Today was the demonstration outside the Church of Scientology (by Blackfriars station, on the river). I’d say there were anywhere between 80 and 300 people there, though seeing as that range is probably incredibly inaccurate I’d appreciate a correction from someone who can judge numbers better than me.

A quote from textually.org: “The London protest is reported to have drawn in anywhere from 500 to 1000 people.” I had no idea it was so many.

It was fantastic seeing all the Internet (digg, 4chan) memes in real life; there was plenty of talk of cake, traps, the current state of Tom Cruise’s sexuality and Soviet Russia. Longcat made an appearance (or several), which was hilarious.

Photos by Lawrence McGovern

I also love the fact that I get to ‘review’ the Met based on today. I guess they handled it well; I spoke to a police woman (and her horse) at about 12 o'clock and she said that it had been peaceful and there had been nothing much happening up till then. They did make a point of keeping everyone on the pavement, but I’m going to assume good faith on their part and blame the stupid, jumped-up bureaucrat who came up with the MPS' “demonstration policies” (which are no doubt so much longer than necessary, a bit like this article).

Photo by Nic Walker

Of course, I had to leave pretty early, so I can’t comment on what happened after about 12:30. I did call up City of London police this evening (for the absolute hell of it) and spoke to the rudest guy ever, who wanted to know in detail exactly what my interest was in those demonstrations. I managed to wrangle out of him that there were apparently no arrests made all day and it continued to be peaceful. Internet organised demonstrations, eh?

Photos by Tom Scott

As always, Flickr and YouTube tell the story best, and here’s one more photo that isn’t CC-licensed. I’ve got a couple of videos that I’ll put on my YouTube profile when I can be bothered. Photos embedded here are of my choosing and mostly random, but if you look closely some of them might contain people I (or maybe you) know :-)

Photo by Tom Scott

Comments

By adam2z on 11 February 2008 at 02:25:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamzethraeus/sets/72157603888020777/

got my set up

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I posted this on Sunday, February 10, 2008 at 20:55, under Life.