>Re: PHOTO

Blurb books are very nice, but because of the way they are produced ‘on demand’ they are expensive. I want to make my books easier for people to buy, and one way is for me to order in quantity, and then pass on the savings from that to others.

So I now have a small stock of all of my books, and can supply them to UK addresses only at a significant saving over the Blurb prices. UK only as a part of that saving comes from the price including a lower delivery charge using UK postal services rather than the courier delivery used by Blurb.

Blurb’s prices seem to go up every time I check them out, and currently a book such as my London’s May Queens costs around £35 including delivery. Direct from me I can supply it for £25 including delivery - though prices may have to rise when my current stocks are sold. But here is my full price list at the moment (16.05.2012) and details of how to order. I’ll try and keep the list up to date on one of my web pages here.

Book Sales: Blurb books by Peter Marshall

Most Blurb books by Peter Marshall are available from him to UK Addresses ONLY at or below the Blurb price but with free delivery (Blurb delivery charges on small orders are ridiculous.) You can find details of all the books in my Blurb bookstore. And if you request it, I’ll sign the books too.

Making an order for books

Please email to be sent the further details needed to place an order, which can then be made either by post including a cheque or by email and bank transfer. Prices will change as Blurb prices change and will be confirmed when you email.

Currently available (all softcover only - click on titles for Blurb book details):

London’s May Queens £25.00

2006: My London Diary £25.00

Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood £25.00

In Search Of Atget: Paris 1984 £25.00

Still Occupied: A View of Hull 1977-85 £30.00

Photo Paris: 1988 £25.00

Before the Olympics: The Lea Valley 1981-2010 £25.00

1989: 20 photographs £17.50

Hardcover versions of some books are available from Blurb, and there is an e-book (iPadf/iPhone) version of London’s May Queens only available from Blurb for £2.49

I’m not sure when I first became aware of Brian Haw’s protest in Parliament Square, though certainly he had been there some time before I first got to know him, longer still when I took the first pictures of him that I posted on My London Diary in 2004, when he had been protesting for almost three years. (I may have photographed him earlier on film - but very few of my film images have made the web.)

At first I’d thought of him more as some kind of eccentric rather than a serious protester, and couldn’t really see a way to make a story about him, except when he took part in other protests that were happening in Parliament Square.

What changed all that was the attempt by the Blair government to pass an Act of Parliament which was in part obviously solely aimed at his protest. SOCPA was a very large hammer to crack a rather small embarrasment to the government, and turned out to have been poorly drafted and to miss the intended target altogether.

Over the years I talked to Brian many times, often calling in as I was passing, occasionally taking photographs of him or his display. My favourite image was during another protest, with him wearing a t-shirt designed by disablement activist Dan Wilkins, a picture that both men appreciated.

I was in the square for the parties celebrating his five years there, then his six… On one occasion when police dragged him away and pushed him into the back of a van, one of quite a few times he was arrested and kept in a cell overnight.

I watched as Brian’s health deteriorated, and was saddened by his death, but of course his protest has continued, with Barbara Tucker leading a small team of supporters. The harassment which has always been present from police (no doubt pressured by their political masters) has stepped up recently. Under the repressive Police Reform And Social Responsibility Act 2011 (PASRA) the tents belonging to the Parliament Square Peace Campaign were removed in January, and Barbara Tucker was arrested at 3 am on 17 Jan. She was released around 5.30pm that day and returned to Parliament Square to join those who had continued the protest in her absence.

Pressure is increasing on the campaign. On the morning of 10 May police came first thing and spent 90 minutes “searching” the few square meters of their display in the early morning. Three days later, at 2.30am on Sunday 13 May, police and Westminster Council came and took away Barbara Tucker’s two blankets, despite there being no legal basis for their action. The law forbids any “structure designed solely or mainly to sleep in” but blankets are not a structure.

You can see the few pictures that I took on my visit last Thursday in the post 4000 Days in Parliament Square on My London Diary.  You can also use the ‘Search’ facility on the site to find more of my pictures of Brian Haw, Barbara Tucker and the Parliament Square police campaign.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Between the official London May Day march and photographing some of the Occupy London protesters at last managing to occupy their original target, the London Stock Exchange (although only on a token basis - and there are now more pictures on My London Diary) I photographed two very different protests.

