Brexit For Beginners

Paris 1996

From Powell to pandemonium: an assortment of Brexit-related images from my library can be found here. I wish they told a story, but nobody else can make much sense of it either. 

Enoch Powell 1983

Dover 2004

   

Nigel Farage, Margate 2015

Westminster 2018

Demolishing South Kilburn

South Kilburn Estate, 22-05-18

On South Kilburn Estate new concrete shells are rising from the rubble that was once Gloucester House and Durham Court. I've written before about Brent Council's 15 year estate regeneration scheme, and the implications of the changes of tenure that are at its core, but none of that captures the extraordinary visual impact made by the tearing down of people's homes, whatever the tenure. The most recent demolition phase lasted around six months. A bigger selection of images from that period is here. More words and pictures here.

South Kilburn, 22-3-18

South Kilburn Estate, 1-5-18

 

South Kilburn, 22-5-18

More at The Corner

Over recent months Speakers' Corner has taken on a new lease of life, not all of it healthy. The 'home of free speech' has become the arena for a weekly gladiatorial contest between Islamophobic English nationalists and a fluid group of young Muslim men, as eager to defend their religion as their opponents are to insult it. The result has been much noise, little enlightenment.

The conflict began in March, when the Austrian far-right Generation Identity leader Martin Sellner was refused entry to the UK and deported. The following week English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson and a large number of his supporters descended on Speakers' Corner to protest at what they regarded as a denial of their right to free speech. Some of them have been around ever since, apparently happy to have found an easily accessible target for their anger.

Testosterone levels are high (very few women are involved), and police intervention has become a regular feature. After some years during which there were often none to be seen at the Corner on a Sunday afternoon, police are now present in force, their vans strategically parked and rows of constables lined up to step in and separate the two groups when they overheat.

In another new development, the clashes are now available to the world beyond in the form of hours of mostly unedited, often chaotic footage posted on YouTube. Everyone is either filming or being filmed, sometimes both at the same time, and the resulting broadcasts can pick up 20,000 or more views within hours of posting.

So the place has got a lot busier, and although endless religious arguments remain its most prominent (and least interesting) feature, crowd numbers are well up, there are still some discussions worth a listen - and still the occasional frisson when the police go on manoeuvres. More 2018 pictures here, older photos from my book here.

Return to Speakers' Corner

Speakers' Corner 2017

Is it just winter, or is Speakers' Corner in terminal decline? On a recent visit – my first for over a year – religion, always a dominant presence, was the only thing on offer, mostly in the form of squabbles between Christian and Muslim preachers and hecklers. And there weren't more than three or four of those. I don't remember ever seeing such an unimpressive bunch.

It was the last, rather miserable, Sunday of 2017. Dull and damp, with occasional spots of rain, and darkness threatening by mid-afternoon. So maybe not a fair basis for judgement. I will be back to check. I hope I'm wrong.

For a record of how it used to be, my book Speakers' Corner, Debate, Democracy and Disturbing the Peace is still on sale at all good bookshops.

Lendlease: Someone Has Blundered

Elephant Park construction site, Southwark

Lendlease's controversial deal with Haringey Council may be looking precarious, but the developer is still going strong in Southwark, where it is replacing 1194 social rented flats on the once publicly owned Heygate Estate with a paltry 74.  A further 500 of a total of 2500 new homes in its Elephant Park scheme will be let at so-called 'affordable' rents, and the rest sold off. Purchase of a one-bed, shared-ownership flat requires a minimum household income of around £60K.
 

The now demolished Heygate Estate, 2002

The London Clearances (continued)

Walterton Road, North Paddington 1975

My first useful work as a photographer came about through involvement with housing campaigners at the tail end of the slum clearance programmes of the 1960s and 70s. In London, streets of poorly maintained, privately rented Victorian terraces were being torn down and replaced by a brave new world of modern homes in publicly owned estates of concrete apartment blocks.

Forty years on, that world has turned full circle. Now it is the 'castles in the sky' that are coming down, streets are all the rage, and council housing, now renamed 'social', is struggling to survive.

