Nottingham City Council ceremonies with counsellors and assorted officials. Events covered here include the unveiling of the Brian Clough Statue and the dedication of Speakers Corner. Opening of the Goose Fair. A plaque and memorial stone to honour George Africanus was dedicated by religious leaders including the Bishop of Kingston (Jamaica). A notable resident, he was a West African former slave who became a successful entrepreneur in Nottingham. Also, commemorated, the Annual Act of Remembrance.
Frequent appearances of the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood. [they don’t seem as antagonistic with each other now as was once the case].
From right to roam to anger over polluted rivers, a new breed of activists is pushing back against environmental destruction
Sun 21 Apr 2024 13.00
Something very interesting is happening in the UK, to do with nature, the expanses of land we think of as the countryside, and where all those things sit in our collective consciousness. The change has probably been quietly afoot for 20 or 30 years. Now, it suddenly seems to be blurring over from the cultural sphere into our politics, with one obvious consequence – the belated entry into the national conversation of issues that have long been pushed to the margins, from land access and ownership to the shocking condition of our rivers.
The prevailing British attitude to nature has long been in an equally messed-up state. From the 1600s onwards, endless enclosure acts pushed people off the land and seeded the idea of the countryside as somewhere largely out of bounds. Britain’s rapid industrialisation only accelerated the process. And despite occasional cultural and political tilts in the opposite direction – the bucolic visions of the 18th- and 19th-century Romantics, the mass trespass movement of the 1930s – most of us now show the signs of that long story of loss and estrangement.
Our understanding of the changing of the seasons seems all about the superficialities of heat and light, rather than the much deeper cycles of flora and fauna; to distinguish between different bird calls or spot particular wild flowers would require a level of folk knowledge that now seems almost magical. In 2018, the average UK adult was reckoned to spend 90% of their time inside. Two years before, the Guardian reported that three-quarters of British children spent less than 60 minutes of each day playing outdoors, which left them less acquainted with fresh air than the average prison inmate. In that context, we might be locked into much the same dysfunctional relationship with the natural world as our immediate ancestors.
But maybe that is changing. In the midst of the UK’s Covid lockdowns, the popularity of outdoor walking suddenly surged. At about the same time, ancient and exclusionary cliches about green spaces were being undermined by such inspirational organisations as Muslim Hikers and Black Girls Hike (last week, the latter’s Mancunian founder, Rhiane Fatinikun, received an MBE for “services to nature and diversity”). Not long after, Right to Roam campaigners were given their biggest publicity boost in years when the wealthy landowner Alexander Darwall took legal action to end the long-established right to wild camping on Dartmoor, commencing a battle that looks set to reach the supreme court. In their very different ways, these stories centre on the same key ideas: a rejection of any idea of natural places and spaces being off limits, and the joyous democracy of gathering together to experience something more nourishing than concrete and tarmac.
They also involve a mounting interest in the kind of enchanting, magical aspects of life that we will only find if we connect with nature – and the traces of much older ways of living that pepper our landscape. My favourite example of this latter tendency is Weird Walk, a project set up by three friends who began by “walking an ancient trackway across southern England wearing incorrect footwear”, which has since spawned a book, a regularly published fanzine and an occasional podcast. Their interests include stone circles, enduring local rituals and “lost places”, and how walking heightens instinctive understanding of the mess the planet is in. “If we are to combat the climate change that is disrupting our seasons,” say the Weird Walkers, “perhaps we must also heed the call to embrace viscerally the natural world and its rhythms.”
There is a strand of our revived interest in nature that connects with recent British history, and the upsurge of protests against road-building that happened in the 1990s. These struggles – against such feats of tarmac-based official vandalism as the Newbury bypass and the M3 extension on Twyford Down, near Winchester – fused radical and creative action with a sense of history and mysticism: for their participants and many observers, they represented an inspirational rejection of a money-driven absolutism (one infamous legislative document from that time was titled Roads for Prosperity) that a lot of people thought was too powerful to fight. More than 30 years later, some of that energy is still coursing around: in the past decade or so, I have seen it in the campaigns against a dual carriageway cutting through the Stonehenge world heritage site, the madness of fracking and the nature-destroying effects of HS2.
Moreover, the kind of activism that mixes a deep affinity with the landscape with a hardened political edge is more visible than ever. The two things have an obvious symbiotic relationship: the worse environmental destruction gets, the more precious nature seems and the louder people get. Recently, that has been the essential story of how the treatment of rivers by private water companies has become such a hot political issue. Thanks to that outrage and the endless effects of our heating climate, the notion of giving nature a set of legal rights is edging into political debate: in Lewes in East Sussex last year, for example, the district council passed a motion that opened the way for the River Ouse being granted rights – to flow, be free from pollution and sustain native biodiversity – based on the Universal Declaration of River Rights created via international cooperation in 2017.
Unsurprisingly, the political establishment does not like this stuff at all: earlier this year, the UK delegate to the UN environment assembly insisted that the rejection of rights for nature “is a fundamental principle for the UK and one from which we cannot deviate”. To many people, that will have sounded like someone stubbornly playing their part in a very familiar story, whereby today’s outlandish and unthinkable idea very often becomes tomorrow’s inevitability.
A new kind of politics is brewing here. It is both radical and deeply rooted in our history, and already giving rise to set texts. Next week brings the publication of Wild Service, co-edited by Nick Hayes, who wrote The Book of Trespass, the 2020 travelogue that shone glaring light on the absurdities of land ownership. This new book brings together writers and activists who are all working towards “a new culture that returns nature to the centre of society”. Its title reflects the idea not only of serving the planet by protecting it, but the idea that in doing so, we honour something genuinely sacred. The new breed of protesters, walkers, campers, foragers and wild swimmers are at the heart of it all. “We need people to be intertwined with the land like brambles in the bushes,” says one of the contributors. Nature, in other words, is something we are all part of, and we can only safeguard it from disaster by being joyously and defiantly tangled up in it.
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Protesters in Trafalgar Square, London, May 1994. Photograph: @mattkosnaps
It’s three decades since the government’s attempt to ban raves radicalised an oddball coalition of dance fans, squatters and ‘new age’ travellers. What became of the protesters who tried to kill the bill?