I knew that the protests against workfare - unpaid labour that unemployed people are pressured to carry out at least sometimes under threat of losing their benefits - which had begun earlier in the day and had been continued by some of the marchers supporting UK Uncut and the autonomous bloc during the May Day march were expected to continue after then end of the march. I’d been given a hint that one group might target the company who run the scheme whose offices are in deepest Soho, around 15 minutes walk from Trafalgar Square. I left the rally in Trafalgar Square to check, but nothing was happening in the area - and I suspect the protesters were unable to find the place and turned elsewhere, or had simply changed their mind. It isn’t unusual for protests not to happen, sometimes even when they have been quite widely advertised, though I was sure that workfare protests were going to happen elsewhere later.

Placards, coffin and Merlin Emmanuel who was one of the organisers

From checking on this I caught a bus to Holborn, where I knew that there was going to be a protest against the so-called ‘Independent Police Complaints Commission’ or IPCC.  Set up in 2004 to replace a discredited body that was widely seen as simply there to deflect public anger without and prevent any real investigation or redress against the police, this replacement body has turned out to be equally lacking in independence or powers. Recently even its boss has admitted it needs reform, when it was not even able to question the 38 officers involved in the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, whose killing by police sparked off last Summer’s disturbances.

Although in general the British police forces are among the best in the world, they have problems, and have unfortunately failed to deal with them. We can all name high-profile cases where the police have failed, have been shown to be racist, have used inappropriate levels of force, often with fatal consequences, have issued statements known to be false to the press, have lied in court evidence and more and of course there are many more cases that have not received attention in the media. We know that in general police look after their own, and there are few effective investigations of police corruption or abuses, and that prosecutions of police are extremely rare. Cases tend too be neglected, drawn out to excessive length and pushed under legal carpets on into the long grass. And the IPCC, staffed with a high proportion of former police has turned out to be some of the longer grass.

The Scots also have a system to not investigate complaints such as
those involving the abuse of Hollie Greig in Aberdeen

Photographically the main difficulty in covering the event was that little interesting was happening. There were a few posters, placards and banners, and a black coffin with the message RIP IPCC, but it didn’t add up to a great deal to make pictures with. It was just a very static event with people, including a number who were videoing the event well back from the speakers , making it difficult to take pictures without getting in their way.

What interest there was came mainly from the speakers, and some of these were rather undemonstrative, even while some of what they had to say was a powerful indictment of the police and the IPCC. It wasn’t easy to find different angles, and this wasn’t helped by a strong low sun. Things got a little more interesting for me later because of some of the people involved.

Marcia and Samantha, sisters of Sean Rigg, killed in Brixton Police Station in August 2008

I’ve photographed Marcia and Samantha Rigg on various occasions over the years since their brother Sean was killed shortly after being taken in to Brixton Police station  in August 2008. As well as campaigning for a proper investigation of his death they have also become leading campaigners for the proper investigation of all deaths in custody and for effective control of police behaviour. Although they were limited in what they could say because of the forthcoming inquest, they gave damning testimony on the total failure and inadequacy of the IPCC.

Although occasionally the sun went behind a cloud, using flash fill helped improve the lighting in the other images I took of them.  But working from the side the lighting with the sun shining almost directly into my lens was considerably more dramatic.  The kind of result shown here needed considerable work in Lightroom to burn down the sunlit areas as well as adding brightness and contrast to the shadows.

From here I got a bus back to Oxford St with a colleague. Getting on buses on days where extensive protests are taking place is often a mistake, as the traffic can get very badly held up, partly by protesters but often mainly by police blocking off much larger areas than the protest. We got stuck in Oxford St and could tell that something was happening when the police helicopter that we had seen from our seat at the front of the top deck was hovering was more or less directly above us. I spotted a crowd and police a couple of hundred yards away and we rushed downstairs. The traffic was completely at a standstill but the bus was between stops and at first the driver refused to open the doors to let us off, but my colleague and the other passengers persuaded him and we rushed to join the protesters running along Oxford St.

The light was tricky here too, shining low directly behind the protesters.

That’s my hand at top left - without using it to supplement the ineffectual lens hood the image would have been a mass of flare - you can see a nice ‘rainbow’ effect at bottom right. I could crop it out, but that would lose some of the figure in blue below, which I think would be a shame. Most people don’t realise it is my hand, which after all was there anyway, so why should I remove it?

A little later, in the Charing Cross Rd there was some nice rim lighting - and again fill flash was essential. One big advantage of modern flashes and cameras is that flash can be used at fast shutter speeds - 1/320th in this case.

