Andy Worthington's Blog, page 163

Photos of Lewisham: Hills, Rivers, Secret Corners and Blatant Skyscrapers

Lewisham: Hills, Rivers, Secret Corners and Blatant Skyscrapers, a set on Flickr.

For most of the last 16 years I have lived in the London Borough of Lewisham — first in Forest Hill, London SE23, and, since November 1999, in Brockley, London SE4, which overlooks Lewisham town centre, the commercial heart of the borough. Built up since Saxon times around the River Ravensbourne, which flows into the River Thames at Deptford, the town centre is also the place where the River Quaggy, flowing in from the south east, via Eltham and Kidbrooke, joins the Ravensbourne.

From its valley, Lewisham also wanders up the hills to the south east, towards Lee, and the east, more steeply uphill to Blackheath. These photos were taken between May and August, and capture some of Lewisham’s history, some of its contours, including the hills and rivers, and some of the new developments in the town centre — Prendergast Vale College, a new school on the former site of Ladywell Bridge primary school, which is a positive development, and the high-rise apartment blocks rising up along Loampit Vale, the road from Lewisham to New Cross that peaks in Brockley, whose contribution is almost entirely negative.

The product of an unholy collaboration between Barratt Homes, Lewisham Council and London & Quadrant Housing Trust, the so-called “Renaissance” development which features 788 apartments in eight buildings, including one 24-storey monster  — contributes negatively to the borough because it spectacularly fails to address the chronic need for affordable housing, containing just 146 apartments which are designated as being “for affordable rent,” which (a) may be a lie, and (b) fails to address the fact that there are 17,000 people on Lewisham Council’s housing waiting list, with 350 families living in hostels and 1,000 in temporary accommodation. It also will add enormous stress to Lewisham’s infrastructure, and, in addition, it plays into inappropriate fantasies, entertained by politicians of all parties, that London is overflowing with yuppies whose only purpose in life is to pay through the nose for apartments in high-rise glass and steel blocks that are cynically advertised as barometers of lifestyle and achievement, as I hope to have shown in the photos.

What Lewisham actually needs is a renaissance in social housing, something that the political activists of People Before Profit have been pushing for, as part of a new vision of life and work in the 21st century, in which, along with genuinely affordable, not-for-profit housing, politicians and those with access to money also invest in creating jobs as well, moving beyond the dreadful laissez-faire approach to job creation that has prevailed since Thatcherism in the 1980s, with the idiotic mantra that the market will solve everything, when all the market has actually done is to do away with jobs completely and/or to menialise workers in low-paid retail service jobs with no meaningful future. This is particularly relevant in Lewisham, which, according to the TUC’s Touchstone blog, “is the hardest place in Great Britain to find a job,” with “almost thirty-five dole claimants chasing each vacancy.”

Expect more reflections on the need for work and housing in the future, particularly in connection with photo sets from Deptford, where a long-running struggle remains ongoing to prevent the riverside at Convoys Wharf from being turned into some wildly inappropriate high-rise city, but also with Lewisham, where two other plans are still ongoing — firstly, Lewisham Gateway, next to Renaissance, where there are plans for up to 800 new apartments, including some in yet more new tower blocks, and Thurston Road, opposite Renaissance, where there are plans for 400 more properties.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Photos of the Olympics: In Search of the Paralympic Torch

The Olympics: In Search of the Paralympic Torch, a set on Flickr.

With the main Olympic Games now a memory, the focus, for the next 11 days, is on the Paralympic Games, before Britain returns to the gloom of life under the crushing yoke of a myopic Tory-led government. While the Games were a great success, the emotional resonance of the Paralympic Games is much stronger, given the obstacles people have had to overcome to take part in the first place, and it is a tribute to the UK that the Paralympics began here in 1948. As Wikipedia explains:

The first organised athletic event for disabled athletes that coincided with the Olympic Games took place on the day of the opening of the 1948 Summer Olympics in London, United Kingdom. German born Dr. Ludwig Guttmann of Stoke Mandeville Hospital, who had been helped to flee Nazi Germany by the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) in 1939, hosted a sports competition for British World War II veteran patients with spinal cord injuries. The first games were called the 1948 International Wheelchair Games, and were intended to coincide with the 1948 Olympics. Dr. Guttman’s aim was to create an elite sports competition for people with disabilities that would be equivalent to the Olympic Games.

