Brixton Hill Clinic Defence Campaign - defeating anti-abortionists in 1990

The anti-abortion movement in the UK will no doubt be emboldened by recent events in the United States, and while the scope for them to challenge current laws seems to be limited there is a risk that they may step up direct action against health services. In recent years anti-abortionists have picketed St John's Medical Centre in Loampit Vale SE13 (including in 2015 and 2018) and sporadically protest in Brixton and Streatham.

These documents are from an earlier campaign that successfully stopped similar protests, at least for a while. Back in 1990, a Brixton Hill Clinic Defence Campaign was set up in response to anti-abortionists picketing the local clinic.  The Campaign was set up at a meeting at Lambeth Town Hall in July 1990. As the invite issued by the socialist group Workers Power explained:

'As you may know, anti-abortionists have been regularly picketing the Raleigh Clinic in Brixton Hill and the Leigham clinic in Leigham Court Road. Streatham. The pickets have included supporters of Operation Rescue, a US derived organisation noted for its militant and often violent tactics. The pickets take place every Saturday at Brixton Hill between 8am and 12 noon, and as far as is possible to tell, between 10am and 12 noon at Streatham on the last Saturday of the month only.

The anti-abortionists tactics have so far included leafletting and harrasing women going into the clinic.  It is vital that all those who support choice and the right of women to control their own bodies get organised against the anti- abortionists. While there are not very many of them at present, if they are left unchallenged, they will attract support and their tactics will become more and more militant. Informal counter-pickets have been happening every Saturday at Brixton Hill. Such counter-pickets need to be organised properly and built for in the Labour movement.

It has also been argued that there is a need them to be carried out with sensitivity - there is a danger that large unruly counter-picket outside a clinic would have the same deterrent effect on women seeking abortions as the anti-abortionists themselves. 

We have taken the initiative of booking a room in Lambeth Town Hall on Monday 9th July in room 121, in order to hold a meeting to discuss the way forward to defeating the anti-abortionists. We need to discuss what tactics to use and how to mobilise people against Operation Rescue. We would hope that some sort of organising committee could be constituted to organise the counter-pickets, and any other action deemed necessary. We hope everyone who is concerned about the threat that the anti-abortionists represent and wishes to organise against them will either attend or, if an organisation, send a representative'.

Invite to a meeting to 'Organise Against Operation Rescue' at Lambeth Town Hall, July 1990

In the early protests the police did not seem to have been interested and when an anti-abortionist had run towards the clinic and been stopped by a counter-demonstrator it was the latter who was arrested (though later released without charge).  

At the meeting at Lambeth Town Hall the main political difference was on how to respond - representatives attending from the alphabet soup of left/anarchist groups active in Brixton at the time. Broadly speaking the Socialist Workers Party wished to mobilise counter protestors at the clinic. Others present - the majority at the meeting - felt that having a crowd there, even a sympathetic one, would be very uncomfortable for women attending. It was agreed to have enough of a presence at the Clinic to challenge the anti-abortionists and if necessary escort women past them, but not to seek to mobilise large numbers directly outside it. Instead, efforts would be put into preventing Operation Rescue getting to the Clinic in the first place

A leaflet given out at the clinic declared 'A Woman's Right to Choose... Raleigh Nursing Home is one of the few places in Lambeth that performs abortions. We are here today outside it because we believe that every woman should have the right to control over her own body. That means she should have the right to an abortion if she wants one.

Unfortunately there are some people who seek to prevent women from exercising that right- by force, by threats and by terror. You may have seen them here too. As often as not they are the ones on their knees. You may have been given one of their glossy horror pamphlets full of photographs of "dead

babies". If we had the same vast wealth behind us as they do - and the same twisted logic - you could be reading an equally glossy pamphlet full of pictures of dead women; just some of the hundreds of thousands who die every year throughout the world whilst attempting backstreet abortion. Because that is the reality in countries without even Britain's limited legal abortion facilities.