By the time we got to McDonalds on The Strand there was more strong side-lighting which made my picture of a man with a megaphone outside the store more effective - and this time I managed without flash fill, but with quite a lot of work in Lightroom.

You can now see my work from the whole of May Day on My London Diary:

London May Day March
Abolish The Corrupt IPCC
May Day Workfare Protest
Stock Exchange Occupied

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Red isn’t my favourite colour in photography, although it’s sometimes been said that every good picture needs a little bit of it. Nonsense of course, but while a little bit of red is fine, it’s very easy to have too much of it, and neither film nor digital is all that good in coping with large amounts of bright colour in that area of the spectrum. Which can cause something of a problem on May Day.

With red road,  red bus and red buildings as well as the clothing and banners there isn’t really a great deal that isn’t red in this picture, and getting a truly believable skin tone on the face was something of a challenge with all the reflected red light.

Most of the brighter red areas of these pictures needed some burning in to get some tonality, and the red tends to make other colours - such as the yellows in the above picture - look too wishy-washy and they have to have some attention too.  I think I’ve perhaps overdone it on the flag at the bottom left in the picture above, but it certainly needed some darkening.

All the big heads made me want to do something with them, and I was attracted by the solidity and the expression of the man in the foreground, and though it might not show his best side I didn’t feel it was too unkind. But one face that truly makes me feel uneasy is the huge portrait of Stalin. Although he was ‘Uncle Joe’ to the press in the days of my childhood, and a vital figure in winning the war against fascism, it’s hard to understand why there are people still prepared to carry his banner or wear his t-shirt.

London’s May Day celebrations bring together “trade unionists, workers from the many international communities in London, pensioners, anti-globalisation organisations, students, political bodies and many others in a show of working class unity” and it’s a shame that May Day isn’t a bank holiday so that more people can take part.  This year’s May Bank Holiday came almost a week later.

Jim Connell’s word’s, written at the time of the dock strike in 1889 are stirring and for an hour or so a year in London the red flag is flying over at least a small part of the capital. Here is his second verse (in web colour scarlet #FF2400) for any of you who have forgotten it.

Then raise the scarlet standard high
Beneath its fold we’ll live and die
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer
We’ll keep the red flag flying here

I didn’t hear the words sung in English this May Day, (and its a long time since many in the Labour party sang them with any conviction, and the tune makes most of us think of Christmas trees.) The Internationale which was also getting played certainly has a better tune, but the standard English words are impossible to sing.

Few of the flags and banners in my pictures are scarlet, although I’m not sure that the colours are entirely true to hue, but many seem to be a little bluer shade of red, and, as I’ve deliberately made some darker than they appear to retain some tonality.  In the real world, colours don’t always look the same anyway, and change in different lighting conditions. You can see more of my work from the day on My London Diary in London May Day March.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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My work for April is now all on line on My London Diary, and it was a busy month for me, and rather more varied than most. I was trying to take things a little easier, but things didn’t really work out that way.

Walking the Rip-Off - Heygate & Aylesbury
Support For Palestinian Hunger Strike
Big Ride for Safe Cycling

Workers Memorial Day
Protest Supports ‘Pussy Riot’
Olympic Course Day 2
Olympic Course Day 1
Climate Rush Spring Clean London’s Air

Disabled Activists Block Trafalgar Square
Free Syria Embassy Air Strike
EDL and UAF At Home Office
Binfield Walk
Gravesend Vaisakhi
Olympic Site Revisited
Gasworks Dock Revived
Class War Snack Attack
Roma Nation Day Of Resistance

International Pillow Fight Day
Syrians Continue Protest Against Asad
World Health Day: Lansley’s Bill
Christians Celebrate Good Friday
Twickenham & Richmond

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Last June I wrote a post The Scandal of London’s Largest Ghost, accompanying my panoramas of the deserted Heygate estate at the Elephant and Castle, a well-designed 1970s estate with years of useful life remaining - and which a council commissioned survey had concluded was not a ‘failing estate’ but nevertheless they decided to demolish it.  It was a decision based on finance - getting the debt off the council books and making millions for the developers - but the financial crisis has stalled the process. It is shameful that a Labour council should be essentially selling off publicly owned assets for private gain, but even more shameful that when London has its worst housing crisis ever that some 1300 homes in a prime location in the inner city should be left empty since the residents were ‘decanted’ in 2008, four years ago.

