Suddenly, Snow: Photos of Brockley at Night

The opportunity to take these photos of the streets of Brockley in the snow, with the pavements empty of people and the streets almost empty of traffic, came to me unexpectedly at 2.45am last night. As I was about to go to bed, I noticed, through a window, that the outside world looked white, and, on closer inspection, discovered to my delight that it was snowing.

Five minutes later, I was dressed and venturing out into the night, discovering that the snow had been falling steadily for a few hours, and was settling, although I also discovered that it was very wet, and that the chances of it lasting beyond the morning were vanishingly remote.

I was out for about an hour, and I basically did a circuit of my immediate neighbourhood in Brockley, in south east London, up Tressillian Road to Hilly Fields park, then down Harefield Road to Breakspears Road, down to Brockley Road, and then back up Tressillian Road via St. Margaret’s Avenue.

It was a great privilege to be out at this magical time, and to be able to capture some of my impressions of the snowfall, a wet carpet that created a dream-like silence that is hard to find at any other time.

On my return, I posted five of my favourite photos, and then caught a few hours sleep before waking around 9am to discover that the snow had indeed largely disappeared, and heading down to the Houses of Parliament for a press conference held by Defend London’s NHS, a new coalition of campaigners — including MPs — calling for an end to the destruction of the NHS in London.

It was a very useful and informative event — and I’ll be writing about it soon — but it could hardly have been more different from the world of snow and silence in which I had been immersed just hours before.

I do hope you enjoy this photo set, the 77th in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike — and, occasionally, on foot! I’ll be back soon with the continuation of my photos from September — another contrast to this set — adding my impressions of Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square to those of Regent Street that I recorded here. I’ll all be posting more photos from New York, from my recent trip to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo on the 11th anniversary of the opening of the prison, and also a final set of photos of Brighton from my visit two weeks ago.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.