Gloucester House and the rubble of Durham Court, South Kilburn Estate, 2018

Across the road from the sub-standard flat that was my home back in 1975 (toilet and cold water sink on the shared landing, no bathroom), work has begun on Phase 2b of Brent Council's 15 year South Kilburn Estate regeneration scheme. Demolition of the low rise Durham Court blocks is underway, and the now deserted 18 storey Gloucester House awaits the wrecking crew.

If all goes according to plan, by 2029, when the final phase is scheduled for completion, 2400 new homes will have been built, 1200 for private sale, and 1200 let at social rent to existing secure tenants.

Partly demolished blocks, Durham Court, South Kilburn Estate

The buildings and landscaping completed so far are impressive, a big improvement on the bleak brutalist concrete they have replaced, and the scheme has attracted much praise. The council has also been lauded for its financial strategy, using income from the private sales to fund the homes let at social rents.

So what's not to like? In a convincing piece on Haringey's controversial partnership deal with Australian developer Lendlease on the Red Brick blog, Steve Hilditch argues that the most straightforward criterion for assessing the wave of regeneration deals being done by councils across the capital should be the number of social rented homes there will be at the end of the process.

“Thousands of mainly social rented homes will be knocked down and thousands of mainly private homes will be built. There will be many more homes overall, but, how will the proposed mix of market and sub-market homes tackle homelessness and the needs of people on the waiting list?  The type and tenure of new homes is as important as how many homes are built in total. Social rent remains the only truly affordable option for many people on lower incomes.”

On that measure, the figures for South Kilburn don't stack up. By 2029, 2400 new homes will have replaced 1610. Of the latter, 1420 were occupied by secure tenants and 190 by leaseholders. It's hard to know whether the prices leaseholders are getting for their compulsorily purchased homes match the prices demanded for the new (unlikely). But it is certain that 1420 secure tenants will not fit into the 1200 homes available for social rent. It is probable that enough of them will have been rehoused elsewhere to make the scheme work, but the net effect will be to reduce the number of social rent homes available across the borough, and to clear even more people on low or average incomes out of central London.

Kilburn Quarter, completed phase 2a of South Kilburn Estate regeneration scheme

Brent, like many others London councils, has been forced into this trade-off between private sales and publicly owned social rentals by central government funding cuts and the long-term disempowerment of local authorities. The new estate looks like it's going to be a nice place to live, and will provide much improved homes for the tenants who are rehoused on it - albeit at higher so-called 'target' social rents.  It will also increase the number of homes available for private sale and market rental – in itself not a bad thing, as long as they're occupied once bought. It's just a pity it won't be of any help in cutting the waiting list and housing the homeless.  More pictures here. More words and pictures here and here.

HS2. The Wrecking Begins

Reverend Anne Stevens and local resident Jo Hurford, Euston Square Gardens

On Friday the Reverend Anne Stevens, vicar of St.Pancras Church, spent two hours chained to a 100 year-old plane tree outside Euston station, whilst local residents handed out leaflets to passing commuters. Work has already started around the planned London end of the HS2 high speed rail link to Birmingham, but the protest marked a significant escalation in the disruption which will turn the area into a building site for an estimated 17 years. On Monday Euston Square Gardens will be fenced off, and the felling of its century-old trees will begin, clearing the park to make way for construction vehicles, expected to average 650 trucks a day.

As many have pointed out, HS2 as planned is seriously flawed. It is extremely expensive (and getting pricier by the week), poorly integrated with the existing network, and its London terminal is in the wrong place, a densely populated area already home to three of the capital's principal railway stations. To cap it all comes news that Carillion, one of the major contractors involved in construction of the new line, is in serious financial difficulty.

Whilst all taxpayers will be forking out the cash for this, local residents have the added nightmare of living through it, windows closed, day in day out for almost two decades.  More pictures here.  More words and pictures here and here.

An Archival Impulse

Committee Meeting, 510 Centre, North Paddington 1978

In the spirit of archivism, I'm making accessible an article I wrote for the British Journal of Photography in 2010 to mark the demise of Photoworks Westminster (formerly North Paddington Community Darkroom), a community-based photography project that I set up in the 510 Centre, a busy grant-funded advice and community centre at 510 Harrow Road, in 1976. A PDF of the piece can be downloaded here. 

