Archive for September, 2012

On July 11, as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, I decided to revisit a journey I had made last year, when my wife’s sister visited from Scotland and we went cycling along the Thames Path from Greenwich to the Thames Barrier, out to the east on the border of Greenwich and Woolwich. On that occasion, I had been delighted to borrow my wife’s camera to take photos, and it undoubtedly provided a spur for me to get back into photography, a passion since adolescence, which I had neglected since becoming a full-time writer and researcher on Guantánamo six and a half years ago. My wife then made it a reality by buying me a camera last Christmas.

It then took a while for me to come up with a project that enabled me to make the most of my awakened interest in photography, but in May, after I had begun cycling around my neighbourhood with my son over the preceding months, regularly taking in not just Brockley, but also Nunhead, Forest Hill, Greenwich and Deptford, and after we had the rainiest spring in living memory, I found that I couldn’t stay in the house on the first sunny days in what seemed like an eternity, and, as a result, I took to my bike, repeating those trips with my camera, and then travelling further afield. Very swiftly, I decided that it was so good for my body, my mind and my spirit to cycle regularly, to explore the city that has been my home for the last 27 years, to get to know it and to feel it and to understand it, and to photograph the aspects of it that were of interest to me, that I would embark on a project to cycle the whole of London and to photograph it. Read the rest of this entry »

These photos are the latest contributions to my ongoing project, on Flickr, to photograph the whole of London by bike — the sixteenth instalment in what will eventually comprise many hundreds of photos sets. I currently have 60 sets to post, mostly taken in a very busy month before my summer holiday in Italy, so please bear with me. I have also been adding the photos to an interactive map, which can be found here, and I am also engaged in bringing the photos together in collections, for which maps also exist, which I hope help to contextualise the photos. Tags may also be a good way of seeking out photos, and tags are available here.

The project is my way of getting to understand London, the city that has been my home for the last 27 years, and came about because I needed — for reasons involving my health and what I think can accurately be described as my spiritual existence — to combine exercise, exploration and my neglected love of photography. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Friday August 31, was the last day of the Atos Games, a week of events organised by Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and UK Uncut against the jaw-dropping hypocrisy involved in Atos Healthcare, the French IT giant, being allowed to sponsor the Paralympic Games, while the company is also in charge of running the government’s Work Capability Assessments, a review process that is designed to find disabled people fit for work.

As a result, huge numbers of disabled people, who are not fit for work by any genuinely objective measure, are being driven into poverty — a wretched and cruel policy for a government that claims to have Christian values — and the results are leading directly to suicides, or other deaths through the stress involved. Undeterred, however, the government recently renewed Atos’ contract, to the tune of £400 million, and ministers are permanently involved in ignoring the inconvenient truth that, on appeal, tens of thousands of decisions made by Atos’ representatives are being overturned. The average is 40 percent, but in Scotland campaigners discovered that, when claimants were helped by representatives of Citizens Advice Bureaux, 70 percent of decisions were overturned on appeal. Read the rest of this entry »