Camden Lock, South Bank & Soul in the City: I didn’t write much about my day on Saturday 7th August 2004 – and I’ll reproduce it in full at the end of this post.
I didn’t then mention that I started the day in Camden taking half an hour wandering around Camden Lock before walking along, past a secret garden near Regents Park (and I can’t remember where that was) to Park Square East where I took a picture of the Diorama “built in 1823 to show large, dramatized tableaux paintings as entertainment.“
Next I took the tube to the South Bank where at the National Theatre I found the Caesar Twins swimming around in a goldfish bowl, but with apparently relatively few people paying much attention.
From there I went onto the beach beside the River Thames at Gabriel’s Wharf where people were relaxing and enjoying the warm weather. The tide was out revealing a remarkably wide area of sand.
In Bernie Spain Gardens on the bank above a festival was taking place and I photographed a few Romanian musicians before walking back across the new Jubilee (Hungerford) bridge to Trafalgar Square – where my 2004 account below describes what was taking place.
“Saturday I spent wandering around London, mainly getting to things too early. I did manage to take a few pictures of a Romanian group performing at Bernie Spain Gardens, before leaving for Trafalgar Square which had been taken over for the final event of a two week ‘Soul In The City’ mission for young people.
The fountains in the square were full of young people, mainly girls, waving in ecstasy to rather tame gospel music in a slickly managed event. As I was photographing a woman was praying out loud into my left ear, filling it with sycophantic nonsense, but otherwise there seemed to be little real fervour.
I went back to the Romanians, where at least there was Urquell Pilsner on sale (its advertising says ‘In the beginning there was darkness, then in 1842 we found the light.)”
The larger images are ones I took then but didn’t use in my original post. There are a few more pictures on My London Diary, beginning here.
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