When Harry Harrison first saw the white paper for the criminal justice and public order bill at the end of 1993, he couldn’t believe what he was reading. Harrison was the 27-year-old co-founder of Nottingham’s DiY sound system, so-called house music anarchists, who were known for throwing joyful free parties in fields and forests, quarries and squats. Now those gatherings could be criminalised and, for the first time, the music he played was being legally codified as “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. “It was almost like a surrealist prank,” he says now. “I said: ‘Is this real?’ It was a crazy mixture of the sinister and the absurd.”
The 179-page bill was a hotchpotch of measures, from updating obscenity law and lowering the age of consent for gay men to restricting the right to silence when arrested and enabling the collection of DNA samples. Andrew Puddephatt, then director of the civil rights group Liberty, calls it “a Christmas tree bill. You bung a lot of different issues into one big bill as a way of securing parliamentary time.” At the time, Puddephatt described it as“the most wide-ranging attack on human rights in the UK in recent years”.
When most protesters talked about the criminal justice bill (CJB) they meant “part V public order: collective trespass or nuisance on land”. The notorious “repetitive beats” clause painted it as an anti-rave bill, but that was only the most eye-catching component. The new offences of aggravated trespass and trespassory assembly restricted the movement of travellers (a loose group comprising both ethnic Travellers and “new age” travellers), squatters, road protesters and hunt saboteurs, as well as sound systems. The CJB was an efficient means for John Major, the then prime minister, and Michael Howard, the then home secretary, to appear tough on law and order, soothe the brows of rural Tories and restrict protest, safe in the knowledge that the groups affected had few friends among the press, politicians and public.
The more conspiratorially minded reading is that the government sought to nip in the bud a potentially dangerous coalition of young people who lived outside the system – but it backfired. By targeting so many groups at once, the CJB strengthened that alliance, turning loose connections into steel bonds. Overlapping with the growing movement against road-building, 1994’s anti-CJB campaign filled central London with ravers, turned city streets into art installations, occupied Michael Howard’s garden and made a battlefield of Park Lane. It was the UK’s most exciting collision of pop culture and protest since 1968 – young, creative, colourful, noisy – and its legacy is still with us 30 years later. It established strategies of dissent that went on to inform subsequent campaigns, from Reclaim the Streets to Occupy to Just Stop Oil.
“It was an explosion of dissent,” says Camilla Berens, who was at the heart of the campaign. “A lot of people said Michael Howard did us a favour – he brought a whole generation of outsiders together.”
The root of the CJB was a moral panic about the “unholy alliance” forged between ravers and travellers at the Castlemorton Common festival in May 1992. “They have little in common,” said one senior police officer, “except music, parties, perhaps drugs, and a willingness to defy authority.”
The travellers had experienced a rough few years since the Battle of the Beanfield on 1 June 1985, when police demolished a 140-strong convoy heading for the Stonehenge free festival. The Public Order Act 1986 then gave the police new powers to evict encampments, forcing many travellers to move to Europe or come off the road. “It basically ended up as a refugee column, going from place to place,” says Alan “Tash” Lodge, a former traveller and Beanfield witness who has been photographing protests for 50 years. “With the law, the police action, the whole thing went down the tube.”
Castlemorton Common festival, May 1992 – the trigger for the criminal justice bill. Photograph: Alan Lodge
At the 1990 Glastonbury festival, however, the travellers connected with a new wave of renegade rave sound systems that had begun throwing free parties in squats and warehouses. The sound systems latched on to the old free festival calendar, creating a thrillingly new alloy of the urban and the rural, the ancient and the futuristic. “It was a second wind to a lot of us,” says Lodge. “Suddenly there was hope again.”
“Coming out of the clubs and into the woods was a significant move,” says the journalist CJ Stone. Now a retired postman, in the 90s he chronicled the scene in his Guardian column. “All of a sudden you see yourself as enmeshed in nature, and the parties as an expression of nature itself. The spiritual element felt revolutionary.”
The two most famous free party sound systems were DiY and Spiral Tribe. “It was like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” jokes DiY’s Harry Harrison, who is now a social worker in Wales. “We had a healthy rivalry.” Both systems saw their project as bigger than music. “We were young, radical, fearless and relentless,” Harrison says. “We came from a background of animal rights protests, anarcho-punk and free festivals. I guess we wanted to provide an ideal for living.”
Emerging from London squats, Spiral Tribe were self-styled “techno terrorists” who threw parties almost constantly. “To tell you the truth, I don’t ever remember sleeping,” says co-founder Mark Harrison (no relation). “We were on a mission.” Having attended Stonehenge as a teenager, Harrison saw free parties as a liberating, utopian force: taking back common land with the sound of the future. “We weren’t a bunch of dirty, rotten caners. We felt, maybe naively, that we were bringing something of great worth to society.”
Harry Harrison, photographed in north Wales recently. Photograph: Francesca Jones/The GuardianHarrison and riot police, Trafalgar Square, 1994. Photograph: Courtesy of Harry Harrison
The free party scene exploded in summer 1991, primarily in the south-west, but there were signs that this merry lawlessness could not last. “As we came into 1992, we did sense a crackdown looming,” says Harry Harrison. “It was growing exponentially and it was clearly about to escalate out of control.”
Nobody planned for tens of thousands of ravers to descend on Castlemorton Common in the Malvern Hills. A convoy of revellers looking for a site for the Avon free festival had been moved on several times when, on 22 May, West Mercia police allowed them on to the common, having no idea how big the party would get. Spiral Tribe were hiding out in a Welsh forest, “battered and bruised” after a savage police raid on a warehouse rave a month earlier. They got the call and headed east. “All these officers in shirt sleeves were waving and smiling,” Mark Harrison recalls. “We were very confused. It felt like a trap. But in all honesty, I don’t think it was intended as such.”
The unprecedented scale of Castlemorton was largely a media-driven phenomenon. The more outraged attention it received (the Daily Telegraph denounced it as a “hippy siege”), the more people came. At its peak, there were between 20,000 and 40,000 people – one of the UK’s largest free gatherings since the last Stonehenge free festival in 1984. Castlemorton was effectively a self-governing, 24-hour pop-up town, with its own power, lighting, catering and accommodation.
Residents complained about the traffic, litter, dogs and noise. Somebody fired a distress flare at a police helicopter. There were tensions, too, between longtime travellers and fly-by-night ravers. “I was going round yesterday at 4am burying their shit,” one traveller told the Guardian. “They don’t seem to know how to use a shovel.” For all that, there were only a few dozen arrests, mostly for minor drug offences.