Community garden created on the Heygate estate, April 2012

Many of those residents were also shamefully treated. The council had a policy in recent years of using short term contracts for lettings, enabling them to disclaim responsibility for re-housing many of those who lived there; others were given little choice but to move to developments outside the area. Those who had bought the leasehold of their properties were also shabbily treated, often being pressured into accepting a fraction of the true market value of their properties.

In Walking the Rip-Off - Heygate & Aylesbury you can read more about what has happened on the Heygate estate and what is now happening on the nearby and much larger Aylesbury estate with some pictures (including a few panoramas) that I took during a walk around the two estates with some of the very few remaining residents of Heygate and tenants from the Aylesbury estate.

A garden on the Heygate estate, April 2012

One of great strengths of Heygate is its green spaces, and some of these are now being gardened by remaining residents, former residents and other supporters, and were one of the things I focussed on. It is unfortunate for their cause that a few residents are unhappy about being photographed, although most were  welcoming.

Taplow on the Aylesbury Estate, April 2012

Carpenters Estate, April 2012

Of course, Southwark isn’t the only council acting shamefully towards its tenants and those in need of housing. On the Facebook site of CARP! you can read about Newham’s similar treatment of the Carpenters  Estate next to the Olympic site. It’s worth looking at an Open University video which looks at this and the Excalibur Estate in Lewisham which I photographed in the 1990s and in 2010 in Excalibur Estate.

Excalibur Estate, Catford, 2010

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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I’ve just been looking at the latest issue of Lensculture, “an online magazine celebrating international contemporary photography, art, media, and world cultures“, and as usual it is worth a look, including some fine photography. (If you read this post some time in the future you will find this issue in the Lensculture archives as No 33)

There are quite a few things I’ve seen before, but even some of those have been revitalised - for example the pictures from a new and expanded edition of Christer Strömholm’s great Les Amies de Place Blanche, first published in 1983, and an expanded version of Robert Adams’s Prairie from 1978 (which I thought I had bought then but can’t at the moment find.)  Other favourite projects covered in the issue include Chongqing: City of Ambition by Ferit Kuyas (surely one of the best if not the best of the many essays on the new China) and there are other familiar works such as Jocelyn Bain Hogg’s remarkable book, The Family and Simon Norfolk’s Burke and Norfolk.

But there is other work new to me, some of which I found interesting and just the odd thing that failed to touch me. But overall this is a great read.

It was a gloomy and damp day, the rain varying between the occasional spot and heavy downpour as I rushed from what for me counts as a early morning event - 10.30am at Tower Hill for Workers Memorial Day with speeches and wreath-laying at the statue of the Building Worker there to Park Lane in Mayfair for the Big Ride. Of course 10.30am isn’t really early, and only meant me leaving home around 8.45am, but I’ve long got out of the habit of early rising (and had not got to bed until after 1am.) On weekdays I don’t like to travel in the morning rush hour if I can avoid it, because it costs me two or three times as much for the privilege of often standing in a crowded train for 30 or 40 minutes. But this was a Saturday, so at least I was travelling rather cheaper and got a seat.

I arrived at Park Lane just a few minutes after the time I’d been told people would start gathering at Brook St, to see everyone around there cycling away, and thought I might have missed it.  Running with a fairly heavy camera bag isn’t my idea of fun, and I could have done without the 700 yard dash to find where the front of the ride was actually assembling and I was able to take some pictures.  The rain wasn’t too heavy, though it did cause some problems, and working as I do most of the time with a very wide-angle means their is no way to stop drops of rain getting on the lens, its effects usually impossible to spot on the small images on the back of the camera, and this made a few images unusable. Sometimes you are lucky and it isn’t in a really critical area of the picture, as in this case:

You can clearly see the diffusion it has given on the top left of the sign reading ‘Grannies Want To Cycle Too’  although I’ve reduced the effect considerably in post-processing in Lightroom by darkening the area and increasing contrast and sharpness. You can see it again on the bottom of the flag in this picture:

I was also trying hard to remember that 16mm is usually a mistake with bicycle wheels at the edges of the frame, and trying to work more towards the 35mm end of the lens.

Although the SB700 flash unit’s instructions are very clear about not letting it get wet, it seemed to keep working fine, and I needed a little fill from it for most of these pictures of people. I still am not quite used to the various buttons and switches on this unit, and after seeing the results  when I got home reached for my black tape.  Since I take more than 99% of the pictures on the TTL setting the unit now has a small piece of tape preventing me from shifting it from that position accidentally. It does take a bit of doing without the tape, but I found I had managed it. Similarly the switch which changes from even to standard and centre-weighted coverage is fixed at the even end. It’s easy to peel off the tape should I need to change the setting.

