US High School Bands still play a major part in the Parade
I can’t remember when I first photographed the annual New Year Parade in Westminster, London, though I’m sure it was some time in the 1990s, though apparently it’s been going for 23 years. But for a long time it was an almost entirely USAmerican affair, all high school marching bands and pom-pom waving cheerleaders, and began in Berkeley Square, completely drowning out all nightingales.
Of course it’s changed since then, particularly with 9/11, the fall in value of the dollar and then the London bombings scaring off many from the USA – and the recent recovery of the dollar doesn’t seem to have helped much. Although there are still plenty of high school kids in their uniforms, the balance has shifted, with many London boroughs and other UK organisations now taking part, and although it is still in Westminster it has become a London event.
But for several years I’ve been dragging myself out of bed on 1 Jan and wondering what I’m doing and why. Not that it’s an event without some interest with occasional glimpses of the surreal, even though it has very much been organised into a formula, too stage-managed to really hold the attention.
Going there is in some ways a social thing, getting out and greeting some of my colleagues (also not quite sure why they are there) as well as some of the characters I’ve photographed many times before and wishing them a “Happy New Year.”
It’s also in part a kind of ritual to mark the start of a new photographic year and to put down a marker that I really do intend to keep covering events for another year. Somehow I feel that if I didn’t get up and get out to photograph this, perhaps I might not bother tomorrow to get to the Egyptian Embassy or to the big protest march on Saturday.
But even as I take pictures I find myself wondering that perhaps I should really be looking for something different to celebrate the start of a new year’s work.
But this was part of the London Borough of Merton’s Winter Wonderland
More pictures now on My London Diary.