Spiral Tribe weren’t the loudest sound system, because their usual rig had been trashed in the police raid, but they had targets on their backs. They were also the last to leave, on 29 May, so there was no safety in numbers. The police swooped, impounded vehicles and arrested 13 people for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. “They were building Spiral Tribe into this unstoppable dark force so they could bring in the criminal justice bill, which wasn’t just about repetitive beats,” says Mark Harrison. “We were billed as folk devils.” The police also raided Spiral Tribe’s squats. “They were looking for me for a couple of weeks,” recalls music producer Lol Hammond, of Spiral Tribe and the Drum Club. “We were in the flat with the lights off, making out we weren’t in. For me, it was either get arrested or go legal.”
We were all outsiders in one way or another. We didn’t buy into the system we were presented with
The backlash to Castlemorton was immense. On 29 June, local MP Michael Spicer absurdly characterised the festival as an “invasion” with the “strength of two motorised army divisions” and “a highly sophisticated command and signals system”. John Major then targeted travellers in his autumn party conference speech: “New age travellers? Not in this age. Not in any age.” Ministers had already been talking about cracking down on squatters and travellers. Castlemorton provided the perfect excuse.
In March 1993, Kenneth Clarke, then home secretary, announced new proposals to amend the 1986 act to outlaw “illegal large raves”. Under his successor, Michael Howard, the criminal justice bill was included in the Queen’s speech on 18 November and published as a white paper in December.
The members of Spiral Tribe returned to the UK from their new base in France to stand trial in Wolverhampton on 10 January 1994. “The prosecutor was larging us as these techno-pagans from hell,” says Mark Harrison. “I think the jury realised it was a load of bullshit. Even the cops seemed reluctant to give evidence against us.” It cost the crown millions to reach the conclusion that Spiral Tribe could not be found guilty under existing laws.
On the trial’s second day, the billpassed its second reading in the Commons. The Labour party abstained, its hawkish shadow home secretary Tony Blair refusing to appear soft on crime. Opposition would not come from Westminster.
CoolTan Arts in Brixton, south London, took its name from its original home, an old suntan lotion factory, but by 1994 it was based in a defunct unemployment benefit office whose clients had once included a young John Major. It was run by Shane Collins, a Green party activist who had joined the Earth First! protest camp against the M3 extension at Twyford Down, in Hampshire, and then, after he was arrested and banned from the site, co-founded its urban equivalent, Reclaim the Streets. All of these groups, and more, worked out of CoolTan, an activist hub with offices, a cafe and two halls for fundraising club nights.
At 7.30pm on Wednesday 12 January 1994, about 40 representatives of groups affected by the CJB came together at CoolTan under the deliberately cryptic name the Interactive Diners Club to discuss coordinated resistance. One of the organisers was Camilla Berens, a young journalist who covered the intersection of countercultural tribes in her magazine Pod. “I came up with this term ‘DIY culture’ to explain what my generation was doing below the surface of mainstream life,” she says. “We were all outsiders in one way or another. We didn’t buy into the system we were presented with.”
Campaigner Camilla Berens, photographed earlier this month. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The GuardianBerens on a ‘funeral march’ from Parliament Square to the gates of Downing Street, August 1994. Photograph: Adrian Short
The Interactive Diners Club was soon formalised as the Freedom Network, with Berens as its media spokesperson. Young activists politicised by the poll tax or Twyford Down mingled with veterans of Beanfield and Greenham Common.“The bill definitely brought people together,” says Chris Cocking, a sociology lecturer at the University of Brighton who was then a 23-year-old Twyford Down protester. “It felt that the subculture was under attack. This politicisation made people realise it didn’t just affect them, it affected others. It was almost like a friendly allied country sending delegations.” He recalls the movement’s initial naivety with a grim smile. “Some people were even saying: ‘Oh, we’ll appeal to the Queen, we’ll get her to refuse to sign it off!’”
It was a bulldozer, this law, and nothing was going to stop it politically
Soon there were roughly 90 Freedom Network branches and 200 anti-CJB groups around the country. The hubs were squatted community centres like CoolTan, the Rainbow Centre in Kentish Town, Exodus in Luton, Justice? in Brighton. For two months, the Freedom Network turned Artillery Mansions in Westminster into a homeless shelter known as New Squatland Yard. In Nottingham, DiY formed All Systems No!, an alliance of sound systems. Everything was coordinated via hotlines, meetings and flyers. “It was pre-internet, no mobile phones,” says Harry Harrison. “You think, how did we do anything? How do you ring up Spiral Tribe on a landline? With great difficulty!”
“Because you were physically going around the country in vans, you would make very strong connections with people,” says Gibby Zobel of Justice? and SchNEWS magazine. “We had a million meetings, just hammering out ways forward.”
The political wing of the free party scene was the Advance Party – a name coined by Mark Harrison. It was launched by Debbie Staunton, who ran Spiral Tribe’s information line, and Michelle Poole, who came from the radical left. Harrison says that Staunton, who died recently, was “a very gentle, very kind woman but very strong. She was massively forward-thinking: this network of info lines could easily turn into a political force.”
By 1994, the large-scale free parties were over. Operation Nomad and Operation Snapshot pooled police resources throughout the south-west to monitor and block travellers and sound systems. “After Castlemorton, we never went to a free festival again,” says Harry Harrison. “We kept doing free parties for the next five years but as a mass movement it just dissipated.” The No M11 campaign in London, however, spawned a kind of nonstop free party in Claremont Road, Leytonstone. Protesters occupied the street with armchairs, barricades sculpted out of found objects and a 100ft-tall tower of brightly painted scaffolding. “It was like a living festival with a purpose,” remembers Zobel. “A really intelligent, active alternative crowd. It was an incredible place.”
The activists’ bridge to parliament was Liberty. Andrew Puddephatt recalls folk-rock band the Levellers turning up for a meeting with dozens of travellers in tow. “For a staid middle-aged organisation, it was quite a difference to have a very young, engaged constituency,” he says fondly. “A bit chaotic, but interesting.”