Incidentally I’ve been pleased so far with the SB700, though even on the wide setting I don’t think it has the same evenness of coverage I got with the SB800. But a little fall-off around the edges is often a good thing. Using the built-in ‘wide panel’ or  the clip on diffusion dome should give more even coverage for those pictures that need it. Without the wide panel in place on the full-frame camera the flash is reasonably even only for focal lengths of 28mm and above. With it the 17mm indicated on the panel isn’t quite true, but using this or the diffusion dome is generally pretty even, and with the two together, things are excellent. But there is a catch. Using the panel or the dome makes the unit much less efficient and increases the recycling time. So almost all the time I work without either.

It is largely a myth that these things make your flash softer. Neither greatly increases the size of the light source, and diffusion without an increase in size simply reduces the amount of the light emitted that misses the subject - unless there are suitable surfaces around to bounce some of it back. To get a softer effect you need a large diffuser or reflector.

For using as fill I now have the flash usually set at -0.3EV and the two camera bodies also with some negative setting, typically also -0.3 or -0.7EV. Often I seem to want a little less fill with the longer lens on the D300, so it’s convenient to use the flash compensation on the bodies to allow for this. Quite why Nikon hide away what is probably the most important information on using the flash in pages E23-E24 of the manual, after a lot of esoteric stuff on advanced wireless operation is hard to understand.

As usual I was spending almost all of the time between actually taking pictures holding my microfibre cloth over the front of the lens to keep it dry, though occasionally using it to wipe the flash too. Mostly it worked, as you can see in Big Ride for Safe Cycling on My London Diary, where there are some better pictures than in this post.

Continuing on the vaguely tech side of thing, here is a pair of pictures, one take on the D700 at 16mm with its normal rectangular perspective and the other on the D300 with the 10.5mm fisheye (almost impossible to keep raindrop free) and then converted to cylindrical perspective.

Of course they are from a different viewpoint but give a good idea of the different ways the two depict more or less the same subject.

After then end of the Big Ride (and again I was annoyed to find that while the organisers had said the finish would be near Blackfriars it was actually more or less at Temple, another unnecessary 700 yards I could have done without and which meant me arriving a few minutes too late) I dried out and warmed up in one of my favourite London galleries, the Courtauld Gallery.To be honest I wasn’t that impressed by the current show there, Mondrian || Nicholson In Parallel, though I did feel that while Nicholson’s work looked better for actually seeing the works, Mondrian is actually more impressive in reproduction. But the Courtauld has one of the finest collections anywhere of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works.

Then, feeling rather better I took a bus to my final event for the day, in Whitehall, opposite Downing St, Support For Palestinian Hunger Strike. By this time the rain had almost stopped too. Again here is a pair of pictures taken with the 10.5mm and 16-35mm from a very similar position which I think demonstrate the uses of both lenses. It was of course a tableau set up for the media, the kind of thing I don’t generally relish.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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One of the things that I find relatively few photographers really seem to appreciate is that much of photography is really a collaborative art. It’s perhaps obvious in some branches of photography - where would Bailey have been without Shrimpton? But most of the collaborations I’ve been involved with have been considerably less intimate, often a matter of a few fractions of a second, and are often unwitting at least in detail on the part of my photographic co-respondents.

I’ve never been a great fan of David Bailey (or of fashion as a genre, though it has provided a living for some fine photographers), but when I was invited to apply for a post writing about photography for an Internet site back in 1999 by sending a trial article, I chose to make him the subject. He had made his name by going to New York with the Shrimp in 1962, and it amused me to make my own debut as a Londoner for a New York based company with a piece about another Londoner. Looking back, it isn’t a piece I’m particularly proud of (perhaps one of the few of the hundreds I wrote that I’m pleased is no longer on line), but it had a certain edge and humour and it got me the job.

I didn’t see BBC4’s We’ll Take Manhattan which was screened in January, though I suspect I would have been unable to watch it in its entirety, but the video about its making is almost certainly a more interesting piece, and considerably shorter. It’s also worth noting, as ‘Daks’ comments on the The Arts Desk piece that as usual film-makers rewrite history to suit their purposes - as well as presenting a highly censored version of Bailey-speak.