While I hope the Paralympic Games are a great success, I cannot post these photos and move on without expressing my contempt for the current government, which, using the French firm Atos Healthcare, has implemented a policy aimed at cutting state support for disabled people, through reviews rigged to demonstrate that all manner of physically and mentally disabled individuals, who ought to be deserving of support in any country that calls itself civilised, are actually fit for work. As well as being cruel on its own terms, this policy — like the government’s demonisation of the unemployed — is also shockingly unfair, when the economy is horrendously depressed (a situation aided by ministers’ deluded obsession with austerity), and jobs are hard to come by even for those without disabilities.

I have written extensively about the government’s savage and unacceptable cruelty towards the disabled (see, for example, Today the Tories Took £100 A Week from Some of the UK’s Most Disabled People: How Can This Be Right?, RIP Karen Sherlock, Another Victim of the Tories’ Brutal, Heartless Disability Reforms, Doctors Urge Government to Scrap Callous Disability Tests and Where is the Shame and Anger as the UK Government’s Unbridled Assault on the Disabled Continues?), and urge anyone interested in making sure that cynical politicians are not allowed to continue their wretched policies, this time around by using disabled athletes to portray other disabled people as workshy scroungers, as they will undoubtedly do, to join in this week’s Atos Games, organised by Disabled People Against the Cuts (and see UK Uncut and the Guardian‘s coverage) to protest about the utter hypocrisy of Atos being a main sponsor of the Paralympics, securing favourable PR for themselves, while doing more than almost any other company to make the lives of disabled people as miserable — or intolerable — as possible (also see The Void article here).

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Glass, Light and Fantasies: Photos of the City of London At Night

Glass, Light and Fantasies: The City of London At Night, a set on Flickr.

This latest photo set, on Flickr, from my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike — the 23rd instalment in what will be at least a year-long project — follows up on a previous set, Parks, Water and Dreams: Photos of a Journey from Surrey Quays to Central London, in which I recorded a journey through Rotherhithe on the evening of July 19, 2012, when I travelled to The Arts Catalyst, on Clerkenwell Road, in London EC1, to speak at an event marking the sixth anniversary of the arrest of Talha Ahsan, a British citizen and a Londoner, who has been held without charge or trial ever since, while fighting extradition to the US — an unjust situation that I have also written about here and here. Please also see this photo of me wearing an “Extradite Me, I’m British” T-shirt, to highlight the problems with the US-UK Extradition Treaty.

After the event — shortly after 9pm — I set off for home, but took a detour through the City of London, to capture photos of the City of London at night, the morally and legally dubious powerhouse of Britain’s financial industry, which fascinates me (see the evidence here and here), as does its offshoot at Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs (see the photos here and my essay here).

At night, the City, of course, is almost totally deserted, like Canary Wharf, and becomes a kind of futuristic dream, or some sort of haunted playground. The images in this set only capture a brief glimpse of this liminal world, in which the architecture of power oddly lacks the human players who supposedly animate it, but I find that appropriate, as it is, I believe, accurate to regard those involved in the international machinery of money-making by increasingly devious means as ghosts in a malevolent machine that no one is in charge of, and a metaphor for the wider society in which politicians play the same role, on the deck of the ship, manning the controls, but unaware — or unconcerned — that their actions are meaningless, as no one is actually in charge.

As I explain in the notes accompanying the photos on Flickr, the City of London at night is a fascinating, but rather haunted place, devoid of the human beings who supposedly maintain the levers of power, but perhaps more accurately illustrating how, in fact, no one is in charge of the juggernaut of greed and a skewed sense of entitlement that the financial centres of the West have become as a result of over 30 years of deregulation.

I’ll be posting more photos of the City and of Canary Wharf soon — from the 56 photo sets I have not yet uploaded, mostly taken in the month before I flew to Italy on my two-week family holiday, on August 12 — but in the meantime I hope you enjoy these photos of the City at night.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Echoes of Ancient Rome: Photos of the Roman Forum, the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill

Echoes of Ancient Rome: The Roman Forum, the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill, a set on Flickr.

