Inside Fortress Wanstead Flats

It has been a particularly fraight week, part of it spent in a witness room with the Tomlinson family at Southwark Crown Court, awaiting the verdict of the trial of Metropolitan Police constable Simon Harwood for the manslaughter of Ian Tomlinson. I still haven't managed to find the words to describe the extent of my anger and disgust at his acquittal - or what impact I believe the decision is likely to have on the future policing of protest - but I plan to try and write something over the weekend.

Meanwhile, today was the rather poorly-publicised 'public open day' for Fortress Wanstead Flats, which I ventured into with some friends and some trepidation this morning. This was the one opportunity to see inside the Olympics operations base that local people have campaigned so vociferously against and fortunately, there were none of the expected restrictions on photography. What we had confirmed is that up to 3500 police will use the base over the busiest days of the Games and what we discovered was that vehicles will leave via the entrance on the busy Centre Road - effectively cutting off another way out of Newham. Here are a few of my photos: as ever, there are more to be found on Flickr.