Battling borders

I wrote this post for The Common Voice blog. Twitterfriend @DougDowen asked me to write for his blog as a stand-in while he was observing Yom Kippur, a Jewish holiday.


I’ve often thought about how much more difficult setting up a new life in London would have been without social media.

Through Twitter, since moving to London from Toronto in 2008, I’ve been able to make new friends in England and keep in touch with old friends in Canada.

When I was a child, my mother -- who is English and emigrated to Canada with my Canadian father in the 1960s -- relied on snail-mail letters from family and friends to stay in touch.

I’m lucky because I have a Canadian and a British passport, which means I can travel freely to Canada, Britain, the United States and the 27 countries of the European Union without needing a visa.

Last weekend I went to Berlin, where invisible and visible borders destroyed so many lives in the 20^th century.

Nazi rule in Germany after 1933 destroyed Berlin’s roughly 200,000-strong Jewish community by enforcing exile to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp or to death camps. 

After the Second World War, Berlin was divided first into four sectors among Russia, France, Britain and the U.S. and later, in 1961, split into communist East Berlin and capitalist West Berlin.

The Berlin Wall, constructed to prevent an exodus from east to west during the Cold War, separated families and friends again until it was smashed in 1989.

Now the city commemorates the Holocaust with the dramatic Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Patrick Eisenman, and engineer Buro Happold, made up of concrete slabs, and via tributes in the decade-old Jewish Museum, designed partly by architect Daniel Libeskind.

The divisive wall is also commemorated throughout the city with markings on the ground, pieces of wall and a museum at Checkpoint Charlie, which marks the  border crossing between the old East and West Berlin.

Estimates vary, but between 100 and 200 people were killed trying to escape from east to west.

To a tourist, reconstruction, reconciliation and remembrance characterise modern-day Berlin.

Old scars remain.

Wharfians v workers

Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs, is one of London's two business districts, and boasts many a majestic bank tower -- they loom in the distance from views along the Thames.

The site in East London was developed by Canadian firm Olympia and York in the 1980s and 1990s. Almost 100 acres of the area is is owned by Canary Wharf Group.

Any vehicle that tries to enter is stopped by security guards and searched before it is allowed to pass at a sort of Checkpoint Charlie. It has always struck me as strange since people can walk freely into the area or  enter by boat, bicycle, bus, from the Docklands Light Railway or the tube.

The area is pure dystopian sci fi -- a post-modern site littered with arcane referents to its historical past as part of the East India Docks where shipments arrived by boat from all over the world.

The roadblocks are manned by people I think of as the Wharfians -- in my mind, a caste of people set apart from the rest of us by the weight of their own self-importance and their symbolic role as our protectors. Their presence gives workers in the Wharf a certain smug cache.

Today as I re-entered the perimeter, one of the Wharfians asked me if I was taking pictures of them and I said no -- because I wasn't I had taken a picture of the road block, not them. I was also trying to get a shot of a black plastic thing they run over the handle of the vehicles, which reminds me of the bomb detectors that Newsnight investigative reporters discovered were just aerials detecting nothing.

When I told the guard I hadn't taken a picture of them, he demanded to take my BlackBerry and look at the pictures on it. I said, "no". He said you can't take pictures, and I said you can't tell me not to and you can't take my blackberry. He wanted to know what I was doing there in the Wharf and I flashed my staff pass at him and I kept going.

I knew they would catch up with me and sure enough a while later, a guard came up behind me saying excuse me -- I let him say it a few times before I responded. He said: I hear you've been taking pictures! I said, yes, I have. He wanted to know what I was doing there and who I am. I said to him, you tell me what you are doing here and who you are -- how is it that you pursue a woman walking alone along the street in such an aggressive manner?

He said you aren't allowed to take pictures, I said I am on camera in this place 24/7 so I don't think you have any grounds to refuse me the right to film here. Also, I pointed out that anyone could take a picture of these chaps without them knowing from a car or the road or even a building nearby.

I ended up showing him my press pass because I didn't want to get frisked, and he did end up looking quite sheepish.

Is it legal to deny people the right to take pictures?