[...] we aren't trying to frighten anybody away. We don't even want to be here ourselves. It can be traumatic enough for women to come for an abortion without a crowd of people on the gate as they go in. We are only here because if we weren't the militant anti-abortionists - who in the United States have resorted to fire bombing clinics - will count it as a victory'

Meanwhile a crew drawn from Workers Power, Red Action, South London Direct Action Movement and other local anarchists, all of whom had a presence in the area, put in place the plan to stop Operation Rescue in their tracks. These people were in effect the backbone of Anti Fascist Action in South London and weren't mucking around. As the anti-abortionists made their way up from Brixton station they were ambushed, and as they used to say 'acquainted with the pavement'. It was a long time before they returned to Brixton Hill.

A report on the campaign from Workers Power, July 1990

 

A letter from the campaign from City Limits magazine, 2 September 1990

The following account, 'Bouncing the Bigots',  comes from Direct Action, October 1990:

'[...] In Brixton a group was formed to oppose Rescue by mounting a counter picket. Over the weeks, our tactics evolved and developed. Members of a variety of groups and organisations  (DAM, Red Action and others) formed the Clinics Defence Campaign.

Our main concern is not to add to the intimidation of women going into the clinic. A vast crowd clustered round the entrance is inherently frightening. We use what we call "them plus two": if they have five people, then we have seven and we surround them with our banners supporting a woman's right to choose. We also have back up in case of any trouble and also relief pickets for when the constant singing and praying gets too much!

Week after the were they have appeared and been met with a hostile reception. Slowly their numbers decreased as weaker souls got too scared to face up to vigorous local opposition. On one appearance due to a certain incident they left en masse (well, there were only 3 of them) in an ambulance. For almost 2 months now, they've been happily absent from Brixton'

[The address given for the Clinic Defence Campaign in this article is 121 Railton Road - the squatted anarchist centre that was used by many local groups in this period]

(updated February 2024 with addition of Direct Action article)

Save South London Buses (12, 45, 78, 521)

Transport for London is currently consulting on major cuts to London bus routes, including in South London scrapping the 12, 45, 78 and 521. 

A 'Save Southwark Buses' petition has been launched which argues:

'The 12, 45, 78 and 521 provide essential routes for Southwark residents without access to the tube or overground. It is vital that the most vulnerable passengers and those on the lowest incomes can get to work, school or access key services across the borough and beyond. An efficient public transport system is also vital to cleaning up the borough’s air, ensuring that residents have a viable alternative to car use.

It is disgraceful that the Government has cut TfL’s funding by £600m and has demanded that TfL makes service cuts and increase prices for the funding to survive the Covid pandemic. These cuts to services have been forced on TfL and will only serve to level London down, ensuring that those without a car will struggle to get around the capital. Hard pressed families will have to make more difficult and costly journeys...

It will have a devastating impact on areas such as Camberwell, Peckham and Dulwich on the number 12 route. The loss of the 45 route will impact on areas of Walworth with the lowest levels of car ownership in Southwark. On the 78 route it will impact and isolate areas of Nunhead, South Bermondsey and .along the Old Kent Road. For the most vulnerable living and visiting London Bridge and St George’s that rely on the 521 route, the cuts will be badly felt'.

I frequently get the 78, which goes from Nunhead to Shoreditch via Peckham and Tower Bridge and it is pretty obvious that what is being proposed as an alternative is going to be a significantly poorer service. Without the 78 you would have to get at least two buses, relying on the often overcrowded P12 to get from Nunhead to Peckham and then change. What's more the P12 is less frequent than the 78, it starts later, finishes earlier and doesn't serve the last stop of the 78 in St Mary's Road.

You can respond to the TfL consultation here until 12 July 2022, but the real power to prevent these cuts sits with the Government.

Nouveau Quiche - a co-operative restaurant in 1980s New Cross

Nouveau Quiche was apparently a co-operative restaurant at 301 New Cross Road, this advert is from Marxism Today, 1986 and promises 'Cordon Rouge catering for all occasions'.  A 'TGWU recognised workers co-op' no less (the Transport and General Workers Union was one of the largest trade unions at the time, it later became part of Unite).

I asked on twitter and facebook for memories of this place and got a few interesting comments:

'My memory is a bit hazy but they must have been doing vegetarian food, otherwise we wouldn't have gone, and the decor was fashionable for the mid-80s, lots of matt black etc. I think they did actually serve quiche. In those days the area was a culinary mix of the well-established Indian, Chinese, Turkish etc, but if you wanted something different there was nowhere local to go'.

