Jon Seah on January 5th, 2009

Yesterday I had planned to head over to the Dover Street Market to have a look at some clothes (preferably warmer but yet fashionable). So there I went, on my way to Green Park but as I approached to the exit, there seemed to be a crowd blocking it. As a new born true Londoner, I decided to barge my way through the exit and from there I was greeted with Police officers running away from a large crowd. Some of the coppers that were running had shouted at us to get back down the tube. I didn’t know what was going on so I pretended to walk down the stairs but then went back up again when the coppers were gone. Turns out the crowd of people were the Freedom for Palestine protesters and they were relatively peaceful. I was kinda hoping it to be a drunken mob of soccer fans creating mayhem like the Chelsea vs Man Utd game for the Champions League 2008. Having never been to a protest before, I decided to follow the crowd as it would definitely be more exciting than window shopping.

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The protest was going along as I would have predicted until the coppers with riot gear came along. That’s where I was expecting things to get interesting and possibly some proper rioting to happen? It’s not that I wanted people to get hurt but I just wanted to seem some action (and photograph it)… Ok fine, I wanted to see people get hurt (whether it be the protesters or the coppers). C’mon, how often do you experience a riot? Nicola told me of his story in Paris a couple of years ago for New Years Eve when a riot happened, there were the full blown and police with riot gear shooting rubber bullets and throwing tear gas into the crowd so I was kinda expecting that to happen on this occasion.

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What I did enjoy was running around the city taking photos of the protesters and police officers. So still something that doesn’t happen everyday and was fun to experience :)

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