Puddephatt’s primary concern was part V’s repeal of the Caravan Sites Act 1968, which obliged councils to provide spaces for traveller encampments. But conversations with usually sympathetic MPs were ominous. “They would say: ‘Yeah, we understand it, Andrew, but you’ve got no chance.’ Everybody hated travellers.” Tory MP Bob Dunn labelled them “no more than a bunch of unwashed, benefit-grabbing, socialist anarchists who deserve a good slap and a wash”. The Telegraph called them “human locusts”.skip past newsletter promotion
Protesters outside parliament, July 1994. Photograph: @mattkosnaps
When, after the second reading, the bill entered its committee stage, Jim Carey was there every day. A musician who had been squatting and putting on free arts events for a decade, he was so disgusted by the unchallenged vilification of squatters that in 1992 he took a night-school journalism class and launched a magazine, Squall, to provide a counter-narrative. He enjoyed cycling to parliament each day to show that this squatter with long hair and earrings knew every detail, but was shocked to discover that many MPs didn’t. “I kept wanting to stand up and correct them because their information was wrong. I could see MPs doing crosswords. It was a bulldozer, this law, and nothing was going to stop it politically.”
On 13 April, the CJB passed its third reading in the Commons, with Labour abstaining again. In its entirety, the bill was too big to fail. Now the more realistic goal of the Commons amending the worst sections of part V had been dashed. As the Labour peer Lord McIntosh later said in the Lords, if he looked soft on squatters: “Mr Tony Blair would have me shot at dawn.”
Did the activists truly believe they could win? “Oh God, yeah,” says Zobel. “It was a cultural phenomenon. I don’t think we had any hope in the mainstream media or political parties, but we definitely thought we could stop it.”
“Not at all,” counters Alan Lodge. “But it was still important that you could say you did your best. To curl up in a ball and say, ‘It’s so awful, I can’t do anything,’ is the worst thing that you can do.”
As the anti-CJB campaign gathered steam, the Advance Party’s Staunton proposed something surprisingly conventional: a march from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square on May Day. “We all thought: well, marches never get any coverage unless something goes wrong, but Debbie was very convincing,” Berens recalls. “She said: ‘Let’s bring the free party scene into central London and make it a massive celebration and galvanise the movement.’”
What took place on that gloriously sunny day was a new kind of protest: a 20,000-strong rainbow parade, dancing from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, drawing in many people who had never been on a demonstration before. “THEY WANNA FIGHT,” read one giant banner, “WE WANNA DANCE.” But the audiovisual spectacle was more eloquent than words. With an ethos of “party and protest”, it was a cheerful pageant of the lifestyles the bill sought to extinguish – DIY culture with its tailfeathers out. “Because music was now being criticised, music was protesting,” Lodge reasons. “It was much more of an entertainment than a po-faced, down-with-that protest.”
“There was a real sense of camaraderie and effervescence,” remembers Lol Hammond. “There was a lot of pride in the dance community. I think we were seen as a bunch of smiley-T-shirt nutters, off our faces.”
The demonstration passed peacefully – with one notable exception. “You had to try quite hard to be arrested,” Harry Harrison says with a roguish grin, “but we took our clothes off in the Trafalgar Square fountains, and that did it.” He ended up in a police cell, roaringly drunk and dripping wet. “Party and protest. We did both in equal measure.”
This police helicopter came over saying, ‘Everybody get out of the park!’ And then it all exploded
The CJB was expected to pass before the summer recess, but was delayed by amendments in the Lords. “So we had that whole summer we hadn’t thought we’d have,” says Berens. In one of many nonviolent direct actions, she led a group of Freedom Network women who locked themselves to the parliament railings dressed as suffragettes. Plans for the next march, however, were fractious.
One day, four visitors went to CoolTan saying they were from the Coalition Against the Criminal Justice Bill and that they had the support of Tony Benn and the trade unions. “We know all the networks, so who the fuck are you?” Berens replied. She soon learned that the coalition was a front for the Socialist Workers party (SWP), which had no history with the movement. “My views have softened a lot over the years,” says Chris Cocking, “but at the time we viewed the SWP as a Trotskyist, entryist, parasitic organisation intent on taking over campaigns for their own agenda. That did cause a lot of bad feeling.”
Whether the SWP organised the 24 July march or just co-opted it is unclear, but it was certainly more conventional than the first, with a sea of “Kill the Bill” placards. It was also three times bigger. Amid a largely peaceful day, there was a flammable encounter at Downing Street just after 3pm. A handful of protesters climbed the gates and started shaking them, eye to eye with a phalanx of armed police; and mounted police charged into the crowd.
Jim Carey saw the demonstrations primarily as promotional tools: streets thronged with colourful young people forced the media to pay attention. He became a “media tart” and versatile public speaker, from Newsnight to nightclubs. “We were celebrating the culture that we’d built outside of Thatcher’s dream,” he says, “and that celebration was a dissenting voice.” A photograph of ravers in Trafalgar Square graced the cover of the New Statesman, with an essay by CJ Stone about the “new politics”.
Meanwhile, dance music artists joined the Levellers in getting the CJB into the music press. The Prodigy’s chart-topping Music for the Jilted Generation was effectively an anti-CJB concept album: “Fuck ’em and their law!” was the refrain of one track. Autechre programmed the rhythms of Flutter so that “no bars contain identical beats and can therefore be played … under the proposed new law”, while Orbital’s Are We Here? (Criminal Justice Bill?) was an eloquent four minutes of silence. In October, Lol Hammond orchestrated a fundraising single called – what else? – Repetitive Beats. “You do think you can change things,” he says. “But I remember people saying, ‘Why are we getting so political?’ as well. They chose dance music as a means of escapism and all of a sudden they had to think about politics.”
By then, though, time was running out: the bill was scheduled to return to the Commons on 19 October. The mood going into the third and final march on 9 October was therefore angrier and more urgent. “There was an inexorable logic to the bill happening so people probably felt more desperate,” says Puddephatt. This time there were as many as 100,000 protesters, but they were not of one mind. In July, Freedom Network flyers had cheerfully advised: “Keep it fluffy” (in the sense of nonviolent direct action). Now the anarchist group Class War, who disdained the anti-CJB campaign as uselessly soft, retaliated with its own slogan: “Keep it spiky.”
Things did get spiky when two sound systems tried to get into Hyde Park. “The idea was – at least in my head – that we could hold Hyde Park for a week or so and have our festival,” says CJ Stone. Eventually, the police let them in, but what seemed to avert a showdown only postponed it. Late in the afternoon, when most people had gone home, mounted police charged the stragglers. “No warning,” says Berens. “They sent people flying. It was so shocking and surreal it was hard to believe it had actually happened. This police helicopter came over saying: ‘Everybody get out of the park!’ And then it all exploded, with riot vans charging up and down Park Lane, cops waving their shields: ‘Get out! Get out!’”