A PDF of my book, That Was Then, This Is Now, which describes North Paddington context in which the project evolved, can be downloaded here.

This archival impulse has been prompted by a request from the Four Corners project in Bethnal Green which, in addition to documenting the heritage of its own film work, is creating a new archive exploring the photographic practice of its onetime neighbour, the Half Moon Photography Workshop (later Camerawork), from its creation in 1972 to its closure in 2004.

The travelling exhibitions, workshops and, above all, the roughly quarterly issues of Camerawork magazine (1976-85), were hugely influential at a time when a wave of community-based photography projects were springing up in various parts of the capital and elsewhere. As a self-taught photographer working in uncharted territory, the opportunity to read about and discuss the work of those with greater knowledge and experience was invaluable. I contributed what I could, but learned a lot more.

For those wishing to explore this bygone world further, there is now also a North Paddington Community Darkroom Archive at the Bishopsgate Institute, which includes a collection of laminated exhibition panels dating from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Meanwhile Gardens, North Paddington 1983

Dominica Democratic Association meeting, 510 Centre, 1977

The Dustbin of History: Kodachromes

It feels like sacrilege, but I am in the process of binning large numbers of Kodachromes.

In the days of colour film, Kodachrome was the gold standard. It's what the National Geographic photographers used, despite its now unthinkably slow speed (64 ASA, unless you were a masochist and went for the 25). It had other drawbacks: it had to be sent back to Kodak for processing, so couldn't be used on jobs that required a fast turnaround, and, to get the best out of it, accurate exposure was essential. But, correctly exposed, it produced transparencies with great colour, contrast and sharpness, and reputedly better archival stability than any other film. I used it on virtually all my foreign trips through the 1980s and 1990s.

It was only when picture desks started going digital, and image distribution switched from Royal Mail or motorcycle courier to FTP and email, that another disadvantage was revealed: Kodachrome's unique emulsion structure made it quite tricky to scan. Getting the colour and contrast right was not straightforward, and Digital ICE automated dust-removal, which worked well on other colour film stocks, could not be used. That meant dust and scratches had to be removed by hand in Photoshop. Scanning Kodachromes was hard work.

However, that's not why they're in the bin. Distributing images shot on colour transparency film to multiple publications meant shooting multiple frames, or making duplicates after the event.  After each trip one set went into my own filing cabinet, and selections of 'similars' went off to the various picture libraries that also distributed my work. Over the last few years they have all come back, like long lost homing pigeons: many agencies have closed, and those that haven't no longer deal in hard copies.

Once an image has been digitised, identical copies can be made effortlessly, with no loss in quality. There's no need for 'seconds' or spares. So, although I can't bring myself to throw away the original of anything worth scanning, I've finally got round to trawling through the stacks of returned suspension files, comparing 'similars', keeping the best, and dumping the rest.  What I'm doing is completely logical - it just feels like an unforgivable sin.

Pictured above is a binful of hundreds of slides from two trips to the Dominican Republic, for Christian Aid in 1983, and Oxfam in 1991. Scans of some of those I've kept are here.

Dominican Republic 1991

Rodney Bickerstaffe, 1945-2017

NUPE Conference 1988

For most of the 1980s the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) was one of my most regular, and most enjoyable, sources of work. Its members were the unsung heroes of our public services – ambulance drivers, cleaners, carers, caretakers, cooks, dustmen, home helps, hospital porters and other NHS ancillary staff, street cleaners and more – and my commissions for the NUPE Journal gave me the opportunity to visit a huge variety of workplaces and meet the people who worked in them (more about that here).

The monthly assignments also meant I frequently photographed the union's General Secretary, Rodney Bickerstaffe, whose untimely passing was announced this week. It was always a pleasure. He was wise, witty, warm and, above all, a fantastic public speaker. He will be sorely missed.

