Galleries

We are the 99% – Occupy London Stock Exchange

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‘We are the 99%’ is the refrain from Wall Street to London, from Oakland to Tel Aviv. A growing chorus of international resistance to the maintenance of the status quo following the impact of the financial crisis on individuals and societies across the developed world.

As the 99% suggests the frustration lies with growing income inequality and the fashion for austerity that is eroding the broad social benefits that in many ways are the key to the social compact that binds societies together.

In London the protest has seen a tent city arise in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral, just opposite the London Stock Exchange. Since the occupation began on 15 October 2011 several high profile resignations have ensured from St Paul’s – reflecting conflicts and tensions within the church as it how it should respond to the protest at its doorstep.

St Paul’s appears to be a particularly appropriate site to challenge the status quo, as the edifice embodies the established Church of England, and by implication the State. The question posed ‘what would Jesus do’ – is perhaps at the heart of the church’s discomfort at its new neighbours.

Visit occupy london stock exchange to learn more about the campaign in London.

Jerusalem – old city

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The old city of Jerusalem is an intense experience with the competing forces of so many gods and religions – all vying for supremacy.

The disputed sites, memorials and interpretations create a bizarre overlay on an ancient city of the ghosts of past civilizations. Yet there is also a continuum, such as the ancient Armenian Cathedral, St James, which seems to fuse the Arab and Christian traditions.

Escaping the pressure of too many Gods we headed to the Dead Sea – less than an hour away to experience the slippery, saline water.

Tel Aviv

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A recent wedding took le flâneur to Tel Aviv, a city which in many ways embodies the vision of the founders of modern Israel, reflected in its Bauhaus inspired architecture, signalling a modernist drive to create a new urban ideal.

The city follows the contours of the coast and was built on the sand dunes to the north of the old port city of Jaffa. Exploring the city le-flaneur walked along the beach to Jaffa – and then north again to the Carmel market and Sheinkin Street, lined with fashion shops.

Our first evening in the city brought home a very different perspective though, with a tent city lining the Blvd Rothschild. The tents are part of a broad protest movement that seeks to draw attention to the high cost of living, excluding many young Israelis from living in the modernist community that their grandparents created.

As part of the wedding celebrations we visited the district of Shabazi, the first Jewish district to be built outside of Jaffa and pre-dating the establishment of Tel Aviv by some 20 years. Close to slum status in the 1960s it has increasingly gentrified, becoming one of the most expensive districts of the city.

London series – Harringay Green Lanes food festival

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The Green Lanes Food Festival celebrates the diverse mix of communities that live in and around Green Lanes. For a day a busy London street is closed to traffic and becomes a vast street market. On 18 September 2011 almost 20,000 people walked down Green Lanes – just one month after the London riots.

The Festival is organised by the Green Lanes Strategy Group, a combination of local Residents’ groups, Traders, Police, Council officers and Councillors. The first festival was staged in 2009 and is planned to occur every 2nd year. It is part of just one of the many activities being undertaken by the local community to re-generate the area around Green Lanes.

Green Lanes itself is an ancient London thoroughfare that was originally a cattle route from Hertfordshire to the Smithfield market just outside the city gates. Passing through several London boroughs, it combines a mix of Turkish, Greek, Cypriot and Jamaican residents. More recently Polish shops have joined the existing Turkish and Cypriot traders along the stretch of Green Lanes from Turnpike Lane to Finsbury Park.

You can find out more about the festival at http://www.harringayfoodfestival.com/

London series – Kings Cross

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Behind the glorious facade of St Pancras station and the newly renovated platforms that deliver us to exotic European destinations lies a post industrial landscape. The district north of St Pancras and KIngs Cross rail stations is an area in re-generation – one of the largest areas of re-development in central London. But also behind these modern facades lies one of the oldest christian sites in England, dating back to the 12th century – the old St Pancras churchyard.

I was fortunate during the recent London Street Photography Festival to join a guided walk by Alan Dein – the author of an oral history of the King Cross area. We strolled from the Eurostar terminal to the enclave for the Camley Street Gardens – and on to the old St Pancras Churchyard. Alan’s walk reminded us of the dislocation and upheaval that the development of the railways brought to the area in the 1830s – and perhaps a new phase of re-development will create new upheaval?

Walking out of the old churchyard we entered the district of Somers Town – a distinct community with it own identity – and an area marked by the social improvers who rebuilt the area in the decades following the first world war. Perhaps one of the most noted was Father Basil Jellicoe, who founded the St Pancras Home Improvement Society. Unlike many of his contemporaries Basil Jellicoe went on the road – selling his vision for social housing. Unusually among his contemporaries too he also recognised the pub as the centre of the community – which encouraged him to  establish a school for publicans – despite being a teetotal himself.

As our walk continued across the Euston Road, or the New Road as it was known in the 1830s, we crossed an invisible barrier from the slum clearance and social improvement to the private development on the south side. Such a London experience – poverty alongside prosperity.

The impossible letters

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The impossible letters – how can read the letters of the alphabet in everyday objects, in buildings, on the street? This was the project challenge for a group of photographers who participated in a workshop organised as part of the inaugural London Street Photography Festival.

After reviewing the work of the two course conveners – David Gibson and Jesse Marlow (also the winner of the festival’s international award), both members of iN-PUBLIC – and a selection of other street photographers, it was time to wander the streets around Spitalfields and Shoreditch.

This is my contribution to the task – followed by some loitering at the Ten Bells afterwards…

London Series – Clerkenwell and Smithfield – Crime, revolutions and executions

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Crime, revolutions and executions seems an apt subtitle for Clerkenwell and Smithfield – a district that has housed prisons, acted as a site for public executions and has been the chosen residence of its fair share of revolutionaries over the centuries.