The Smokescreen sound system at a protest march in London in October 1994. Photograph: @mattkosnaps
The Daily Mail called it Revolt of the Ravers. By the end of the day, there had been 39 arrests, 53 shop windows smashed and 28 injuries. “It wasn’t as bad as the papers made out,” Harry Harrison protests. “I’ve seen a lot worse. On the riot-o-meter, I’d only give it a three or four.” For Chris Cocking, it was a radicalising experience: “A lot of people, myself included, went from quite naive, pacifistic, hippyish protesters to hardcore Class War anarchists.”
Due to the publicity, Berens was invited to debate the CJB’s implications with Tory MP Nigel Evans on BBC One’s Kilroy and the scowling interrogators of Radio 4’s Moral Maze. “Suddenly, we were flavour of the month,” she says ruefully, “but by then it was too late to do anything about it.” The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (CJA) received royal assent on 3 November.
“Don’t keep calling it the criminal justice bill,” Alan Lodge scolds me at one point. “It’s an act! We lost.”
On one level, the anti-CJB campaign experienced unmitigated defeat. The CJA marked dance music’s transition from a subversive force into a respectable pillar of the night-time economy. A thwarted attempt by Debbie Staunton’s new group United Systems to stage “the Mother”, a massive, defiant free party on 7 July 1995, led to three members of the Black Moon sound system in Derbyshire becoming the first people convicted under the “repetitive beats” clause. They were fined and their sound system destroyed. More often, the mere threat of arrest was enough to quash a party. “The festival culture they tried to criminalise has gone mainstream,” says an activist calling himself Phoenix, who was a 24-year-old organiser at the Rainbow Centre. “But they now put a big fence around them and charge people £250 to get in.”
The act also made life intolerably difficult for travellers. “It made a bad situation unmanageable,” says Puddephatt. The eviction of Claremont Road in November 1994 eliminated another outpost of DIY culture. In his book Party Lines, Ed Gillett calls the CJA “a funeral knell for British counterculture”.
All the stuff that’s now mainstream in the UK in the last five years was being discussed around campfires 30 years ago
For many activists, though, the CJA wasn’t the end at all. The day after it became law, five campaigners climbed on to the roof of Westminster Hall and unfurled a banner reading “Defy the CJA”. More than 200 protesters, including Phoenix, occupied the garden of Michael Howard’s country house in Kent and staged a mock trial. “The message was defy, defy, defy,” says Berens. “We were all prepared to go to prison.”
The immediate consequences, however, were not as bad as the campaigners had feared. By the start of 1997, there had been only 470 prosecutions for aggravated trespass and 42 for trespassory assembly. The utopian, carnivalesque energy of the 1994 protests flowed into the guerrilla street parties of the relaunched Reclaim the Streets, which began in May 1995 and escalated towards a symbolic return to Trafalgar Square to mark the general election two years later. Protesters blocked off streets to cars and installed climbing frames, bouncy castles and sound systems. On the M41 in July 1996, activists hidden beneath the giant skirts of stilt-walkers dug holes in the tarmac to plant trees. “The free festivals stopped, but now we had these urban festivals of resistance in the middle of London,” says Berens.
The road protests got bigger, too. The 1996 occupation against the Newbury bypass, where protesters set up home in trees and tunnels, made 23-year-old Dan “Swampy” Hooper a household name. “They were selective,” says Cocking. “The idea that they would mass-arrest everybody didn’t come to pass.” All the existing projects went ahead, but the cost of security, damage and delays hobbled the Conservatives’ £23bn road-building programme before the Labour government junked it altogether. As Cocking puts it: “There are noisy defeats and quiet victories.”
The protests were not always harmonious. As with all non-hierarchical movements, there were many disagreements about strategy. Drug addiction and mental illness caused friction, too. And there was growing concern about undercover police. “We all joked about it,” says Phoenix. “We assumed our phones were bugged. We knew there was infiltration, but we tried not to get too paranoid.” Shane Collins has participated in the government inquiry into “spy cops” who used false identities to embed themselves in groups such as Greenpeace and Reclaim the Streets. Two of them, Jim Boyling and Andy Coles, were men he knew and trusted.
There is growing interest in this period and what it meant. Mark and Harry Harrison have published memoirs and appear in a new documentary, Free Party: A Folk History. Berens, co-founder of South East London Community Energy and a volunteer for Greenpeace, is writing her own memoir of a life in protest. Everyone I speak to sees the anti-CJB campaign as one stop on a continuum. Reclaim the Streets and the road protests rolled into Peoples’ Global Action in the late 1990s, the Camps for Climate Action in the 2000s, Occupy in 2011 and, more recently, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. Figures from 1994 have played a part in all of these. They sit on councils, work at charities and train young activists. The cliche of hippies ageing into yuppies does not seem to apply here. “I haven’t stopped since 1991,” says Phoenix. “All these movements flow into each other. I still want to be active when I’m 70.”
Shane Collins, now a Green party councillor in Somerset, argues that the DIY coalition of the mid-90s was the cradle of modern environmentalism: “We lost a few battles but we won the war as regards the road protests, GM foods, new coal-fired power stations, fracking.” Zobel, now an activist and journalist in Brazil, agrees: “All the stuff that’s become mainstream in the UK in the last five years was being discussed earnestly around campfires 30 years ago.”
There have been setbacks, too. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 placed even more restrictions on protest and trespass than the CJA, bringing “Kill the Bill” placards back on to Britain’s streets. Yet the veterans of 1994 fight on, in myriad ways. “I’m a perpetual optimist, so, yes, I thought this was going to change the world,” says CJ Stone. “In a way, it did.”
Posted in.|Tagged30, act, CJA, criminal, harrison, harry, protest, years|Comments Off on ‘We went from naive, hippyish protesters to hardcore anarchists’: the criminal justice bill protests, 30 years on
Armed Forces Day aims to show the public, various aspects of military life.
Invited to cover the Army Presentation Team on their visit to Nottingham University
The 1st Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment arrived back home following a six-month operational tour of Afghanistan. They paraded through Nottingham and received the Freedom of the City. A cause for some celebration and relief, but also some sadness on behalf of those who were killed or injured.
Every year, I attend the Remembrance Day Parades. On a lighter note, I have photographed various re-enactments including The Sealed Knot Civil War Society, The Napoleonic Association, Medieval, Norman and Saxons. Oh …. and some Vikings once!
