Nations came together to honour the fallen at the Hackney Remembrance Day parade on Sunday. Local officials joined around 300 people from all over the world to lay flowers and wreaths outside the town hall and observe a two minute silence before the procession began.
Michele Boutsen, 49, from Chile, was among those paying their respects. None of her relatives has ever fought in a war but she wore a poppy to honour British troops. “I can only be a tourist and lead a decent life because of their sacrifices,” she said.
The Chilean wasn’t the only international to take part in Sunday’s festivities. Jamaican Kip Edwards, a 35-year-old Hackney Central resident, said his grandfather was in his country’s Infantry Volunteers in World War Two. “It is very important to pay our tributes to the people who kept us free from tyranny,” he said, after parading for almost three hours. “That is something that we all share, regardless of where we come from and regardless of our ancestry.”
Ethiopian salesman Abekele Bikiwa, 22, didn’t know about Remembrance Day until a few hours before, when veterans with medals and a pipe band started gathering in front of the town hall. On a sunny Sunday, he prefered to go to the parade than to buy a present for his father’s birthday. “This is once a year and it happens now. My old man will understand,” he said. “It gives us a sense of community, for sure. It is good to be here.”
Many of those who marched in Hackney chose to continue their remembrance at a London Jazz Festival event, just across Mare Street. Organisers said the showcase was “an irresistible opportunity to commemorate the related themes of liberty and creative freedom, since jazz is both the music of the liberated and most liberated of musics”.
