It’s hard to resist a name like Pratt’s Bottom and I have to confess I didn’t try hard, and as soon as I heard the details it was etched in my diary. Pratt’s Bottom (or rather Pratts Bottom, as I notice they like to omit the apostrophe these days) is a village on the south-east outskirts of London, and notable particularly for its annual village fete held each year in May.
Last year’s May Queen crowns the Pratt’s Bottom May Queen for 2008
Part of the reason for its continuing vitality as a village is the Village Hall, where you can act, sing opera, play short mat bowls, train your dog, play badminton or with model trains as well as be a Brownie or join the WI, though if you get your nights mixed up the results could be surreal. It also has a very nice pub, the Bull’s Head, its very own village school with 47 pupils (a pre-school group also meets in the Village Hall) and – the real reason for my visit (although the pint of Theakstons was very welcome) its own May Queen.
There are some drawbacks. Pratt’s Bottom is a longish journey from where I live and the nearest station only gets one train in each direction per hour. Due to a misunderstanding about the times I arrived rather late to find the procession had already left and found myself running over half a mile up a hill to catch up with it, getting to the village green where the fete was taking place more or less as it arrived.
It was also raining. Not particularly heavily, but steadily. Enough to sneak the odd drop onto the filter I’d just wiped and spoil the picture, though I’d tried hard to keep a cloth over it when not in use.
So when I’d taken the pictures of the May Queen crowning, had a walk round all the stalls, had a couple of goes on Pratt’s Bottom’s Human Fruit machine and taken a look inside the Village Hall at the drive-it-yourself model railway (I resisted) there really wasn’t a lot to do other than join the Morris Men having a bit of a sing-song in the pub.
It is, after all, traditional.