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Saturday
Oct152011

Occupy Wall Street (and Beyond): 1st-Hand Reports from Occupy London March

An EA correspondent is in the Occupy London march today. His messages are reprinted here without any editing:

1450 GMT: Tents now going up here. Occupystpauls it is. For now. Can't see the cops having it.

1324 GMT: Assange [Julian Assange of WikiLeaks] just showed up. Massive massive cheers.

1319 GMT: First instance of people's microphone.  

Police shut access to 3 of 4 entrances to St Paul's churchyard. People gathering both sides of two of those police lines. Especially the side where access is blocked to the main crowd in St Paul's churchyard

Still a standoff and quiet, but crowd numbers are growing slowly. 

1238 GMT: Found a coffee shop. 

In the lull moment here.  Don't know how the media coverage is playing out, but from what I'm seeing not a big story yet. 

More police have shown up and the about a thousand here are not confrontational. 

And the biggest point to note so far, bar the extraordinary number of photgrpahers (who were the ones who got me trapped in the surge), is the lack of direction/leadership. Lots of small groupa all trying to pull in different directions. 

Unless something big happens that's it for now.

1203 GMT: Now kettled/contained in front of St Paul's main entrance. 

Bastards. Cutting off the coffee shop where I was going for a break :) 

Forgive the spelling in last mail. Stuck between marchers surge and police counter surge. Hence the coffee break decision.

Calmed down a bit now though.

1148 GMT: Moving around. Trying to flank police. March blocking streets. Thin blue line comes to mind though. They [the police] can't contain marchers yet. Not enough of them.

Another police line blocking access to square. Beginning ti get anysy riufght noe.

1127 GMT: Police horses blocking Paternoster Square entrance.  Stand off for now. "We are the 99%" and "Whose streets? Our streets" are the chants.

1117 GMT: 500-600 here. No announcements yet. 4 paddy wagons. Six horses just showed up. Good humoured for now though.

1038 GMT: 5 mins from St Paul's. Quiet so far.

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