Our Flag & Olympic Website – On Saturday seventeenth November 2007 I had a extra diversified day than standard, starting with a march my soccer supporters, then a stroll across the outdoors of the then fenced off Olympic website adopted by an Olympic-related symposium. I can’t keep in mind something in regards to the symposium, although I believe it was nearly actually crucial of what was being performed to London, its future being sacrificed to a extremely industrial sports activities competition.
March For Our Flag – Westminster
Just a few months earlier in February 2007 I’d photographed and written a couple of ‘March for Our Flag’ organised by soccer supporters, notably Tottenham followers. The primary group backing that – and the repeat march this month by way of Westminster – was the United British Alliance. There was a suggestion that, though a patriotic occasion, it was at the least attempting to detach itself from the racism of the far proper.
The UBA website online described itself as “a multi-ethnic, multi-faith organisation with a passionate curiosity in reclaiming our as soon as proud nation from the grip of worldwide terror and political correctness gone-mad,with a view to re-installing some satisfaction in our communities and lifestyle.”
As I commented in November 2007:
Though people might be honest in these makes an attempt, it isn’t really easy to shake off this impression. Among the hyperlinks on the [UBA] website online are to folks and teams who I might think about as having excessive views, and the dialogue you’ll find on soccer boards and elsewhere appears clearly Islamophobic.
Though there have been even fewer supporters this time – nicely below 200 – there did appear to be a barely calmer perspective and a barely wider vary of individuals attending, though nonetheless just one or two black faces.
Curiously sufficient, on the UBA website online galleries, all of the marchers have their faces – or at the least their eyes – blacked out. The one folks not given this remedy are the police escorting the occasion.
As I’ve typically stated, the one method to defend our freedom is by being free. That features standing up for what you consider – and being seen to take action. So I’m completely against this sort of censorship of the information. Freedom of expression is part of the British heritage of which I’m proud. As too are Morris Dancing, Affiliation and Rugby soccer together with the various different issues, together with the best way we’ve efficiently built-in components from different cultures and religions into our lifestyle through the years – and proceed to take action.
My footage from the seventeenth November do present one or two households and their youngsters took half and I can see only one darker face among the many younger males. In view of latest occasions and the habits of Suella Braverman my remaining two sentences are very acceptable and really related: “All of us want way more optimistic messages and actions from our flesh pressers to steer us all – together with Britain’s muslims to a brand new and united imaginative and prescient of our society. Islamophobia wants combating, not encouraging.”
I walked out of Stratford Station and throughout the footbridge resulting in the Carpenters Property and on to Bridgewater Street, a lifeless finish with a bridge throughout the tidal Waterworks River.
The highway to Hackney Wick is firmly closed and so too was the Greenway only a few yards from the doorway on Stratford Excessive Road.
You would stroll down it only a few yards, and I took one other image trying again alongside the Waterworks River in the direction of Bridgewater Street the place I had been standing earlier.
I took just a few footage across the fringe of the world, then walked again alongside the Excessive Road in the direction of the centre of Stratford.
The Log Cabin pub had been right here at 335-337 Excessive Road, Stratford as a training inn since at the least the mid-18th century, although it was referred to as The Yorkshire Grey earlier than being renamed round 1997 when the hiddeous inexperienced excresenes had been added. The constructing was Grade II listed in 2003, nearly actually saving it from demolition and is assumed thus far from round 1740, and although elements had been rebuilt within the late nineteenth century a lot of the inside had survived roughly intact. It closed in 2001 and is now a resort.
My remaining image was at The Working Mens Corridor and Membership Rooms on Romford Street, based in 1865 and rebuilt in 1905, with the motto Labor Omnia Vincit (Work Conquers All). Maybe it was right here that the symposium was held, and I’ve a really imprecise recollection of a chat by Iain Sinclair, though that would have been on fairly a unique event.
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