'I was an education development worker at a homelessness project in New Cross Road during the mid 80s, and some of my colleagues used to go there. I think we had meetings there as well'.

There were other radical food places in this period including Brockley Bean, the vegetarian/wholefood co-op in  Coulgate Street. Nice to see that the daughter of one of those involved has opened a cafe of the same name in Wrexham. 

In the 1990s there was the great Heathers vegan restaurant in Deptford, home of anti-apartheid benefits and fantastic food which I must return to another time. With the widespread availability of vegetarian/vegan food today it is hard to remember the days when you had to make your own humous or do without. Hard to remember too perhaps how much these alternative food spaces overlapped with radical political movements, in the case of Nouveau Quiche perhaps late period Communist Party of Great Britain in its Marxism Today phase with its designer socialist aesthetic and its questioning of Stalinist certainties

Interestingly in the 2000s there was a really good Indian restaurant a few doors down in New Cross Road called Nouveau Spice - inspired by a memory of the radical quiche-ists?

Update, December 2022:

From Greenwich Lesbian and Gay Centre Newsletter 1986 - 'Nouveau Quiche opened late '85 in New Cross Road.... With lovely decor and good vegetarian food, it offers a warm welcome to lesbians and gay men. Noueau Quihce are also sponsoring our benefit night on 1st March, offering a meal for two with a bottle of wine as one of the draw prizes'

I also found a review in the book 'Sarah Brown's Vegetarian London'(1988) though strangely the text mislocates it in Dartford! (assume they meant Deptford). Seems it wasn't exclusively vegetarian but veggie positive

The restaurant also features in 'Egon Ronay's Bird's Eye guide to healthy eating out' (1987). Seemingly its 'healthy, hearty and highly imaginative' menu included Ghanain nut stew and walnut-stuffed aubergines.

'You and Me' - TV drama filming at Skehans

 Lots of filming going on this week around Telegraph Hill locations for new ITV drama series 'You and Me', including at Skehans pub SE14 where one of the characters is seen getting into a black cab and heading off down Gellatly Road. The Hill Station Cafe has also been used. The series, with Russell T Davies as Executive Producer, is due to be broadcast in 2023.

[2023 update - the series is now out, more about its locations here]

'I hate to see your heartbreak'

Railway Bridge, Vesta Road, SE4 (allotments in background)

 

Echoes of Ukraine invasion at Peter the Great statue

Anti Putin graffiti and Ukrainian flag stickers on the Peter the Great statue at Millennium Quay in Deptford. The statue was built with the support of the Russian embassy in, shall we say, different times.

Lewisham Sound Systems Trail

Big crowds last Sunday (29/5/2022) at the Lewisham Sound Systems Trail, with dub reggae and other sounds across the Deptford area. All free as part of the We are Lewisham borough of culture programme

Dennis Bovell and Friends in the Albany garden.

Lemon Lounge at Creekside artworks

Unit 137 at Deptford Market Yard

Nunhead Cemetery Open Day 2022

Nunhead Cemetery Open Day was busy on 21st May 2022 with its usual idiosyncratic mixture of local history, wildlife and cemetery enthusiast stalls, morris dancers and goths.

There was a 'hearse and horses promenade' courtesy of South London undertakers Francis Chappell & Sons. I posted this picture on twitter and a friend asked what was going on with the tiny people in the hearse - a trick of perspective or something spookier?!

 

The Peanut Factory: squatting in South London in the 1970s

I really enjoyed reading 'The Peanut Factory' by Deborah Price (Guts Publishing, 2022), her memoir of life in South London squats in the 1970s and early 80s - and specifically the scene in the Crystal Palace/Norwood area. Must admit that despite myself being a Brixton squatter later in the 80s I had no idea how much squatting there was around that nearby part of London. But this was in a period when there were plentiful empty private and council homes for people to live in if they could cope with disrepair and no hot water.

She particularly mentions a triangle of streets lower down Gypsy Hill where many of the houses were squatted and a warehouse known as the Peanut Factory became an informal community centre: 'There was big rockabilly scene down at the squats, with King Kurt and other fledgling bands, and a lot of quiffs and hair-gel. Parties happened every weekend. It was amazing how many people could cram into a small Victorian terrace'.

