May Day London 2003 (3)

It was a pretty good turnout, erm, as it turned out. I mostly busied myself with distributing surgical face-masks to those worried about the SARS virus and/or trial by media, as well as Out Of Order stickers to those concerned about the functionality of the system at large. I did, however, manage to get this picture at that vital moment when the traffic finally ground to halt. From this point on, police held the line that if you were on the road, you were an anarchist. If you were on the pavement, you were a bystander. This rule held even if the road were shut off for two blocks in either direction. I really should have remembered this, but again, I'm getting a wee bit ahead of myself.

This brave gentleman headed into the centre of the crowd claiming to be a Capitalist And Proud Of It...

...he was removed by the police for his own safety. Yes, that is an Out Of Order sticker he's wearing. Fine by me. The joy of the Out Of Order Project is that it's open to personal interpretation. One of the few nice policepersons I met on the day asked for a sticker as a souvenir, and actually stuck it to his inside vest - then swiftly moved it to his report book when I whipped my camera out. Heh.

From here everybody started marching down nearby Shaftesbury Avenue, and things looked pretty casual for a while...

... but about a block down the road, the rear cordon began. Police quite pointedly made it clear to anybody on the fringes that if you went in; you stayed in. Fair warning, or subtle intimidation?

Well, the photographers moved in a few minutes later, and the vans weren't far behind, so I'm inclined to think the latter.

Here are a few folks carefully thinking it over. Numbers down this year? Here's where about half of them went. Quite a few Parents With Prams backed off from this point on.

And here come the vans!

From here, the protestors were hemmed in and carefully guided toward Trafalgar Square. The crowd tried to change direction early on, and even had mixed success with the occasional side road, but disruption was limited to about a block a time. A sound tactic in theory, but the very deliberate warnings had stuck in my mind. A shut-in was wasn't far away. In fact, it was more or less already in effect.

Those who tried to leave the march at this stage were edited according to police tastes. If you looked like a tourist, you were allowed to leave. If you looked like a soap-dodger, you were staying right where you were. It was at this stage that I actually ran into Mike Slocombe (of Urban 75), pictured here giving an interview after being, as he described it, illegally detained. Two or three years ago, I would have mocked him for overreacting. I was two blocks away from an even more pronounced shift of opinion.

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