The Derbyshire Peak District National Park Peak District. 2 Hours of Beautiful Landscape Photography by Alan Lodge taken with a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra / Expert RAW
During news coverage, incidents and situations are frequently attended by police. I have attended news conferences, armed situations and public order incidents. The opening of police stations and civic engagements.
Within this set, you can see some specialist police units in action, scenes of crime officers, drug confiscation, underwater search unit and the helicopter. I have always had an interest in police surveillance methods and equipment used. Have covered many protest and public order situations, examples here include union and cuts protests, right-wing / EDL demonstrations, prevention of gatherings at Stonehenge. Environment protest and the policing action at Ratcliffe-on Soar power station. I have been called to give defence evidence in court.
One of the highlights of the festival will be a City Centre day produced by City Arts on Saturday 13 April from 11am which will see puppetry and processions of all scales. Free street theatre, shows, music, and marvellous sights and sounds will link Sneinton Market to Old Market Square, all the way to the new Central Library. You’ll see Mahogany Carnival Design’s spectacular costumes,
Arts, crafts, installations, graffiti, performance ….. and many things able and mysterious. Here a selection from commissions, university degree shows and galleries. Productions by local artists, sculpture and examples of public and performance arts.
Andy reflects on his journey studying photography in university, delves into his career progression, explores the valuable lessons learned from mistakes, and shares anecdotes from his photo shoots with musicians.
A podcast collaboration with Radio DADA.
Posted in.|Taggedandy, earl, ntu, Photography|Comments Off on Interview with Andy Earl, ex NTU
With greater acceptance by society, gay pride events have been gaining in popularity. Shown here, events from Manchester, London, Leicester, Derby and Nottingham. Greater Manchester Police and the Gay Police Association asked for this group picture before they joined the parade. It is also encouraging to see chief police officers joining with other groups from public service, such as the military etc.
Many commercial outfits have arrived and taking places at these events. Some of the more cynical perhaps feel that they are simply trying to cash in on the ‘pink pound’ and not give a screw about the civil rights held up here. At Manchester Pride, some youths held up signs “too poor to be gay” and pride not profit”. They were hustled to the side by security who then started harassing me. Citing commercial sensitivity!! ’twas ever thus!
c/o Sumac Centre, 245 Gladstone St, Nottingham NG7 6HX
PRESS RELEASE
Nottingham Green Festival :: Sunday, 8th September 2024
Nottingham Green Festival is now in its 31st year and is organised by grass roots community-based volunteers, not-for-profit and with no statutory funding. The ethical standards and sustainability / environmental / human / animal rights ethos of the FREE one-day event are long established, having evolved from the pre-history of Nottingham Peace Festival from which it grew. At the last event, we estimate we had around 5,000 adults and children in attendance.
Nottingham’s own green festival, happening this year on Sunday 8th September between 12noon and 6pm, provides the place for everyone to learn, explore and try the latest in everything environmentally friendly and ethical, while having lots of fun in the beautiful setting of the Arboretum Park.
We are proud to run the event ‘off-grid’. Free live music is powered by solar panels and battery storage equipment. Outdoor entertainment and adult & children’s activities and workshops include stalls from small green businesses, craft workers, community groups, charities, campaigns, artisan food producers and vegan caterers. Stalls share information about domestic energy saving, insulation and reducing carbon emissions. Re-use, repair and recycling are encouraged by organisations like Hackspace, Repair Cafe and Bike Co-op. Sustainable and energy-saving technologies, transport and information are promoted. We encourage food vendors and stalls to operate with minimal or no plastic.
In the report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate scientists have warned that there are only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people. The tipping points beyond which we will be unable to regulate the situation are just around the corner.
It is with this in mind that the organisers of the Green Festival feel that we need to step up a gear and include education, workshops, information sharing and action to better enable people to understand the issues of concern and to help them and their neighbourhoods bring about the changes required.
Respected medical journal, The Lancet, stated that “Civilisation is in crisis; we can no longer feed our population a healthy diet while balancing planetary resources. If we can eat in a way that works for our planet as well as our
bodies, the natural balance will be restored.” This has been challenged by other scientists but there is an argument that a massive reduction in meat consumption supporting a move away from livestock farming could be part of the solution to our planetary dilemmas.
The Green Festival has addressed these issues since the 1980’s, with exclusively vegetarian food, including Veggies Catering Campaign, since day one. With the growing interest and adoption of vegan living, supported in Nottingham by initiatives such as Sneinton Vegan Market, the Green Festival is taking a lead nationally with an all-vegan food policy.
Alongside this, other sustainable issues are advanced by the event, especially regarding single use packaging: The free tea stall & some caterers use returnable mugs; plastic water bottle sales are banned in favour of the new water fountain at the Arboretum, funded by the Green Festival. This year stall holders have formed a working group to share best practice to reduce plastic waste.
We are aware that personal and community learning and changing are best achieved in a happy positive environment, not by being immobilised by threats of doom. The joyous and relaxed atmosphere of the Green Festival is a perfect event to help people accept serious lifestyle change and look to working within their friendship circles to promote these necessary changes
We attract a wide spread of local people of all ages, and plan further efforts to make the site safer for people with disabilities, despite the increasing crowds. We make provision to serve the many local communities but must always work to improve the event.
We organise and prepare for the event throughout the year. Beyond the local and community groups currently involved, in future we hope to include staff, students and societies from our universities and colleges in projects to help educate and inform those attending the event about the urgency of our situation, and offering positive and practical actions that individuals and communities can take.
Please help us if you can. ‘Think globally, act locally’
At the end of Tish, the documentary about the photographer Tish Murtha, one of the lingering questions posed by her daughter Ella is how did this incredibly talented artist not manage to sustain a career in photography?
Murtha, who created unparalleled portraits of working-class life in Newcastle’s West End in the 1970s and 80s, has been “rediscovered” in recent years, but her inability to make a living in her lifetime not only haunts the film but also current photography – where working-class voices are increasingly rare.
“Primarily with Tish being a working-class woman and a single mother – that was the defining reason why she couldn’t sustain a career,” says Paul Sng, the director of Tish. “It’s much harder for women to progress in the arts to this day.”
Tish Murtha was not able to sustain a career in photography but her work has been ‘rediscovered’ in recent years. Photograph: Tish Murtha/BBC/Freya Films/Demon Snapper Productions/Ella Murtha
In 2022, a study showed that the proportion of working-class artists had shrunk from 16.4% for those born between 1953 and 1962 to just 7.9% for those born four decades later. The research found that people who grew up in professional families were now four times more likely than those with working-class parents to be in creative work.