Clerkenwell (Clerks Well) and Smithfield (Smooth field) are two ancient districts on the boundaries of the City of London and over the centuries have seen multiple waves of development – from fashionable districts in the 17th century, through industrial revolution and post-war decline to come full circle to trendy districts in the 1990s. An example is the Clerkenwell house of detention – first a prison, later a school and now – luxury flats (though the prison cells remain in the basement).

Walking around the streets here you try to imagine the hemmed in feeling of the ‘Rookeries’ – the narrow streets and cheap houses that covered the modern day area from New Oxford street to Farrington Road. Many of the locations in the area feature in the writing of Dickens including; Saffron Hill, Bleeding Heart Yard and Clerkenwell Green, an odd name as it has not been ‘green’ for 300 years. This old village square of Clerkenwell has links with radical politics with the Bolshevik’s newspaper Iskra published here in the early years of the 20th century. The same building now houses the Marx Memorial Library. There is a local story that Lenin met the young Stalin in the Crown Tavern on the green in 1903.

Clerkenwell has a monastic tradition as well, acting as the home of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem – today only the southern gatehouse of their Priory exists but a link with the monastic order remains in the name of the district’s oldest pub – the Jerusalem Tavern, which has existed since the 14th century.
Smithfield, a popular site for the public execution of heretics and dissidents was until the 1850s open fields and the location of London’s meat market. Cattle were driven down to Smithfield via St John’s Street and slaughtered and sold on site. The area was also the location of two monasteries, Charterhouse – later an almshouse and St Bartholomew the Great.

Memories of the Displaced

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The genesis of this project arose out of my first visits to Poland in 2005 and the stark differences I discovered between the Polish Catholic cemeteries and the state of the Jewish cemeteries in Krakow. It was not just the overgrown, cracked and broken tombstones – but also the years of death on many of the tombstones in the Miodowa Street cemetery. Then there is the absence of the detritus of visits by family members to the graves – clearly evident in other Polish cemeteries. It is this last visual clue that reminds us that in less than six years a rich and varied Jewish culture, which had existed for 600 years, was eradicated.

The statistics of those who were displaced seem beyond imagination – yet they involve countless individual lives and histories. The ‘Stolpersteine’ (Stumble Stones) project by the German artist Günter Demnig, is just one small step to assimilate this enormity into individual personal details. ‘Stumble Stones’ are small brass plaques lodged in the pavement next to the homes of those deported. Each plaque indicates the name, year of birth, date of deportation, and eventual destination of each individual. Sometimes whole clusters of these stones can be found where entire apartment blocks were evacuated of their inhabitants.

In the Polish city of Bydgoszcz at Fordon a memorial marks the site of the Dolina Śmierci (valley of death) where 5,000 – 6,000 local residents were murdered in 1939. The panels on the memorial, which list just name and profession, reflect the lists compiled before the war, which sought to eradicate the doctors, lawyers and priests of a generation.

These physical memories remind us that within the grand historical narrative lie the stories of ordinary people and everyday lives.

The burnt our shell of St Johannes church in Gdansk and the half-finished Sagrada de Familia in Barcelona are both reminders of the interruptions and dislocation of war and the distortions of fascism which has left its mark in cemeteries, cities and pavements across Europe.

Les Murs de Paris

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Walking through Paris from the fashionable 8ème to the rapidly gentrifying old working class districts to the North & North East brings you across a variety of signs and street art on the walls – official & unofficial. This journey takes in the work of contemporary urban artists, Mosko et Associés, monuments and memorials to the city’s history, and the work of architects, builders and artisans who have left their stamp on the fabric of Paris.

This series, collected over several years, also reflects the impermanence of the urban space – murals can be repainted, buildings torn down, districts regenerated and urban improvements created.

One example is the ongoing renovation of Paris’ metro stations, where the plastic cladding walls from the 1970s are being stripped away – to reveal the original tiles and advertising hoarding from the beginning of the 20th century. These ‘improvements’ however can also eradicate more recent history – such as the murals at Abbesses metro now painted over in featureless white, returning the station to its ‘original’ condition. On a recent trip to Paris I also discovered that the prowling tigers in the Villa de L’Ermitage had disappeared – replaced by a uniform covering of gray paint.

Brussels New Year 2007

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A random walk through Brussels in the closing days of 2007. The journey takes in the districts of Ixelles & St Gilles in the south with their combination of Art Deco, Art Nouveau and other architectural styles. A fine example of Art Nouveau is the house built for the industrialist Edouard Hannon with its frescos by Boudouin, which today houses the Espace Photographique Contretype.

Walking along the Avenue Louise and the streets surrounding it reveals the grand houses of Brussels. At the end of Avenue Louise lies the Abbye de la Cambre, the 12th century Benedictine Abby which formed the origins of the village of Ixelles long before it became part of Brussels with the construction of Avenue Louise in the 1840s.

Our walk continues to the centre of Brussels and the Christmas market in Place Ste Catherine and beyond to the Grand Place.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

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The 18th century parkland of Bretton Hall is, like any urban space, a man-made landscape – modeled and transformed to suit the tastes of it’s owner. Today as the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the grounds of the estate provide an environment for the exhibition of contemporary sculpture. A recent addition is work by Andy Goldsworthy – a permanent exhibition of ‘Hanging Trees’, embedded in the remains of a derelict Ha-Ha – part of the original fabric of the Bretton estate.

This juxtaposition of the remnants of the original estate, and its artificial landscape, combined with the free-standing work in the grounds, creates a compelling dialogue on the shifting and changing use of the land and its transformation over time and ownership.