Suffering for your beliefs

I have been a bit quite recently, due to not being particularly well. I have had a chest infection, which got quite bad just before Christmas and I was told my doctors to stay in doors for a bit, in addition to the medication. So I was pretty much housebound for a month. I haven't yet picked up my camera this year, but I may resume the project next week. In the meantime I still have one days shots to post, which will likely take up this and the next post.

The shots here, were taken before Christmas, on my birthday. I took a half days holiday in order to try and complete the area between Holborn and Fleet Street. I started off on the east end of Holborn, where St. Andrew Avenue and New Fetter Lane join onto Holborn Circus. Here I met an Iranian man who was on day 18 of a 30 day hunger strike and protesting for the freedom of political prisoners, democracy, equal rights and freedom of speech. I spent a a while talking to him and was humbled by the experience. It was a very brave and courageous thing that he was doing, something that know I couldn't do.

After we finished our conversation, I continued up Holborn which turns into High Holburn just past the tube station, a fact I had not realised when in this area previously.

From here I then headed back down Holborn to photograph some of the streets off it, gradually heading south towards Fleet Street. The next stop was Furnival Street. Behind the doors in the shot below is a goods lift, that dates back to the late 1940’s and which leads down to an endless warren of tunnels known initially as The Chancery Lane Deep Shelter, and latterly as the Kingsway Trunk Exchange. After the war, the tunnels were briefly occupied by nearly 400 tons of Public Records Office documents, until in the late 1940’s, with the Government’s increasing realisation of how vulnerable the Capital’s communications networks would be in a time of conflict, it was decided to transform the tunnels into a protected trunk telephone exchange.This huge undertaking was completed in 1954, and a couple of hundred people worked down there until the 1980's.

Just off of here is Took Court.

At the end of both Furnival Street and TookCourt is Cursitor Street. There was quite a lot of building work going on here as you can see in the image, which limited options somewhat. The man coming towards me in the shot, stopped to chat to me for a few minutes. He was interested in my cameras, which he thought was a Leica; he owned one and was quite disappointed to find out that it was not.

Also off of Furnival Street is Norwich Street.

This leads to Fetter Lane, and from here I went through  Plough Lane.

Plough Lane then leads to New Fetter Lane, where I took a couple of images. The first is a reflection which doesn't really work, and the second is the empty interior of an office - here I quite liked the stark white emptiness , broken up the ladder. Its not a great shot, but I don't think it would have worked had the ladder not been there, or the ladder had been a plain metal variety.

I then continued east for a few streets onto Little New Street.

Just off here leading to Faringdon Street is Stonecutter Street, which is the last image of the post. The rest of the streets I photographed this day, will follow in another post.