Simon Huggins's blog

Sun, 13 Sep 2009

Thames Festival and Greenwich

I went to the Thames Festival on Saturday.

It was shit.

Essentially it consisted of thousands and thousands of people walking along fairly narrow paths along the southbank in London very, very slowly past stalls of tat which had nothing whatsoever to do with the Thames. They were from random markets around the city brought onto the South Bank.

There was a feast on a bridge. To get there you couldn't go up the steps near the Thames path that everyone was on. You couldn't go up the next set of steps a block further south either. You had to weave your way another block further south and then come back on yourself to get on to it.

When you eventually got onto the bridge, the feast was a bunch of food stalls overrun with people queuing for food which I suppose was predictable. The food was lovely and they had nice ale. They also had hippies persuading people to wear salad hats so you could garnish your neighbours food (wtf?) in some sort of grow-your-own-gone-wrong way because naturally all the salad was wilting in the heat and with the very small amounts of compost in the hats.

They had straw bales too and one organic hen in a coop. Because Londoners are stupid and believe that seeing this stuff once is enough to bring them close to rural life and will do as their part for saving the planet.

So we escaped on a Thames Clipper and sat in the sun in Greenwich park which was lovely, not chock full of people and much more relaxing. We went to the Greenwich Union afterwards and had a great meal with good ale.

All my Greenwich park photos

All my Thames Festival fire garden photos

After another Thames Clipper back up to London Bridge, we wandered up to see the fire garden. To be fair to the Thames Festival, the fire garden outside the Tate Modern was amazing. There was music and lots and lots of burning flowerpots and oil lamps on wires going up and down hooked up to cool machines that whizzed them round in all sorts of different ways. There was a metal, machine-powered man cycling on a high wire whilst balancing oil lamps either side. And big globe like structures with more burning flowerpots.

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