Due to a misunderstanding, the kiss-in (for the organisation of which I have been called an "extrèmiste sodomite" - article in French on a fundamentalist blog: you've been warned!) did not take place but the protest it was a part of did go on and was indeed much fun.
Many friendly and familiar faces were there and it was in the end about 300 people who took to the wintry streets of London (between Westminster Roman Catholic Cathedral and the Italian Embassy in Grosvenor Square) to voice their opposition to the undue influence of the Pope and the Vatican in European and British politics.
It was interesting to note that despite the wider purport of the protest, a vast majority of the participants seemed to come from the LGBT community.
My pictures of the event can be seen in this set of my flickr account.
(Image above: Peter Tatchell speaking against the Pope outside the Italian Embassy)
Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at...
Dear Author,
ReplyDeleteHaving been present at the march, for the whole event, I can say that your figures of 'just under 500' are more than a little off. I did a brief count of heads, and it came to just under 200. Perhaps it would be better to write this more accurate figure, given the value of truth, which was the purpose of the rally after all.
Yours,
Isaac