My two-week family holiday in Italy is at an end, and I am now back in London, slightly cold and pining for the heat, the cooking, the fresh fruit, the culture of Rome and the mountains and lakes of Abruzzo province. All holidays must come to an end, however, and as I reacquaint myself with my home, and my friends, and try to focus once more on Guantánamo and the parlous state of British politics, and look forward to cycling in search of new and unexplored parts of London as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, I will also be posting more photos of Rome and of our travels in Abruzzo province.

I have already posted four sets of photos of Rome (here, here, here and here), and this fifth set takes up where the last one left off — with a visit to the Roman Forum, on August 15, followed by a visit to the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill on August 16. These three sites — the heart of Ancient Rome, and consisting of its civic and religious centre, the hill on which several emperors made their home, and the colossal blood-stained amphitheatre where murder was turned into sport — offer an unparalleled insight into Ancient Rome, and for visitors, from the UK at least, the fact that access to all three sites is open for two days and costs just 12 Euros is a bonus, as my wife and I joked that in the UK each site would probably cost £27.90, with a ticket for all three offered at “just” £75.

The cultural wealth of these three sites is truly extraordinary, as layer upon layer of history unfolds in the Forum, whose ruins rest on even more ancient ruins, and, in some cases, monuments were taken over by Christianity. Up on the Palatine Hill, the tree cover is welcome in the summer heat, and the sense of history is also palpable, as this is the most central of Rome’s seven hills. It was also the home of the Emperors Augustus, Tiberius and Domitian, and, according to Roman mythology, was, moreover, the location of the cave where Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome, were found by the she-wolf that raised them.

However, for the most vivid demonstration of power on a gigantic scale, the Colosseum is unrivalled. The largest amphitheatre in the Roman world, it was the home of bloody gladiatorial contests, executions and staged killings for many centuries, a grim example of a compact between the inhabitants of Rome, who loved the deadly shows, and the rulers who encouraged them. It remains a powerful symbol of the kind of bloodlust that I hope we are still moving to eliminate from the human experience, and I was rather touched to note, while researching its modern history, that it has, on occasion, been the venue for demonstrations by opponents of the death penalty, and is illuminated with golden lights every time a  death sentence is commuted anywhere in the world, or countries ban the use of the death penalty (see Amnesty International’s list here for details of which countries have abolished the death penalty)

In two final sets of photos from Rome, I will be posting photos of a tiny fraction of the treasures accrued over the years by the Catholic Church, as crammed into the Vatican Museum, and a last set of photos of various sights in Rome, including the cold majesty of St. Peter’s, but for now I hope you enjoy this tour throughout the ruins of Ancient Rome, an era whose influence continues to resonate down the years.

Please note: There are 40 photos in total in the set, “Echoes of Ancient Rome: The Roman Forum, the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill,” although only the first 24 are shown above in thumbnails.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Photos of The Pantheon and Il Vittoriano in Rome: Transcendental Illumination and a Show of Power

The Pantheon and Il Vittoriano in Rome: Transcendental Illumination and a Show of Power, a set on Flickr.

I’m nearing the end of my two-week family holiday in Italy, and have been in Abruzzo province, near the town of Sulmona, since Sunday August 19. For the first week my family and I were in Rome, and I posted my photos from the first three days of that wonderful week here, here and here.

Our time in Abruzzo has also been wonderful, in this little known area of Italy, with its mountains and lakes, its vertiginous roads, its excellent food, and its old-fashioned hospitality with a laid-back vibe. However, we have been so busy travelling around that I have been unable to find the time to post more photos of Rome — until now.

This fourth set (out of seven in total) focuses on two of the elements of Roman culture that recur from the time of Ancient Rome through to the unification of Italy and its unfortunate militarism in the first half of the 20th century, and which are also a hallmark of the Vatican’s presence as an empire-within-an-empire — namely, an obsession with raising buildings on a colossal scale, and also with demonstrations of power. In this photo set, these tendencies are demonstrated through two buildings, and with glimpses of others. The first of the two is The Pantheon, the ancient Roman temple built on the orders of the Emperor Hadrian, with its vast oculus, a round hole 8.7 metres wide at the top of its dome, which is itself the largest unsupported concrete dome in the world. Through the oculus, light shines down on those in the temple, dwarfing them, and creating the impression that they are literally in the presence of God — or the gods. The Pantheon was taken over by the Catholic Church, of course, which may have spared it from being destroyed over the centuries, but its power remains that of Ancient Rome, and it is remarkable that the oculus has not been replicated elsewhere.