Speaking for a national minimum wage at the TUC 1986

No Resting Place

At the beginning of this year, prompted by what seemed to be a recent significant rise in the numbers of people sleeping rough in central London, I set about documenting some of the many dark doorways and uninviting corners in which anxious, disturbed or destitute men and women now spend their days and nights.

I decided to focus on the places, rather than the people who use them, in order to highlight the harsh locations in which rough sleepers find themselves, without identifying the often vulnerable individuals who use them.  Not all the photographs succeed in doing this - parts of faces are visible in one or two. 


 
The pictures were taken on and off from January through March, and now the Greater London Authority has released figures for the numbers of rough sleepers recorded in the capital during that time. I was not surprised. They showed an increase of 7% on the same period last year - to 2,751 individuals over the three months. Nationally, rough sleeping has risen by 37% since 2010.

Each person has their own story, but together the bodies trying to keep warm on cold hard pavements are the most visible symptoms of the current crises in housing and adult social care provision in one of the richest countries in the world.  Shameful.  More pictures here.

The Waste Land

 End of the day on London Bridge 2016

Unreal city,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent,were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street...

(from The Waste Land, 1922)

These pictures, recent additions to my London in 50 project, were inspired by TS Eliot's description of commuters crossing London Bridge and dragging themselves to their deathly work in the City of London.  Re-reading The Waste Land, written in 1922, I imagine them in black & white, ghostly shadows in the "brown fog".  But although my pictures were taken on a sunny evening as the financiers and their clerks walked in the opposite direction, their day's work done, nothing much seems to have changed in almost a century.  They still look miserable.

 End of the day on London Bridge 2016

Bringing It All Back Home

In the National Gallery it's Van Gogh's Sunflowers. In the Louvre it's the Mona Lisa. And in Florence it's Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (above). It seems that every major gallery has one iconic work that is the principal focus of selfie attention.

Around these 'trophy' artworks the hushed reverence that was once the default gallery mode has been swept away by smartphone-toting tourists elbowing their way to a clear view on their screens or, even worse, blocking everyone else's by posing for a selfie. Anyone wishing to peacefully contemplate the actual painting in front of them is in for a hard time.

Collecting such photographs is one of the more explicable idiocies of tourism. Perhaps what I have been doing - taking pictures of people taking those pictures – is idiocy squared, but tourism and its idiocies fascinate and repel me in equal measure. Being a tourist traipsing around Europe's big cities, with no connection to anyone who lives there, carefully channeled through a string of 'must-see' landmarks to which no native gives a second glance, can be a deathly experience. Suddenly alighting on something recognisable, both to the viewer and to their Facebook friends back home, makes a connection between the real world and this transient state of novelty and boredom. Maybe that's what photography is all about. 

Florence 2016

More Market Failures

Nine Elms regeneration zone

 There is a striking disjunction between the desperate shortage of affordable housing in the capital, and the extraordinary panorama of cranes, pile-drivers and high-rise residential blocks in various states of construction visible from almost anywhere in the city with a view.

Even more extraordinary, at least to someone unfamiliar with London's dysfunctional property market, is the fact that many of the newly completed apartments transforming the skyline are empty, bought off-plan by overseas investors as convenient assets in which to stash their cash. But now it appears that all is not well in the luxury homes trade.

Battersea Power Station

Last month Morgan Stanley warned that prices of new, upmarket London flats could fall by as much as 20% this year, and the International Business Times reported that Chinese investors who bought apartments off-plan in the Battersea power station development are having second thoughts now the time has come to pay the balance on their relatively small up-front deposits. Those in the know are clearly expecting trouble: although pre-tax profits at the estate agent Foxtons only fell by 3% last year, investors knocked 33% of the share price. If these are the first signs of a bursting bubble, it would be good news for anyone who thinks of four walls and a roof as home, rather than an offshore shelter for their dodgy money.

More pictures here.

Construction of Alto Apartments, Wembley

A Chorus of Disapproval

Members of the ENO chorus in rehearsal, 1998
 

The chorus at the English National Opera has just voted for strike action in protest at proposals to cut four jobs and reduce the current year-long contracts for the remaining 40 singers to nine months. The cuts follow a 30% reduction in the ENO's annual Arts Council grant.

