Since I began my project, ten weeks ago, to cycle the whole of London by bike, armed only with a camera, I have managed to become quite familiar with the whole of south east London, Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs, and the banks of the Thames — on the north from London Bridge to the Royal Docks, and on the south from Blackfriars Bridge to Thamesmead, as well as travelling to Stratford — in search of the Olympics — and back, and in this latest set, taken a few weeks ago on a bike ride into central London from south east London — to be followed imminently by a rainy set of photos from the City of London — I found some parts of south east London I had never found before — in Nunhead (in the London Borough of Lewisham) and Peckham, Walworth and Borough (in the London Borough of Southwark), and some that were familiar, which I came across in a largely unplanned manner.

The parts of London I have covered in the last ten weeks are, I concede, only a fraction of this vast metropolis, but the dozens of journeys I have undertaken have made me fit, and have stretched my eyes and my mind, which had become cooped up after six years of researching and writing about Guantánamo and the “war on terror,” and after the 21 months that I have spent railing against the cruelty and myopia of the Tory-led coalition government, which, through an obsession with destroying the state and privatising whatever was not already privatised by Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown, has initiated a savage and deluded age of austerity. Read the rest of this entry »

So the time is nearly upon us. The Olympic Games — corporate, militarised, jingoistic — begin on Friday, and, after a plague of disasters in recent weeks, everything appears to be running relatively smoothly on the last lap. This morning I popped down the hill with my family, to Ladywell Leisure Centre, on the main road between Lewisham and Catford, to watch the Olympic torch pass by, and to watch those watching.

Despite the early hour — the torch passed by just after 8am — there were hundreds of people present for the passage of the torch itself, and of the corporate sponsors’ vehicles — in this case, those of Coca-Cola and Lloyds TSB, although sadly no one asked me about my T-shirt, which features a Union Jack and the message, “Extradite Me, I’m British.” Available here (for just £9), the shirts were created to publicise the plight of Talha Ahsan, Babar Ahmad, Gary McKinnon and Richard O’Dwyer, who face extradition to the United States under the US-UK Extradiiton Treaty of 2003, a creation of Tony Blair’s government that allows British citizens to be spirited away to the US — and its out-of-control judicial system — without the US having to provide any evidence, even if the alleged crimes took place in the UK, and even if the alleged crimes are not crimes in the UK. See here, here, here and here for further information.

Nevertheless, despite the concerted effort to focus on the supposedly positive sporting message of the Games, the stink caused by the recent scandals still lingers. It can be noted with some sense of satisfaction that G4S, the inept security firm, has done permanent damage to the cynical corporate — and governmental —  mantra that “private is best” by failing to employ enough security, despite being paid £284 million to do so. Read the rest of this entry »

Regular readers will be aware that, for the last month, I have been posting photos to an account I set up on Flickr, and publicizing them here, adding a new outlet for my creativity, and my perceptions of the world, to the other methods — primarily the written word, but also TV and radio shows, personal appearances and film-making — which I have been using to chronicle the injustice of Guantánamo and the “war on terror” for the last six years, and the horrors of life in Britain under a Tory-led coalition government, which I have been chronicling for the last two years.

Taking photos is a great passion of mine, but one that I largely let slip from 2006, as I began researching and writing about Guantánamo on a full-time basis, until Christmas last year, when my wife gave me a digital camera. I then took photos of my Guantánamo-related visits to the US in January, and Kuwait in February, and began taking photos in London — and on various trips in the UK — on an occasional basis until, in May — on May 11, to be specific — when the sun started shining after roughly six weeks of almost unremitting rain, I decided to start making journeys by bike around London on a regular basis, taking photos of whatever interests me — buildings old and new, rivers, canals, parks and trees, and forgotten corners of this vast city, where the unusual, the unremarked and the abandoned exist beyond the illusions of endless wealth and perfect order conjured up by those in positions of power. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in May, when the sun started shining again after long weeks of relentless rain, I found myself unable to stay in my apartment chained to my computer, and took to the roads of London on my bike, with my camera, to take exercise and get fit, to explore this extraordinary city that has been my home for the last 27 years, and to capture London at this strange transitional period in its history — with great wealth still apparent on the one hand, and with deepening poverty on the other, as the Tory-led coalition government’s savage austerity cuts, aimed at the poor and not at the rich, for malevolent ideological reasons, begin to bite.

