London Peace March - 22 March 2003

The Met's methods met with limited success, as the protesters simply fell back where possible to form a new line. Of course, this was fine as far as the police were concerned. All they had to do was keep us busy so nobody got the bright idea of taking a quick walk one block south to the U.S. embassy.

It occurred to me that somebody could mention this to the crowd at any time and really shake things up, but having seen the aggressive way in which they merely kept us busy (and the huge presence waiting around the corner), I thought it best to keep my fool mouth shut.

The police had pretty much guaranteed that London would be the only city in the world that day not to host a protest outside a U.S. embassy , but they really had this young lad to thank for it. By climbing on top of a police van, he gave them a great excuse not to move and provided the crowd with a welcome focus point.

As we obviously weren't going anywhere for a while, I took it upon myself to label a few buses caught up in the jam.

Then - and this really surprised me - a copy of my Bush/Blair pic came out of nowhere and was passed up to Vanboy. He threw it down, gave it a good stomping and then tore it up to enormous cheers. I rummaged though my bag and found that I had one more 'No Blood For Bush' sign left over and passed it up to the front. It got the same treatment. Some people have no respect for art.

BTW, this is the official police photographer who got a wonderful shot of me helping out. I figured one good turn deserved another.

From here I ran out of constructive things to do, so left the protest. Sure enough, the police were still waiting just around the corner. When I returned home, I heard that the riot police turned up not long after and things got rather ugly.

Hyde Park was pretty much empty by the time I got there, but I was still in time to check if my little art installation had survived the afternoon ahead of the cleanup.

Yup, it was still there 3 hours later, and largely intact.

I packed it up and helped to clean up a bit, but did wonder how many people I actually reached. In fact, I wondered for most of the trip home...

...until I arrived and saw this at the station. Score one for the team.