On Saturday, between 12 and 20000 people gathered in the street of London to protest against the state visit to the UK by Pope Joseph Ratzinger. A demonstration of what Ratzinger had called the day before "aggressive secularism" which looked to me more like a pride parade with a political message.
Famous faces spotted on the march included John Waters (above) and Ian McKellen. The speakers at the rally the blocked Whitehall after the march included Richard Dawkins, Johann Hari, Dr Ben Goldacre, an openly gay Catholic priest, among others.
My pictures of the event can be found on flickr here. A photopool is available here.
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...
I was actually planning to go to this, but I never made it :(
ReplyDeleteIt's good to see that so many people around the UK are against the attitudes of the Catholic faith. It spells doom for their faith if they don't move forward with the times and society.