Letty, hi!
I was just about to reply when the website crashed.
Anyway, the London march was more of a shuffle, a stop-start progression; there were just so many people.
I took the Piccadilly Line from my brother's house in north London, and got out at Holborn, the stop before Covent Garden. The streets had been closed to traffic, so it was really quiet and unreal. Only pedestrians were seen, and buses (coaches) containing marchers, from all over the country.
And vans containing riot police (not needed). And corporation dustcarts ready to tackle the cleanup afterwards. Never, in the course of human conflict, has so much overtime been paid to so many, for so little.
I walked down Kingsway, down Aldwych, and onto the riverside at the Embankment. That was only one of three starting points. I was 50 minutes early and the crowds were immense, but quiet and well-behaved.
A nice man gave me a placard to wave. "Don't attack Iraq!" and "Not in my name!"
The police moved us off early, by about 15 minutes, there were so many people joining.
We walked past the Palace of Westminster, where we joshed with the bobbies, and round and up Whitehall, past Downing street. At Trafalgar Square there was another holdup as another column of marchers joined. Then round and up Regent Street where the other body of marchers joined at Piccadilly Circus coming from Bloomsbury, Gower Street. By then, it was getting a little bit crowded! Along Piccadilly, past the Ritz, all the way to Hyde Park Gate, a distance of 3.5 miles, starting and often stopping again. The whole street width was taken up by protesters, most with placards, a very impressive and stirring sight. No-one knows how many marchers there were, as the end of the march had not yet left Embankment when the front of it reached Hyde Park. Many people were late arriving because the roads leading in were so busy. The sheer numbers surprised everybody.
Certainly upwards of a million people attended. I didn't wait to hear all the speeches in the park, but it was well organised with plenty of loudspeakers and screens. One thing I had to do, was find a Gents, urgently. This done, I then walked all the way back along Oxford Street to High Holborn, where the tube was closed due to "a body under the train" and they couldn't say how long to reinstate the service, so I found a comfortable hostelry nearby and watched the rugby match. Got back home around 6.30 wherupon we had a takeaway curry, a nice end to an amazing day.
c.i.
