I Am A Woman. I Am Here.
To celebrate International Women’s Day 2018 I created these two paintings which I towed around London, photographing them in locations significant to day, and live posting to Instagram with information about each place.
I started in East London, a centre of suffragette activity, before heading to central London, then Brixton and then back up to North East London to finish at the Winning Sometimes exhibition by women in board sports at Hackney Downs Studios.
Shown next to each image is the caption/information for each post and location.
Map of locations here
Victoria Park
May 25th 1913 was ‘Women’s May Day’ in East London. Suffragettes from East London neighbourhoods marched with a great procession of handmade flags from East India Docks to Victoria Park. A massive crowd of people – the biggest ever seen in East London – assembled to hear the speakers. At the gates to the park the suffragettes were met with violence from the police and suffered many injuries.
East London was a centre for suffragist activities and for the first part of today I’ll be posting from important sites around Bow.
Victoria Park is also my favourite place in London and if I need to be somewhere positive, I walk here.
Lord Morpeth Pub
400 Old Ford Road (kind of). The Lord Morpeth pub stands next to an empty space that was once was 400 Old Ford Road.
This is where Sylvia Pankhurst lived with friend and fellow suffragette Norah Smyth. It became the headquarters for the East London Federation of Suffragettes and women’s social centre The Women’s Hall. When food prices rocketed at the outbreak of the first World War they setup a cost-price restaurant providing nutritious meals to the poor of the area.
Roman Road Market
Every Saturday during the market the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) held political stalls here at Roman Road, where they listened to stories from women of the East End and recruited people to their cause and sold their own newspaper The Woman’s Dreadnought.
The ELFS was shaped by the reality of working women’s lives. As well as women’s suffrage, the ELFS campaigned on a range of issues that affected working and living conditions of the working-class community – from equal pay to decent housing.
459 Roman Road
459 Roman Road is where Arber & Co printers used to be.
Emily Arber printed handbills for Sylvia Pankhurst upon the Golding Press in the basement. Arber’s also printed the suffragette’s own newspaper The Woman’s Dreadnought which Sylvia Pankhurst hoped to be “a medium through which working women, however unlettered, might express themselves, and find their interests defended…I wanted the paper to be as far as possible written from life; no dry arguments but a vivid presentation of things as they are…”.
45 Norman Grove
On this site a toy factory was setup by East London Federation of Suffragettes to provide women with an essential income whilst their husbands were away at war. The government was supposed to pay them an allowance but incompetency meant they were often left months without any financial assistance. Workers were paid living wage and the ELFS also provided a crèche for their children – the first of its kind in the UK.
Close to Victoria Park
The heroic acts of the suffragette movement would not have been possible without behind the scenes labour of people like Mr & Mrs Payne whose house stood on this site. Mrs Payne nursed Sylvia Pankhurst back to health after prison and a hunger strike.
The whole neighbourhood helped protect her and physically stopped the police getting close in their attempts to spy on, and re-arrest her. They refused to rent rooms to anyone they suspected of being an undercover policeman, despite being offered huge rents. One woman wrote to Sylvia Pankhurst saying “she did not see why [Sylvia] should ever go back to prison when every woman could buy a rolling pin for a penny.”
1-3 Rivington Street
For 5 days this week Penguin Books have created a new East London bookshop called Like a Woman which stocks books by female authors, and female authors only.
Books are organised in a new browsing system with sections like ‘Essential feminist reads’, ‘Inspiring young readers’, ‘Women to watch’, ‘Your body’ and ‘Changemakers’.
Russell Square
Women's Strike Assembly, Russell Square. The Women’s Strike rejects the decades of economic inequality, criminalisation and policing, racial and sexual violence, and endless global war and terrorism.
The Women’s Strike is a strike for solidarity between women – women of colour, indigenous, working class, disabled, migrant, Muslim, lesbian, queer and trans women. On 8 March, in cities and towns across the UK we will meet each other on the streets and strike against a system of power that keep us isolated and divided from one another.
Charing Cross Railway Station
On the first International Women’s Day in 1914, suffragettes marched from Bow in East London to Trafalgar Square. Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested outside Charing Cross Station.
Southbank Centre
Women of the World festival at Southbank Centre celebrates women and girls, and looks at the obstacles that stop them from achieving their potential.
WOW festival is a global network of festivals which provides a platform for celebrating what has been achieved, and exploring all the ways we can change the world for the better.
Waterloo Bridge
Women played a key role in the construction of Waterloo bridge during World War II. These bridge builders and 25,000 other female construction workers had been written out of history and it wasn’t until 2015 that women’s contribution to the building of the bridge was officially acknowledged. The bridge is known by boatmen as the Ladies Bridge and Karen Livesey has made a documentary about this called The Ladies Bridge.www.theladiesbridge.co.uk
Tower Bridge / City Hall
#Londonisopen
121 Railton Road, Brixton
121 Railton Road in Brixton.
Back in the 70’s this squat was the hub where the Brixton Black Women’s Group and Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent operated and also the place where founding member Olive Morris lived with fellow activist and BBWG co-founder Liz Obi.
The organisations campaigned on issues including immigration and deportation; domestic violence; exclusion of children from school; industrial action by black women; policing and defence policies; and health and reproductive rights. Their campaigns on reproductive rights included protesting against the testing of contraceptive drug Depo-Provera on women from marginalised communities and virginity tests on female Asian immigrants.
On March 14 1986, a plaque and photograph of Olive Morris was unveiled by her mother Ms Doris Morris to commemorate the naming of Lambeth Council’s building at 18 Brixton Hill as Olive Morris House.