The love music Hate Racism festival which was due to take place in Finsbury Park this Sunday 6th June has had to change the venue to the Hammersmith Apollo due to police objections over the organisers not putting up fencing around Finsbury Park.

The organisers are annoyed that the police allowed a similar type of event to take place in Trafalgar Square where no fencing was used at all and the public may remember the festival which was held in Victoria Park a couple of years back where no fencing was used.

The police seem to have a policy these days to prevent the people from enjoying themselves out in the open air.

Employees of Haringay Council who work at Finsbury Park have for a number of days been arranging facilities for festival goers and today at the last minute have been informed to cancel contracts with various contractors who are rightly annoyed that they have turned up to find they are no longer needed.

Contractors have been abusive to the parks employees and have stated they intend to seek compensation from Haringay Council for wasting their time, even though the employees have stated we had only recieved this news that the event had been cancelled in Finsbury Park this afternoon.

We ourselves are annoyed as we were asked to work on Bank Holiday Monday to make certain that the park was tidy for the event and last week we had been contacting various businesses to provide us with enough toilet facilities as in previous years there haven't been enough for the public to use.

We as the parks employees understand how many people will be annoyed that this event is not taking place in the park on Sunday, but we are not responsible for the actions of the police and the contractors and members of the public should take out their frustrations on the police and not thre parks personel.

There have been several events in the park which didn't have fencing around it, the last one that I remember that did was the Oasis concert a couple of years ago.

Could the public refrain from abusing the parks staff as we we're not the ones who prevented this event from taking place on Sunday.

Our parks manager has been onto Unite who have informed us that the event will now take place at the Hammersmith Apollo and tickets are by donation of five pounds, tickets can be obtained from Bookmarks on Bloomsbury Street today until 7pm and all day tomorrow, anyone who wants further info should go to www.lmhr.org.uk


Trojan (Finsbury Park Supervisor)