That first journey — an appetiser — was around Greenwich and Deptford, close to home, and I followed it up with a ride through Nunhead and Forest Hill to Dulwich Park and back. A few days later, on May 16, 2012, I decided to follow the river from Deptford to Tower Bridge and back, mostly along the route of the long-distance Thames Path — or rather, that’s how it turned out, but when I set off I had no firm idea of where I would go or what I would do. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of my ongoing project to travel the whole of London by bike, taking photos of whatever interests me, and whatever I think reflects the state of London at this particular time in its history — the ongoing manifestation of a hideously greedy property boom, for example, or the luscious greenery brought about through endless rain, which is very probably a sign of serious climate change — I’ve just posted to my Flickr account my tenth set of photos of London, and the first in a sub-set of photos of “Green London.”

This project of mine — to record London by bike — began two months ago, through a need for exercise after six years of sitting at a computer, a need to experience the sunshine — whenever the sun emerged — after the rainiest March and April in living memory (a trend that continues), and through a renewed fascination for photography (a love of mine since I was a teenager) after my wife bought me a digital camera for Christmas. Read the rest of this entry »

Three weeks ago, I posted my first set of photos of my journeys around London on my new Flickr account — a set I took on May 11, cycling around Greenwich and Deptford, down the hill from my home in Brockley, south east London — when I first began to realise that I had a need for exercise, a need to be outdoors whenever the sun shone in this rainiest of years, and a great desire to explore this vast city that has been my home for the last 27 years, even though I have never visited much of it, and have only partial knowledge of its contours, its hidden corners, and even some of its more obvious glories.

Combined, these various motives have progressively unmoored me from being enslaved to my computer, after six years of pretty relentless blogging, and have opened my mind and my body to the sights and the sounds of London, to the sun and showers, the torrential rain, the fast-changing skies like epic dramas, and also to the pleasures of the back roads, away from the tyranny of cars and lorries, where the unexpected can more easily be found, and where much of the city is silent in the daytime, its former industries replaced by apartments, its workers away — in the City or elsewhere — earning the money to pay for the “luxury” apartments in which, in many cases, they do not spend much time.

Repeatedly, I have found myself drawn to the River Thames and its tributaries and canals, most now flanked by towering new apartment blocks or converted wharves — and to classical compositions and perspectives of buildings and sky, clouds and water. Always, though, I find myself in search of unusual sights, glimpses of less obvious worlds in this city of millions of stories, places where the money has run out, or the standardising waves of gentrification cannot reach. Idiosyncratic places, touched by mavericks, or largely abandoned. Read the rest of this entry »

This eighth set of my photos of London, on the Flickr account that I set up last month, is part of my ongoing mission to travel the whole of London by bike, taking photos of everything that appeals to me — from the famous to the obscure, the rich, the poor, the natural and the man-made — and is the third and final part of a journey I undertook on July 5, 2012, first of all touring the bankers’ towers and the former docks of Canary Wharf, which I published as The Power of Greed: Photos of Canary Wharf, and then cycling the Lea Valley Walk — along the Limehouse Cut and the River Lea — to Stratford, for a glimpse of the Olympic Park, which I published as In Search of the Olympics: Photos of a Journey from Limehouse to Stratford.

