LONDON -- The group behind a widely reported anti-gentrification protest at a cereal cafe cancelled a planned demonstration today at the Jack the Ripper Museum in London's East End, citing concerns over heavy police presence.
Class War said on its Facebook page: "We believe the police are intending to make large scale arrests tomorrow - egged on by a press campaign and the mass presence of journalists from round the word."
The "Women's death brigade" of Class War had planned to march on the museum, which it says glorifies violence against women. It was meant to be Class War's next big move after the demonstration at the Cereal Killer cafe in Shoreditch on Sept. 26, which was done under the "F*ck Parade" banner.
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With that demonstration -- in which a couple hundred protesters threw paint and wrote "Scum" on the already controversial breakfast cereal cafe -- Class War discovered that targeting independent businesses brought them way more media attention than focusing on large corporations. Class War has been putting on demonstrations for quite a while, but has never had this level of visibility until recently.
This whirlwind of press attention has attracted the attention of Scotland Yard, and police are trying to identify people who damaged the cafe and threatened the bearded brothers who own it.
Tonight we were attacked with paint and fire by an angry mob of 200. Riot police are on the scene. pic.twitter.com/GPXLmyMmuN— Cereal Killer Cafe (@CerealKillerUK) September 26, 2015
Media coverage about the planned event at the Jack the Ripper museum escalated in the week before. The museum hired a PR firm during the week and tried to organise a counter-protest, but was widely ridiculed for its effort and the counter-protest was canceled.
Dr. Lisa Mckenzie, a research fellow at the London School of Economics who has protested the museum before, had said she'd be at the protest.
"When the Ripper museum applied for planning permission it said it was going to be a celebration of the lives of East End women. What we have got is a gory, grubby museum about Jack the Ripper," she told the Evening Standard.
The museum has been the subject of public derision since its opening. Museum founder Mark Palmer-Edgcumbe, a former head of diversity at Google, has said the museum was intended to be about the social history of women in the East End, but the more interesting angle was the perspective of victims of Jack the Ripper, the name given to an unknown serial killer of women in the Whitechapel area in 1888.
Class War, the group behind this protest, was founded in 1982. It fizzled out in the '90s but has gained traction recently. It had been protesting outside development 1 Commercial Street for 10 months, according to founder Ian Bone.
“There’s was lots of stuff going on there – arrests, burning effigies – and not a peep in the press. Then someone throws a couple of bags of paint at a cereal cafe and it’s in the newspapers from Italy to New Zealand," he told the Guardian.
Here's one of their previous protests, which drew much less attention than that at the Cereal Killer cafe:
No posh water was liberated at all today from Foxtons Stratford pic.twitter.com/JaB9pIhMYU— Lisa Mckenzie (@redrumlisa) September 19, 2015