Student Protest in London

This is unrelated to the protest, but I just wanted to show my new hair color...

Ready for action!

Setting up before our march towards Parliament

When we finally got there, it was packed. I couldn't even tell how far the crowd went up the street towards Trafalgar Square and Downing Street--it was just full of students as far as I could see.


Very calm, pleasant crowd



Most of the signs were about Clegg rather than Cameron, and how he went back on his pledge against fee increases. There were a few crude ones, but they were mostly funny/clever. There's one on the left there that had a nice Pink Floyd reference--"We don't need no education" on one side, and "Leave those kids alone" on the other :)




Part of the crowd was doing a sit-in...or they were just tired...

The big peaceful protest, with the sun shining on Parliament...

The reporters set up shop across from the Houses of Parliament (I think they're technically on the grounds of Westminster Abbey?)

Past Big Ben, it really did all just sort of spread out and calm down

I'm guessing these students would be affected by the proposed cuts to arts programs...

This picture was taken on Lambeth Bridge, only a block or so away from the Conservative Party headquarters at Millbank Tower. It's interesting to see this now, to see just how unaware I was that there was violence going on right behind me. I was just taking a picture of the Thames! I suppose it shows how non-violent the day really was for most of us...

Downing Street--it was very quiet. There were just a few tourists at the gates, no students...

As we wandered around waiting for the bus to pick us up, we popped in to Somerset House and saw where they were setting up the ice skating rink--so pretty!

I got to the University about an hour before we were set to leave, and quickly found people to hang out with--a couple of nice undergrad girls, one studying politics and the other journalism. The ride down to London was very long...and getting through the city itself was even worse. We were just stuck in stop and go traffic for over 1 1/2 hrs. When we finally got dropped off along the Thames, we got our placards and Leeds University Union marched up as a group towards the crowds. In the huge mass of people outside Parliament, we lost track of the Leeds University Union people. We just followed the crowd to the end of the park, and then crossed Lambeth Bridge to the South bank--which turned out to be a very good choice. Only one block further down the road and we would've been at Millbank. At one point, we saw 6 riot police vans speed by, so I called my mom to check on the news and let her know I was going in the opposite direction of the riot vans ;) That was the first we heard about the situation at Millbank--we were just wandering around London, unaware of any violence. It sounds so tame and uninteresting to say what we did: we stopped at Pret A Manger to get some dinner for the bus ride home, briefly went to LSE's after-party which was really lame, browsed a couple of shops, then went to a pub near the Savoy until bus pick-up time (very cool old place!). We really had a great time, and I'm so irritated by the fact that the protest got undermined by a small group of idiots. They didn't accomplish anything at Millbank, other than making students look bad. It was just needlessly destructive, and of course the media is going to focus on that--not on my nice experience, because that's not newsworthy...