In 1998 I spent a very enjoyable three weeks dropping in on rehearsals for the ENO's world premiere of Gavin Bryars' Doctor Ox's Experiment, shooting backstage, in various rehearsal rooms and even, occasionally, on-stage, for a spread in Opera Now magazine. There's a lot of hanging around in rehearsals and I spent much of it in the very good company of the chorus. I don't know how many of today's strikers were there back then, but they were a diverse, humourous, and pleasingly stroppy bunch. I hope they win. More pictures here.

Director Atom Egoyan and the ENO chorus in rehearsal, 1998

Rehearsal for ENO's Doctor Ox's Experiment, 1998

London in 50

I've created a rotating gallery of pictures taken in my wanderings around the city, some on my way to or from commissioned shoots, a few, requiring special access, by prior arrangement. London in 50 is a work in progress, definitely not definitive. I've delved into the archives for some, but intend that older images will be displaced by new as the gallery evolves.

Dam Nonsense

Hampstead Ponds Project 

Campaigners who failed to stop a £22 million flood defence programme currently underway on Hampstead Heath might do well to reconsider their position following the catastrophic flooding that has devastated northern towns and cities over the last week. 

Many local groups and individuals put up a sustained fight against the Hampstead Heath Ponds Project, largely based on concerns over environmental damage to a unique and much loved open space. The 16 month dam strengthening and spillway construction works across 12 of the heath's 30 ponds, which began in April, has undoubtedly caused significant localised disruption but, as events up north have shown, blocked-off paths, the loss of a few trees, and some unsightly construction equipment are trivial compared to the damage to homes, businesses, and the environment that would result if the existing dams were to fail. 

One of the arguments used by the Dam Nonsense campaign was that newly weakened government legislation rendered much of the work unnecessary. A much more sensible argument is that the floods in the north demonstrate that government attempts to justify cuts in spending on flood defences by such manoeuvres are extremely foolish – and extraordinarily costly. 

 

Hampstead Ponds Project

Uber alles: we're all in this together

Drivers' protest, 12-11-15

When Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell speaks of an army of self-employed workers who have been casualised by the internet, he could be talking about the 100 or so Uber drivers who protested outside the company's London HQ last week (above). But he could also have been talking about some of the freelance photographers documenting their demonstration, hoping to make a sale through one of the big online news photo agencies.

The positions of the two groups are remarkably similar: both provide their own, expensive, equipment; neither have guaranteed hours of work or income; in both cases, terms, conditions and rates are set by the company; and in both cases there seems to be an endless supply of service deliverers struggling to make a living from ever-decreasing rates of pay. The drivers' protest, sparked by an imposed 5% increase in commission, was not the first time they have lost out financially through changes imposed from above.

In a way, Uber is quite honest about its role. The big photo agencies hide behind bland titles. The names of Alamy, Getty, Corbis and the rest promise nothing. Perhaps only Demotix hints at some sort of (non-existent) egalitarian enterprise.

But although Uber calls its drivers 'partners', the company's real relationship to its workforce is pretty much as described by its moniker. In German, of course.

Many of the drivers have now joined the GMB. Hopefully collective action, with its backing, will bring results. It would be good to see photographers attempt something similar.

More pictures here.

Bringing Down the Shutters

Bringing Down the Shutters, my feature for The Journalist magazine on the massive decline in the number of staff photographers working for national and local newspapers, is now available online here.

The Eye of the Beholder

A building I photographed by chance last week has hit the headlines. A poll conducted by Building Design magazine has voted 20 Fenchurch Street winner of the Carbuncle Cup 2015, awarded annually to what the voters consider to be the ugliest building in the UK. The 37 storey City of London tower, designed by Rafael Vinoly and built by Land Securities, and more widely known as the Walkie Talkie building, has had its problems, but it was its distinctiveness and prominence, rather than its awfulness, that struck me when I took the photo (above). It doesn't seem to me to be significantly more objectionable than a number of other grandiose British architectural follies.  But I'm an unreliable witness, easily seduced by an all-to-rare shaft of London sunlight.