Sng believes that more should be done to help artists from working-class backgrounds, who might find it challenging, as Murtha did, to navigate the funding applications and institutions, such as Arts Council England, which enable artists to make a living.
“She should have been supported more; not everyone can write applications,” says Sng. “You can use video to apply these days but there are people who don’t have a mobile phone. It’s still very difficult for people like Tish to make it.”
Tish comes to BBC iPlayer at a time when there’s a boom in interest in working-class photography.
A working-class photographer who did sustain an incredible career was Bert Hardy.
Hardy – who was the eldest of seven children and grew up in a working-class family in Blackfriars, London – is arguably one of the most versatile British photographers of the 20th century.
He went on night raids during the Korean war, took images from within the Belsen concentration camp but also captured celebrity engagements and shot sporting heroes such as Sugar Ray Robinson.
But it was his work with Picture Post, where he covered all aspects of working-class life from mining communities and rural poverty to the diversity of Cardiff’s Butetown that is the most celebrated.
Hardy’s work covering all aspects of working-class life for Picture Post is his most celebrated. Photograph: Bert Hardy/Getty Images
Karen McQuaid, the senior curator of the Hardy show, said: “He obviously had a huge abundance of talent but also knew what to do with it and was entrepreneurial and hungry for commercial success as well as anything else.”
Hardy also operated during a period where there was a proliferation of illustrated weekly magazines, such as Picture Post and Life, which had a circulation of more than 13m at its peak – something unthinkable now or even in Murtha’s era.
Pitts, whose exhibition features more than two dozen working-class photographers, says he wanted to give a platform to artists who sit outside the big institutions and also present a “messy” image of working-class life.
“These artists haven’t been given either a chance, haven’t conformed to upper middle class notions of what good taste is, or simply haven’t had the chance to build a network within that world,” says Pitts.
“[The exhibition] is not a sob story. This is, in some ways, a celebration of the tenacity of working-class photographers, but also just to show how stagnant mainstream photography has been.”
If you film your campaign group in action, the footage can be used on social media or even broadcast news to get the message out to a wider audience.
By filming it yourself, you are being part of DIY (Do It Yourself) culture and not relying on the mainstream media to turn up.
Here are a few hints to get you going, using a smartphone.
Before you go out Try and make sure your phone is fully charged.
Pack your charged battery pack and charging cable if you have one.
Make sure you have space on your phone to record onto.
Make sure you have data available on your phone plan, if you are going to upload your films while you are out.
Take a lens cloth – you’ll probably have one if you have glasses, or you can get one from an optician’s or maybe a chemist’s.
Keeping the lens clean while you’re out will improve the quality of your image and help the auto focus to work.
Take basic wired headphones (see below). If they didn’t come with your phone, they might cost £20.
These are helpful for improving the quality of the audio on your interviews (as explained below) and can also be used for the editing after.
When you’re out there 1) Film in landscape (wide screen, with your phone on its side) not in portrait (how you normally hold a phone, upright). Landscape is the shape of computer screens and television. Shooting in landscape makes the footage useful for future documentaries and the news. (If you want portrait footage for social media, like TikTok, just film a slightly wider image in landscape; it’s usually possible during editing to crop the landscape into portrait.)
2) When you’re interviewing someone, ask them to look directly into the camera lens, especially if it’s for social media. On the other hand, you may want them to look at you instead. (If you don’t tell them where to focus their eyes, they could look all over the place during the interview, and this will look strange later, on film!) Do also think about light levels (though the latest phone cameras tend to get this right automatically). You want the face of the person you are interviewing to be well lit – it doesn’t matter if the background is too bright or too dark. You can usually adjust the light by tapping on the screen where their face is and sliding the sun icon to the right up and down.
3) Film short interviews. Let people know how long you want their answer to be. For example, if it’s for social media, the answer should be under a minute! Ask open questions, not questions they can answer with a yes or no: ‘Can you tell me where you are and describe what is going on today? What you hope to achieve? Please could you answer in full sentences because my questions will be edited out of the film. So you could start your answer: “I’m here today because.…”’
4) Think about the background of the speaker. It’s best if the background is relevant and shows where they are and the action.
5) To get good audio when you are filming an interview at an event, think about how noisy it is. Can you ask the person to move away from the noisy people nearby, or away from the traffic or the samba band? Film a short clip of them saying their name and then stop and listen back to this. Can you hear them over the background noise? Also, now, when you edit the film, you can find their name if you need to credit them!
Image
You, the camera person 1) Hold the phone steady while you’re filming. Film each shot for at least seven seconds. Think of it like taking a long photo. Don’t keep moving the camera around. You can just hold your phone in your hand, or you can buy a phone holder or even a gimbal. A gimbal is a device that holds your phone and keeps the image steady even if you are walking around – see the picture below for an example. [‘Gimbal’ sounds like ‘thimble’, except it starts with the ‘g’ from ‘give’ – ed]
2) To improve the audio when doing interviews, plug the headphones into the phone and…
3) Hold the microphone bit out towards the person you’re interviewing.
4) You don’t hold the actual mic, you hold the wire on either side of it. Hold the mic just out of the frame, so it can’t be seen by the phone camera! (If you want to invest in kit, Rode wired mics for smartphones or Rode or DJI radio mics are excellent.)
5) If it is windy, hold your lens cleaning cloth loosely over the mic. This will block out some of the wind buffeting and improve your audio.
Image
Film these types of shots
A) Interviews – film someone explaining the where, why and what is going on. (See the first picture above for an example of an interview.)
B) Action – have your phone out and be ready to film when the event starts.
C) Cutaways – interesting shots like banners, wide shots to show the size of the action and where you are – and also the audience looking on. Cutaways help keep the audience’s attention.
How to share your photos and videos One way of sharing your videos and photos with the media is through a ‘For Press’ Google Drive folder which you create before the demo/action/event. You can then put the link for this media folder into the press release for your event.
How do you get images/footage from the event into that folder?
Many groups now share their content using the free app Telegram (which can be used on your phone or on your computer). Telegram is like WhatsApp but it doesn’t compress imagery (it can take files of up to 2GB), so you can use it to share good quality photos and videos with high resolution.
Create a Telegram ‘group’ for your group, and ‘pin’ it when you are on an action, so it is easy to find.