If The Pantheon’s power is fundamentally subtle, humbling those who visit it through a spectacularly simple light show, ll Vittoriano — also known as the Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II (National Monument to Victor Emmanuel II) or Altare della Patria (Altar of the Fatherland) — which was designed in 1885, inaugurated in 1911 and completed in 1935, is a big show-off of a building, a giant pile of marble, dedicated to showing the ambition of Italy after its unification, and also honouring King Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of the unified country, as well as providing an eternal flame and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Forecasting fascism, it is obviously a deeply unsubtle building, aping the buildings of Ancient Rome that are its neighbours, and, in particular, the Colosseum, another blunt show of strength that also reeks of blood and brutality.

Photos of our visits to these sites will follow soon, but for now I hope you enjoy this fourth instalment of photos from Rome, as I endeavoured to capture something of the transcendent nature of The Pantheon, and, as I also took advantage of a modern addition to Il Vittoriano — a glass lift to a viewing platform on the very top of the building, 230 feet above Piazza Venezia beneath — to take photos that give ordinary people the kind of views of Rome that, given its history, would in the past have been reserved for those of power and influence.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Parks, Water and Dreams: Photos of a Journey from Surrey Quays to Central London

Parks, Water and Dreams: A Journey from Surrey Quays to Central London, a set on Flickr.

On July 19, 2012, I had been invited to The Arts Catalyst, on Clerkenwell Road, in London EC1, to speak at an event marking the sixth anniversary of the arrest of Talha Ahsan, a British citizen and a Londoner, who has been held without charge or trial ever since, while fighting extradition to the US — an unjust situation that I have also written about here and here. Please also see this photo of me wearing an “Extradite Me, I’m British” T-shirt, to highlight the problems with the US-UK Extradition Treaty.

As I have become obsessed with cycling lately, both to keep fit and to chronicle the whole of London by bike (an ongoing project that I began three months ago) and, just as importantly, to feed my eyes and my brain and to allow my mind to roam free after six years of being cooped up writing about Guantánamo, I decided to cycle to the event. This journey took me primarily through Rotherhithe, the peninsula and area of the Borough of Southwark that was formerly made up almost entirely of docks — the Surrey Commercial Docks — until the demise of London’s docks over 40 years ago. As part of the regeneration of the former Docklands areas under Margaret Thatcher, Butler’s Wharf and Shad Thames near Tower Bridge, and Limehouse, Wapping and the Isle of Dogs were all regenerated, as were the docks of Rotherhithe.

Rotherhithe fascinates me, as the regeneration project — Surrey Quays — has elements that are wonderfully successful — like Russia Dock Woodland — and others that are not, like the sprawl of Surrey Quays shopping centre and its gigantic car parks, a mall experience that, like all mall experiences, should never have been imported from the US when, even 30 years ago, massive over-reliance on cars was already recognised by anyone sentient enough not to be taken in by the car and petroleum lobbies as a disastrously myopic idea.

So here, after brief journeys through Rotherhithe previously, and with more to follow, are more photos of my meanderings through the modern visions and liminal history that makes up Rotherhithe, where a ribbon of wealth along the riverside is not as excessive as in, say, the Isle of Dogs, and where history — a history of life connected with the docks, the river and water — never seems too far away.

After my talk, I took a tour of the City of London at night — a contrast to the generally more balanced feel of Rotherhithe — and I hope to post photos of that visit soon. For now, however, I hope you enjoy this journey through a part of London that many people know little or nothing about, but which has life and history in abundance — and, in Russia Dock Woodland, some visionary planning to create new green spaces.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Churches, Temples, Fountains and Piazze: Photos of the Historic Centre of Rome

Churches, Temples, Fountains and Piazze: The Historic Centre of Rome, a set on Flickr.

In two previous sets of photos (here and here), I have covered the first two days of my two-week family holiday in Italy — with a series of photos from Rome, where we have been during this first week, before moving on to Abruzzo province for the second.

