L4E secretary Andy Pye talks to his friend and former business colleague Chris Rand, who came down from Cambridge to experience his first London march for the People's Vote campaign.

The campaign is now more than a protest. We are, as Mike Galsworthy says, building a community. A community which is based on a solid foundation, is here to stay and will sustain until the end of the Brexit episode. It is a community which can put comfortably over a million like-minded people onto the streets of London. A community which is based on a solid foundation, is here to stay and will sustain until the end of the Brexit episode. It is a community which can put comfortably over a million like-minded people onto the streets of London.  How extraordinary that as many as 1 in 40 of the entire population of the UK took time off to visit London and protest - just think of what that means.

My friend and former colleague Chris Rand came down from Cambridge on the morning train. The crowds were so large that we only met up via text! He takes up the narrative:

"I wonder what the early 80s me would have said, had he seen a vision of me standing in Whitehall in my fifties cheering Michael Heseltine? Actually, they'd probably have said: "I knew you'd turn into a Tory", and then been even more confused to find out they were wrong!

"Sometimes big events happen, and you could have gone but didn't. We all have our regrets: for me it's Live Aid, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iraq War march. I could have gone to see each of them. I made my excuses. This morning I woke up and thought: "The People's Vote March is going to be huge, and I'm an hour away on the train. Of course I'm going to go". And so I did.

"What a fabulous event. A million people, they say. And everyone was so nice – it was an utter pleasure to chat to every stranger I met (four of them MPs!). It made me realise something else: EU membership/Brexit is a political issue, but the reason it's divided parties is because the side of the fence you sit on isn't to do with politics – it's to do with the way you look at life.

This was a good day that shows we have a chance of digging ourselves out of the Brexit madness. There were many leave voters present who had changed their minds 

Andy Pye is secretary of London4Europe. This piece has been edited and was originally published on the London4Europe website here