When you have something to share, open Telegram. Click the paperclip icon and then choose your video to share. At the bottom, you can then choose the highest option to share it in. You can also choose ‘file’ for the highest quality option.
When you post content, add a brief description of the action and where the picture or video was taken – and who should be credited for the image.
Also clarify to all in the chat that if images are posted in this Telegram group then the owner is agreeing for them to be used by the media.
If you have someone managing press for the action, they can watch the footage coming in on the Telegram chat, choose the best photos and videos and download them and upload them to the ‘For Press’ folder. This folder can be updated as new images and edits are made through the day.
Alternatively, people filming on the ground could upload their footage and photos to a non-press ‘group’ Google Drive folder set up for the event. (You need to create that folder, and share the link for it with the people who will be filming and photographing, before the action takes place.)
Someone managing this group folder on their computer would then choose the highlights, or edit the film, and choose what should go in the separate ‘For Press’ Google Drive folder for sharing with the media. This folder can be updated as new images and edits are made through the day.
Also, don’t forget to post your footage to the best-known social media platforms!
Edit in your phone
I use the free app CAPCUT to edit footage on my smartphone but there are lots of apps you could choose from.
Download the app and then start by opening a new project.
Choose the interview as your first clip. Trim the length of this.
To make the film more interesting, you can add a few clips as cutaways, called ‘overlay’ in CAPCUT.
Choose an interesting clip that is relevant to what the person is saying.
Use your fingers to stretch the clip so that it fills the screen. This will then be seen but you’ll still hear the interview.
Remove or reduce the audio from overlay clips.
Add text if it’s needed. This could include the name of the speaker and ‘Filmed by [your name]’. You could also include your group’s website or a campaign message.
When you’ve finished the edit, you can click ‘add auto captions’. Check these through for typos to correct.
If you want to make a portrait video (maybe for TikTok), start by recording a short portrait video of anything right now.
In CAPCUT, start a new project.
Add this portrait video first.
This makes the settings for this project ‘portrait’.
Then add your interview. You can resize it by stretching it out with your fingers on the screen until it fills the shape.
Then delete your first random portrait clip by tapping on it and hitting the ‘delete’ option.
Then carry on your edit as above, adding cutaways/overlays and resizing them, and adding text.
All options, such as ‘cut’, ‘adjust audio levels’ and ‘add overlay’ are picture icons at the bottom of the screen.
Once you have finished editing, export the film.
It will then appear in your photos on your phone and can then be shared.
Reporting or filming from the scene of an incident is part of the media’s role and they should not be prevented from doing so from a public place. Police have no power or moral responsibility to stop the filming or photographing of incidents or police personnel. It is for the media to determine what is published or broadcast, not the police. Once an image has been recorded, the police have no power to seize equipment, or delete or confiscate images or footage without a court order.
Where police have designated a cordoned area, the media must respect it in the same way as the public, unless a media facility within a cordoned area has been authorised by police. The best possible vantage point for media should be considered, providing it does not compromise operational needs.
The union has commented after charges were dropped against a photographer arrested by South Wales Police one day before the trial was due to begin.
Natasha Hirst, NUJ president, said:
“There has been an alarming number of incidents of police overstepping their powers with photographers and reporters over the last couple of years, creating an increasingly hostile environment for journalists who are simply trying to do their job.
“Photographers carry out a vital role in independently documenting events that are in the public interest. Yet their safety is often put at risk by members of the public and unfortunately, as in this case, by police officers. It’s important to see this case was dropped, but I hope that swift action is taken to return all equipment to the photographer, along with an apology and compensation for the appalling treatment he experienced at the hands of the South Wales Police. We will raise this case in our discussions with the police and continue to urge them to work with the NUJ to educate their officers on the role and remit of journalists and ensure that incidents like this do not happen again.”
Pamela Morton, NUJ Wales organiser, said:
“It is extremely concerning to read the details of this case, especially the judge calling the case “disturbing” and raises serious questions. Over the past 20 years, the union has worked with the police and NPCC, so that officers are clear that members of the media have a duty to report many of the incidents that the police deal with and the police should actively help journalists carry out their responsibilities. The union’s Welsh Executive Council calls on the police forces in Wales including South Wales Police to work with the union to ensure that relations of trust and openness between the police and journalists are improved and that officers are fully aware of their responsibilities.”
This being the current College of Policing guidance, with is widely ignored!
Engagement and communication
Media relations
3.10 Media briefings
Reporting from a scene
Reporting or filming from the scene of an incident is part of the media’s role and they should not be prevented from doing so from a public place. Police have no power or moral responsibility to stop the filming or photographing of incidents or police personnel. It is for the media to determine what is published or broadcast, not the police. Once an image has been recorded, the police have no power to seize equipment, or delete or confiscate images or footage without a court order.
Where police have designated a cordoned area, the media must respect it in the same way as the public, unless a media facility within a cordoned area has been authorised by police. The best possible vantage point for media should be considered, providing it does not compromise operational needs.
An ongoing diary of stuff, allsorts, and things wot happen ……
I am a photographer with a special interest to document the lives of travelling people and those attending Festivals, Stonehenge etc, what the press often describe as ‘New Age Travellers’ and many social concerns.
With my photography, I have tried to say something of the wide variety of people engaged in ‘Alternatives’, and youths’ many sub-cultures and to present a more positive view.
I have photographed many free and commercial events and have, in recent years, extended my work to include dance parties (’rave culture’), gay-rights events, environmental direct actions, and protest against the Criminal Justice Act and more recently, issues surrounding the Global Capitalism.
Further, police surveillance has recently become a very important subject for me!
In recognition of this work, received a ‘Winston’ from Privacy International, at the 1998 ‘Big Brother’ Awards. The citation reads: “Alan Lodge is a photographer who has spent more than a decade raising awareness of front-line police surveillance activities, particularly the endemic practice of photographing demonstrators and activists”.
I am based in Nottingham, UK.
Quotes & Thoughts
“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But, conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.
In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!!”
Harry Lime [Orsen Wells] The Third Man 1949
“Civilization will not attain to its perfection, until the last stone from the last church, falls on the last priest.”
Emile Zola
“….I have an important message to deliver to all the cute people all over the world.
If you’re out there and you’re not cute, maybe you’re beautiful, I just want to tell you somethin’- there’s more of us ugly mother-fuckers than you are, hey-y, so watch out now…”
Frank Zappa
