This week’s Photograph of the week: Activists Defend Homes from Demolition for Road Expansion in England
In 1994, residents, squatters, and activists came together to stop the M11 link road in East London. Under the rallying cry “Homes Not Roads,” they defended communities threatened by the demolition of hundreds of houses. Protesters occupied homes and blocked demolitions, facing arrests and evictions.
The resistance peaked in the hard fought clearance of Claremont Road in November 1994, which forced out residents like 90 year old Dolly Watson who had lived in her home all of her life.
While the M11 link road itself was opened in 1999, the campaign became a symbol of England’s wider anti-roads movement and helped pressure the government to cancel several road-building projects in the 1990s.
Photo: Orin Langelle/GJEP
New Archive Photo of the Week: People fighting for their land. Their sovereignty. Their right to exist.
One photograph. Five decades of struggle, resistance and memory.
Each week, as hundreds of photographs are digitized from Orin Langelle’s five-decade archive, one image is selected, newly edited, and brought back into public view.
Archive Photo of the Week revisits moments of social, ecological and economic struggle that might otherwise disappear from collective memory—along with the people, places and stories behind them.
From the archive, back into history.