Rome is so photogenic, and the compunction to wander around it so compelling, despite the average daytime heat of around 35 degrees, that it has been impossible to publish the photos as I take them, as a sort of visual diary, but if you bear with me I’ll eventually get all the photos published. At present, I doubt that Abruzzo province is as well-connected to the Internet as Rome, which may make a big difference to my ability to get my photos online.

On our third day in Rome, after a largely fruitless diversion in search of the Metro, we finally ended up in the Centro Storico, the historic centre of the eternal city (la città eterna), arriving at the Piazza del Popolo, the old northern entrance to the city, and visiting the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon, before returning home via Piazza Navona, the largest and most popular piazza in the Centro Storico.

As ever, the scale of the architecture remains overwhelming — the churches that, every few streets, almost block out the light, so high are their facades, and their opulent interiors, in which every surface glitters or demonstrates Rome’s wealth in centuries past — and the Catholic church’s ongoing wealth. As ever, the Roman people themselves were thoroughly welcoming and, as the Italians say, simpatici, wearing their city’s grand history lightly, with young people, in particular, as likely to enthuse as wildly about London and Scotland as they did when I used to visit northern Italy more than 20 years ago.

On this third day, while I admired how much ordinary Roman life remains centred on family and on tradition (in cuisine, for example, using local seasonal ingredients), as opposed to the magpie neurosis of modern Britain, where tradition and culture are largely treated as disposable, leading to an atomised society, I was also aware that the economic disasters engulfing Greece and Spain are also lapping at Italy’s shores, although there was little evidence of it in the streets of Rome. Instead, the city continued its tourist trade in a mostly relaxed manner, with the main interruption to this peaceful business coming from the policemen and policewomen placed strategically at the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain to blow whistles every time the tourists, oblivious to the rules, which were not posted anywhere, sat down in the wrong place or dared, as I did at the foot of The Spanish Steps, to put their hands in the water of the fountains, in an attempt to cool down.

Next up: Photos inside The Pantheon and from the roof of Il Vittoriano, the giant marble monster erected to mark Italian unification — and the ambitious self-regard of the new nation — which was completed in 1911, and which we visited prior to touring the great remains of Ancient Rome — the Roman Forum, the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Photos of Rome: A Storm, the Hills and the Tiber at Night

Rome: A Storm, the Hills and the Tiber at Night, a set on Flickr.

This is my second set of photos from my family holiday this year — in Italy, and, specifically, in Rome this week and, next week, a village in Abruzzo province. The eternal city (la città eterna) is one of the most extraordinary places I have ever visited — with its excellent cuisine, friendly locals and its unparalleled architectural wonders, the result, of course, of having been a major player on the world stage for nearly 3,000 years.

On our first evening, we were introduced to Rome’s super-sized architectural heritage via a visit to Piazza San Pietro, the colossal square in front of St. Peter’s Basilica (la Basilica di San Pietro) at the heart of the Vatican, and on Day 2, although we saw little of the city’s architectural splendours, we nevertheless had an inspiring day, despite being housebound for the whole afternoon as the entire city was drenched by a full-on tropical storm, which reduced the humidity sufficiently that we didn’t have to sleep outside, as we did on our first night.

After sitting out the storm, we walked up to the top of Gianicolo (Janiculum Hill), which separates the Vatican area from the popular neighbourhood of Trastevere (literally, “across the Tiber”) and offers stunning views over the whole of Rome. As night fell, we descended to find Trastevere buzzing, brightly lit and thronged with diners, and, after eating, we made our way back along the River Tiber, at first past the gaily lit riverbank crowded with bars and stalls, and then in darkness along the vast Lungotevere embankments, built beside the river in the late 19th century to prevent it from flooding Rome every winter, as it did previously.

On Day 3, we toured the Centro Storico, the historic old town, visiting the major sights — the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon — and on Days 4 and 5 we took in the sites at the heart of Ancient Rome — the Colosseum, the Roma Forum and the Palatine. These photos will follow soon, but for now I hope you enjoy these glimpses of Rome and of our slightly elliptical itinerary.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Architecture on an Epic Scale: Photos of Arriving in Rome, Visiting St. Peter’s and the Vatican

Architecture on an Epic Scale: Arriving in Rome, Visiting St. Peter’s and the Vatican, a set on Flickr.