People living round Upper Norwood will appreciate some of the hyperlocal detail, including memories of working in local pubs, the zoo and Crystal Palace Adventure Playground. But there is a lot here for anyone interested in alternative scenes in London and their cultural history. 

Price really evokes this time through her relationships with a shifting cast of friends, lovers and flat mates. There is freedom and affordable living, but also addiction and sexual abuse.

Price moves through the sub cultures of the time, leaving aside her former hippy clothes and records to enthusiastically embrace punk and then moving on to clubbing at places like the Fridge in Brixton, the WAG and Le Beat Route: 'Getting dressed up and partying was a living protest against cuts and poverty. It was fingers up to the Government'. Sometimes cultural/music historians treat these scenes as a succession of completely distinct moments, when the fact is it was sometimes the same people involved just changing their clothes.

The Fridge is probably best remembered now for its long term location at the bottom of Brixton Hill, now home of Electric Brixton. But for a couple of years in the early 1980s it was above the Iceland store on Brixton Road. Price remembers it at that time as being 'glittering white, decorated with lots of fake ice stalagmites and stalactites... lit up with silver and blue lights to get a cold icy backdrop' (I went there once to see Rubella Ballet). She also recalls regularly getting her cut at one of the famous gay squats on Railton Road. 

The author is giving a talk at the Bookseller Crown bookshop in Crystal Palace on 26th May 2022, details here. 

Music Monday: Naima Bock - 'Toll'

Naima Bock was the  co-founder and bassist with Goat Girl, but has left the band to pursue a solo career. Her debut album is due out on Sub Pop on 1 July 2022. Naima spent her childhood between Britain and Brazil and indeed has just completed a tour of Europe supporting Brazilian singer Rodrigo Amarante. But her London years have been very much SE London, in fact she lived in my SE14 street for years and went to Edmund Waller school.

Toll is a track from the new album and features a kind of psych-folk sound, little bit Vashti Bunyan but with a languid melody that also puts me in mind of slowed down Stereolab. Great folk horror video too.

Music Monday: Belle & Sebastian video on Ladywell Fields

The music video for the latest Belle and Sebastian single “Talk To Me Talk To Me” features scenes shot in and around Ladywell Fields.

The video was written and directed by 15-year-old south London siblings Freya and Rosalie Salkeld.  According to singer Stuart Murdoch, “we put out an open call to filmmakers who would be interested in making something for the existing budget, requesting an image encapsulating their idea and a 100-word pitch. The directors’ mother got in touch saying her daughters are fans of the group and keen filmmakers, and they sent in a treatment that we loved. They co-wrote and co-directed it, and got a bunch of their friends involved, and made a fresh and funny take on the song.”

The Salkeld siblings added, “Our idea had come from photos we’d taken of our friends for art projects. Casting mates we’d recently seen in a school drama production was really fun — filming them was even better!”

I believe the school that features in some scenes is Kingsdale in West Dulwich.

Airship over Nunhead

The Goodyear Blimp airship has been in the skies of London and Kent this weekend, here seen over Lausanne Road in Nunhead on Saturday 14th May 2022

 

Reweirding: Lost Landscape and Found Lore

A packed Amersham Arms in New Cross last month for the first of a series of 'Reweirding' events there. The theme for March was for 'Reweirding London: Authors on the Secret City', with interesting talks from Caitlin Davies on female crime,  Lara Maiklem on mudlarking on the Thames shore and Tom Chivers on  'London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City' (pictured below left holding his underground London map with host Scott Wood).

The next event,  'Reweirding: Lost Landscape and Found Lore', takes place on Thursday 28 April 2022, 7 pm:

'Discover what remains of south London’s Great North Wood and revel in the revival of the Deptford Jack in the Green mayday celebration. Complementary verdant short films from Video Strolls.

C.J. Schüler, author of The Wood That Built London, charts the fortunes of the North Wood from its earliest times: its ecology, ownership, management, and the gradual encroachment of the metropolis.

The Fowlers Troop Jack in the Green was revived by members of Blackheath Morris Men and friends in the early 1980s. It is a revival of a Jack in the Green from the late 19th/early 20th century which was taken out around Deptford, South East London on May Day by the original Fowlers Troop.

