The crowd, many dressed in black, thronged the upper deck of Trafalgar Square outside the UK’s National Gallery, spilling down the steps all the way to Nelson’s Column.Stand up to Racism, the trade unions-linked group that organised Monday’s vigil for the deceased former Cambridge professor Jason Arday, estimated that 30,000 people had showed up. They converged in a sea of grief in central London as the evening rush hour rolled past, just three days after the body of the 41-year-old was found in a Battersea flat.Police said the death of the academic and father-of-two was “not suspicious”. Days before, an anguished Arday had told friends he “couldn’t go on” as his life unravelled in the glare of a media furore sparked by weeks of allegations he was a plagiarist and fantasist.His contested claims included that he was nonverbal until 11 and illiterate until 18, just 12 years before he got his PhD. He also claimed to have achieved extraordinary physical feats such as running 30 marathons in 35 days, completing nine with a broken leg.Arday also claimed he had raised £5.5 million (€6.4 million) for charity, before later changing that story. Following resurfaced allegations that he had copied large tracts of his PhD thesis, media scrutiny of Britain’s most famous sociologist ramped up over the summer in advance of the late August publication of his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things.Arday’s supporters, meanwhile, believed he had been targeted for scrutiny simply because he was black. At Trafalgar Square on Monday, many came together to share their sorrow, and also anger, at the events that preceded his death.“This is a vigil, not a protest,” the Stand up to Racism convener told the crowd. Yet it was both: a vigil for Arday and a protest against the media whose sustained scrutiny he had borne since July.In keeping with Monday’s heavy mood, it felt sticky in London’s close air, the last hurrah of its fifth summer heatwave. Many sweating in the square waved placards as fans. One woman in African dress cooled herself with a handmade cardboard sign denouncing the “249 articles in 22 days” that had focused on Arday, who was diagnosed as autistic.A subsequent trawl by The Irish Times of media aggregation sites suggested the real number of articles may have been triple that, including English-language foreign outlets.Jason Arday carrying the Olympic Flame on the Torch Relay leg in London in 2012. Photograph: Joe Giddens/LOCOG/PA Wire