I’m on holiday right now, in Rome, an astonishing city, saturated in history, and still, of course, the centre of the Catholic church worldwide. Italy is a country that I have loved for a long time — on a visit as a child, as part of a family tour of Europe in our sky blue Triumph, in which we camping in France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany, and, in Italy,  passed though dozens of tunnels, visiting Pisa and Firenze, and finding marble quarries high in the mountains; Many years later, with an Italian girlfriend, I visited Milano on numerous occasions, and also made memorable trips to Venezia, to Calabria and to Como — and it wads during this time that I learnt Italian, learned to love espresso, and also learned the basics of Italian cookery.

Fast forward to my life now, with my wife, Dot, and my son, Tyler, and Italy — along with Spain, and, last year, Greece — is one of the regular features of our family holidays in the Mediterranean. A few years ago, we had an amazing Easter holiday in Sicilia, and we also had a short holiday in Firenze, and, two years ago, a two-week bonanza with the first week in Puglia and the second in Napoli, which must rank as the most extraordinary city in western Europe, full of contradictions that are normally only associated with the developing world.

We’re in Rome for a week, and then moving on to Abruzzo province, and the city’s charms became apparent almost immediately — very friendly people, the great food, of course, and the architecture on an epic scale. There will be many more photos to follow, including more of the epic architecture that is such a feature of Rome, as well as photos from the tangle of ancient streets that seem to go on forever, with their shops, their restaurants, their churches, and their hidden corners, but for now these are my first impressions, from the day of our arrival.

Come for a walk with us …

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

A Place to Call Home: Photos of Brockley from Winter to Summer

A Place to Call Home: Brockley from Winter to Summer, a set on Flickr.

I have lived in London for 27 years, and for the last 12 years (13 in November) I have made my home — with my wife, and with the son who, prematurely, joined us shortly after moving here — in Brockley, on the hills above New Cross and Lewisham, and near the hill-top park of Hilly Fields, which commands fine views over to Blackheath and Greenwich, to the east, to Blythe Hill Fields to the south, and south east to Kent.

For decades, Brockley was a kind of secret village in south east London, home to artists, writers, musicians and various other bohemians, and affordable for those seeking to buy, whilst also providing generous allocations of social housing. In the 12 years since I came here, I have watched as coffee shops and delicatessens and bars and restaurants and gift shops have opened, where, in 1999, there were none — places like The Broca and Magi Gifts and The Orchard — which have brought the area to life, and although Brockley remains, at heart, the same clever, down-to- earth place it has been for decades, the upgrade of the East London Line and its incorporation into a London-wide Overground network, and regular publicity in the media’s property pages, has led to a recent influx of Yuppies.

The phrase remains appropriate. The Yuppies, priced out of west London, and now, with the opportunism of the Olympics, out of east London too — found Brockley after the Overground, which opened in May 2010, running from Whitechapel to West Croydon, and extending to Highbury and Islington in February 2011, brought them in from Shoreditch and Hoxton and other points north and east, attracted by Brockley’s village nature, its new shops and bars, the weekly farmers’ market off Lewisham Way, and the property prices — horribly overpriced, but still less expensive than many other places in London that could claim to be a “village.”

As a result of this influx, which has coincided with a baby boom and the opening of Gently Elephant, a children’s shoe shop and The Gantry, a new bar/restaurant , prices have risen by about £30,000 in the last year, with the bare minimum for a two-bed property, often without a garden, currently standing at around £280,000. The influx hasn’t fundamentally changed Brockley yet, although its apparent desirability is already driving up rents, meaning that many Goldsmiths students and ex-students, and other young people of ordinary means — the kind of people who always bring life to an area — may well have to give up on living here if there is not a much-needed property crash and a return to a time when life could be measured out in more than the permanently inflated value of property.

Personally, I hope that Brockley remains a bastion of creativity and political agitation, but while I wait to find out, and hope that I don’t hear too many incomers braying about how their overpriced houses were a relative bargain, here’s a selection of photos from the last seven months, showing a few of Brockley’s many faces, and much of its green spaces — and the odd glimpse of its creativity and eccentricity.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.