Sarah Crofts tells the tale of the Deptford Jack-in-the-Green and presents David Aylward’s film of the 2006 procession. Artist Sarah Sparkes demonstrates, with some help, with shadow puppets'.

(further details and tickets here).

David Aylward with the Deptford Jack in the Green

Flowers for Teon Campbell-Pitter in Fordham Park

Flowers in Fordham Park, New Cross, where 16 year old Teon Campbell-Pitter was killed on 13 April 2022

Another child killed, more children charged with his killing. Difficult to say anything meaningful, but Peckham-based Power the Fight are doing some good community based work around youth violence.

 

South London Swans

Redcross Way SE1

The sadly closed White Swan pub in Deptford High Street

Hamilton Street, Deptford

 

Anti-Refugee Bill opposed at Brockley Cross

Billboard poster at Brockley Cross denounces the Government's plain evil plans to deport refugees to offshore detention camps. Press reports today suggest refugees arriving in the UK could be flown to Rwanda.

 

Nunhead Museum 2022

It's been a while since the 'Nunhead & District Municipal Museum and Art Gallery' opened its doors to the public, but for one weekend only this idiosyncratic collection can be viewed at 80 Gellatly Road SE14 - part of the Telegraph Hill Festival Open Studios.

Previous openings of the Museum in 2010 and 2011

 

Gormless Rishi and other famous faces on the New Cross Road

Dark clouds gather over the Sainsburys petrol station on New Cross Road - an omen for the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak as inflation rises and people struggle with the cost of living? For it was here that he recently staged that ill dated photo opportunity to demonstrate that he was a man of the people filling up his car, only to be widely mocked after it was broadcast (by Sky News on 23 March) as it was revealed that he had borrowed a Sainsburys worker's car for the shoot and appeared not to know how to pay in the petrol station.

This particular stretch of the New Cross Road has had its fair share of famous visitors, and the experience has not always been a good one. American actor Shia LaBeouf hit the tabloids not once but twice in 2012 and 2014 after getting into fights just across the road in The Rose pub (known at the time as the Hobgoblin). He was dating local actor Mia Goth, press reports this week say they have just had a baby together in Los Angeles, though he is also facing allegations of violence and abuse by ex-partner FKA Twigs.

On a lighter note there was that time in 2016 when Elton John parked his Bentley outside The Rose and popped in to use the loo.

I guess as a main road many notables good, bad and ugly have paused to sample its delights, some of them even able to work out how to pay for things. I remember that the long gone Sirius fish and chip shop near the Walpole, further along New Cross Road, used to boast that Paul McCartney had once stopped there for chips and a pickled onion. Am I imagining that they had a signed photo of him in the shop?

Ukraine crisis on the walls of London

Like most people watching terrible events continuing to unfold in Ukraine, I feel a sense of powerlessness. I have no armchair hot takes or new geopolitical analyses, other than to express solidarity with people in Ukraine subject to brutal invasion and with those opposing the war in Russia itself (as well as sympathy for those Russian conscripts sent to fight in Putin's war, who we can only hope will turn against their masters as they have at other key points in Russian history)

There are a few echoes of the war on the walls of London, including in the graffiti tunnel in Leake Street under Waterloo station.

'Ukraine burns as we watch. F*ck Putin Murderer'

'F*ck Putin! Make love not war'.

'love not war' - simplistic but true. Since almost everyone prefers the former to the latter why can't it be so?

[There was also lots of memorial graffiti there this week for drum & bass MC Skibadee, who was born in Waterloo]

A couple more from elsewhere...

Noticed a few window signs going up including this 'Glory to Ukraine' near Brockley cross.

A friend sent this one from Greenwich High Road. A contemporary twist on the old anarchist slogan 'No war but intersectional class war'

Waterloo newspaper?

The graffiti in the Waterloo tunnels serve as a kind of wall newspaper, constantly changing in response to current cultural and social events. I took some photos there last year (June 2021) and at the time there was more about Covid, as well as the police off the back of the Black Lives Matters and 'Kill the Bill' demonstrations:

'class matters when it affects you'