It should also be noted that the shoot was January 1962, and Diana Vreeland did not join Vogue until April 1962; in January she was still editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar. Bailey also claimed to have met Shrimpton at VOGUE studios where she was being photographed for a Kelloggs advert by Brian Duffy, who was one of the ‘terrible three’ (Bailey, Duffy, Donovan), so the BBC production was also not accurate with how they met. (Fashion Theory, Lustrum Press 1978)

Daks also goes on to point out that the BBC also showed ” a great documentary on Bailey - Four beats to the bar and no cheating“. You can watch it as four clips from a broadcast on Swedish TV starting here on YouTube. I’ve only watched a little of it so far. Or you could just watch Blow Up again.

I’ve always thought of My London Diary as being at least in part for the people who collaborate with me in the making of the pictures, some more actively than others. It’s one reason why I put so many pictures of most events on it - so that the people I’ve photographed can see the pictures I took of them. Often people will ask me where they can see the them - or if I can send them a copy - and it’s easier to give them my card and tell them they will be on the site in a few days, and that they can e-mail me.

One group I like photographing is Climate Rush, and I was with them a couple of times towards the end of April. Here’s Tamsin Omond cleaning up the London Air:

and I think this is the best - though you can see some others too in Climate Rush Spring Clean London’s Air on My London Diary. Earlier I’d grabbed a picture of her with the duster between her teeth that I quite liked too.

But of course Climate Rush, whose tagline is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s “Well behaved women seldom make history” and have adopted the suffragette slogan ‘Deeds Not Words‘ isn’t just Tamsin.  She was at the solidarity protest for the Russian anonymous women’s punk band Pussy Riot the following Monday, but the best pictures I took  in Protest Supports ‘Pussy Riot’ were not of her.

It wasn’t easy to make a picture that included the flag of the Russian embassy (not that anyone recognises the Russian flag now) visible at the top right, and the placard - from Pussy Riot in Moscow - is perhaps a little less clear than in some of the more obvious images I took, but I felt this was an image that reflected Pussy Riot more than the others which you can see on My London Diary.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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I didn’t take many pictures on the weekend of April 21-2 because I was at a photographic workshop.  If that seems odd, perhaps I should say I was running it, although facilitating would be a better word. Based at the View Tube, overlooking the London Olympic site during one of the last few weekends when that viewpoint will be available to the public, there were some disappointments, but I think we managed to have an enjoyable and fruitful time.

Olympic traffic management sign and Olympic torch

As usual, the main joy of the workshop was seeing how other photographers tackle the same challenges, in particular the others taking part in the workshop. Shortly I hope to be able to link to a mini web-site of some of the work that we produced which the Museum of London promised to host.

Olympic warm up area and former Bryant & May match factory, April 2003

I started the course by trying to show how other photographers and film makers had reacted to the area, including of course my own work on the  River Lea/Lee Valley 1980-2010  web site some of which is also in the Blurb book Before the Olympics, but also showing quite a range of other work, including images by the photographers featured on David Boulogne’s 2012 pics blog (which also has a little of my own work.) It was a shame that the View Tube didn’t have the facilities to display this or own work more than dimly.

One of the buildings overlooking the venue was of course the former Bryant & May match factory (above, taken a week before the course) which has been in the news this week as there are likely to be guided missiles based on one of its towers during the Olympics.  It would certainly be an ideal site from which to attack the Olympic site, but hard to see it as a good defensive position, and in the thankfully unlikely event that any of the missiles was fired and hit a target the result could be terrible casualties in the East End.

We didn’t have any special access to the Olympic area, and the closures already in force were something of a pain, requiring some lengthy detours. Of course many of the paths that used to give access to the area - such as this one - were closed years ago.

This picture illustrates some of the changes that have taken place. A few years ago the path here would have been narrow, surrounded by grass and low bushes and empty. The view would not have been a huge building site with the stadium and other venues but a busy and thriving industrial area with factories, oil storage and office buildings. Somewhat run down - with some of the premises serving as artist’s studios - including the interestingly named ‘Tate Moss’, in 2007 when I took the picture below already severely affected by Olympic blight and the imminent demolition. Now there is serious pedestrian congestion.

More pictures from the area in Feb 2007 on My London Diary.

You can now see more of the pictures I took while walking around the area with the other photographers on My London Diary in Olympic Course Day 1 and Olympic Course Day 2.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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