs to the bone by exploiting the workers so they can undercut competitors for the contracts and make profits at the workers’ expense.
A crowd of around a hundred supporters was there to cheer the strikers when they came out of the BEIS to begin their strike and there were speeches from trade unionists including PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka, RMT General Secretary Mick Cash, and UCU’s Jo Grady as well as then Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP and some of the BEIS workers. I did manage to get a piece of the cake before I had to leave for the Royal Courts of Justice.
Extinction Rebellion had brought the yacht to to court to begin their ‘Summer Uprising’, another series of protests in five major cities against the criminal inaction by the government on climate and ecological collapse. The yacht was named Polly Higgins after the Scottish barrister who fought for years for an Ecocide Law and had died of cancer 3 months earlier, only 50.
When I arrived some kind of new age ceremony was taking place with people bringing water from across the country to pour into a large bowl and a Druid celebrant in long white robes. It’s one of the kind of things that makes it hard for many to take XR seriously as a movement.
But of course it is serious and the crisis that we face is existential. An ecocide law would be a powerful way to restrain some of the worst excesses of companies that are driving us to extinction. There were some good speeches at the event, with some very clear thinking, but also a few which made me cringe a little.
Eventually it was time to march, with the pink Dodo and the yacht, making our way across the river towards Waterloo where XR was to set up a camp on Waterloo Millenium Green.
There really is a climate and ecological emergency, with too many species going the way of the dodo, and we do need governments to tell the truth and make real and difficult actions to halt what seems an inevitable slide into irreversible heating which will make the world uninhabitable for many species, probably including our own. It’s time to end the kind of lip-service which has our government setting targets long into the future while ramping up disastrous policies like Heathrow expansion, road-building and coal mines.
The yacht went with them at the back of the procession, which halted for some time to block Waterloo Bridge, remembering the many arrests there in the previous XR protests, before continuing. It was then stopped by police on Waterloo Rd, causing far more rush hour traffic chaos than necessary by completely blocking the Waterloo roundabout. Eventually they were allowed to continue and occupy the green space they were heading for, but by that time I had left and walked into Waterloo station to catch my train home.
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.
Saturday November 17th 2018 saw the start of Extinction Rebellion’s beidge blocade in central London, bringing the city to a standstill by blocking Lambeth, Westminster, Waterloo, Blackfriars and Southwark bridges. I joined them for the first couple of hours on Westminster Bridge.
From there I went to pay brief visits to three of the other four bridges that XR had blocked, choosing those downstream which were relatively easy to reach on foot.
I didn’t go to Lambeth Bridge, upstream from Westminster, as I ran out of time before another event I wanted to cover. It would have meant too long a walk as the nearest tube station is some distance away and there were no buses able to run. Later I found that it was at Lambeth that the police had been more active in making arrests and attempting to clear the bridge.
I arrived too late for the start of the march organised by Stand Up To Racism, co-sponsored by Unite Against Fascism and Love Music Hate Racism, and supported by many other groups and individuals including Diane Abbott MP and John McDonnell MP against the against the rising threat of Islamophobia and Antisemitism by far-right groups in the UK.
It was a large march and had gathered outside the BBC in Portland Place because the organisers wanted to point to the failure of the BBC to recognise the threat of these extremist groups with a level of support for fascism not seen since the 1930s.
The BBC does appear to have a policy limiting reporting on issues such as this, and of ignoring or minimising protests in the UK against failures of government. When they have reported, they have often talked of ‘hundreds’ of protesters when a more objective view would have said ‘thousands’ or perhaps even ‘tens of thousands.’ They do a far better job in reporting protests in foreign cities than in London.
Half an hour after I began taking pictures the marchers were still walking past me, but I thought that it was nearing the end and I left, not to go to the rally in Whitehall but to return to Westminster Bridge for the Exctinction Rebellion protest where there were speakers from around the country and around the world, some of whom travelled to speak on several of the five blocked bridges. After the speeches there was a Citizen’s Assembly but by then I was tired and left to go home, edit and file my pictures – more hours of work.
Protests by XR have done a little to shake the complacency of our government and others around the world and move them to action to avoid the rapidly approaching climate disaster, but it remains a case of too little, too late. Certainly so for many countries in the global South already suffering dire consequences, but probably also for us in the wealthier countries. Covid-19 has shown that governments can take drastic actions, (if ours cost many thousands of lives by making decisions too late and avoiding basic precautions) but it will need a similar upending of priorities and changes in our way of life to avoid the worst effects of climate change – and there can be no vaccine to end climate change.
More about the events and more pictures on My London Diary:
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.
Although police had put up with Extinction Rebellion blocking the Strand for their protest outside the Royal Courts of Justice calling for an Ecocide Lay, by late afternoon they were beginning to demand that people move or be arrested for blocking the highway.
XR had already identified a site where they were hoping to camp for the next few days, close to Waterloo, so in late afternoon they formed up to march the relatively short distance to their new home atWaterloo Millennium Green.
As well as around a thousand marchers there was also a giant pink dodo and a rather large blue yacht, the Polly Higgins, named for the environmental lawyer who fought for years for a law against ecocide and died this April. I hadn’t seen them moving a yacht through the streets before and was interested to see exactly how that would be done.
Another attraction of the march for me was that it would take me to Waterloo Station, where I could catch a train home. I had intended to march all the way, but actually gave up when the march was held up for some minutes on the Waterloo Road.
Earlier we had crossed Waterloo Bridge, where police had made many arrests of XR protesters during their ‘Garden Bridge’ occupaton of the bridge in April. Although the protesters were peaceful and not resisting arrest, following XR’s policy of non-violence, there had been considerable and entirely uncalled for violence from the police during some of these arrests, and the procession halted and sat down on the road for a few minutes for speeches condeming the earlier police action.
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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