After the alarm of the Olympic experience — far too much building work, and palpable paranoia, or, at least, the presence of a handful of zealous security jobsworths — it was refreshing to get lost in the backwaters of Three Mills Island, just a stone’s throw from the Olympic Park, and then to be beside the River Lea as the sun began slowly to set and to paint the trees and the river in a warm light that had been missing from a day in which the weather oscillated between sharp sunlight and the swift emergence of dark clouds filled with showers. Read the rest of this entry »

On July 5, after I had undertaken the photographic tour of Canary Wharf that I recorded in my previous set of photos, The Power of Greed: Photos of Canary Wharf, I headed north, up to Commerical Road, unsure if I would travel on to the East End or visit the Olympic Park at Stratford. After joining a towpath, which I thought was the Regent’s Canal, which I had travelled the day before, I soon realised that I was, in fact, on Limehouse Cut, the southern end of the 18-mile Lea Valley Walk, which follows the formidable River Lea all the way up to its origin at Leagrave, north of Luton, near Waulud’s Bank, one of the great henges — circular earthen banks and ditches — of Neolithic Britain, along with those at Durrington Walls (near Stonehenge), and at Avebury and Marden in Wiltshire.

Having found myself on the Lea Valley Walk by accident, I took it as a sign that I should follow it to Stratford and the Olympic park, but I had no idea that, after travelling through Bow Common and Bromley in Tower Hamlets, I would suddenly — after passing under the A12 — find myself in what appeared to be the countryside, as the canal came up alongside the River Lea, and there were locks, sweeping views, the extraordinary old buildings at Three Mills, and then, suddenly, the gigantic building site in Stratford that is the home of the 2012 Olympics.

As another stage of my ongoing mission to travel the whole of London by bike, photographing whatever interests me — the buildings old and new, the rivers and canals, the skies and trees, the street art and decay — this journey pitted the traditional infrastructure of London’s waterways with the modem developments that have sprung up alongside it, and, in particular, with the cleansing of history along the Lea Valley and the outrageous and irresponsible blank cheque issued to those erecting the giant Olympics playground. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, a rather unprecedented event occurred. The BBC, in its long-running but generally dumbed-down Panorama slot, broadcast a half-hour programme — Britain on the Brink: Back to the 70s? — which took off the blinkers, or the rose-coloured spectacles, that much of the mainstream media have clamped on Britain’s face since the cruel and incompetent Tories began laying waste to the British economy two years ago.

Those of us with any intelligence — and I don’t count George Osborne and David Cameron or any of the other clowns masquerading as functional ministers in this category — knew that the government’s claims that, despite all evidence to the contrary, savage austerity cuts to the state provision of almost services, accompanied by up to a million job losses, would allow the private sector to ride in on a white charger dispensing new jobs like confetti were the worst sort of fantasy. The truth, of course, is that savage austerity cuts always — always — mean an economic death spiral, and the only way out of a recession is to spend wisely to stimulate demand.

In addition, of course, those not blinded by having studied the propaganda that mostly passes for economics would also have realised that the private sector’s ability to provide answers has come to an end. In truth, the motto that private was better than public was largely a ruse of Margaret Thatcher’s to destroy Britain’s manufacturing, and then plunder the family silver for profit — the nationalised industries and some other necessary state-provided services. Read the rest of this entry »

The latest set of photos uploaded to my recently established Flickr account is my fifth set of photos of London, part of an ongoing and recently established project in which I plan to cycle around the whole of London, photographing whatever takes my interest, to record London as it is at this critical juncture in its history — with the country in the grip of a profound recession, and a government responding, suicidally, with savage austerity, all the while making sure that the rich and the super-rich can continue to make obscene and disproportionate amounts of money, untouched by the suffering inflicted on everyone else.

These journeys are also an important project for me personally — a welcome opportunity to stay fit, but, more importantly, a kind of poetic odyssey, grand in the sense of trying to get a personal overview of the whole of this huge city that has been my home for over half my life, much of which I have never visited before, but also much more intimate, in that it allows me, through wandering on a bike, often with no fixed route, to be able to be easily distracted or to be drawn to whatever attracts my attention.

What attracts me, as I have been discovering, is the decaying and the idiosyncratic, the gulf — apparently ever-widening — between the rich and the poor, and how that manifests itself in the built environment, and the nature — the river, the weather, the trees and parks, the seasonal outbursts of organic growth — that stand in contrast to many of the efforts to control the shape and form of the city, and to leave the kind of legacy that, history shows, will sooner or later be swept away. Read the rest of this entry »