Sweeps Festival – Rochester, Kent: I’d always avoided festivals like the Dickens Festival and Sweeps Festival at Rochester. Somehow these events seemed to be synthetic rather than authentic unlike the older carnivals, some of which still take place, though there are far fewer than twenty or thirty years ago – when my local carnival petered out.
The Rochester festivals are very much recent sponsored promotions of tourism to the town and the Medway area, although the Sweeps festival claims to dates back over 400 years, when child chimney sweeps celebrated May Day, said to have been their one day off in the year, and came into town to make the most of it with a great deal of mischief and mayhem.
The free Sweeps festival was actually founded in 1981 and lasts three days – in 2024 it begins on Saturday 4th May and ends on Bank Holiday Monday, May 6th. It has managed to continue while cuts in government funding have resulted in others being abandoned. It is very different now from its supposed origins, with folk groups and Morris dancers coming from around the country to perform to thousands of visitors.
Working with my friend, photographer John Benton-Harris on book projects I had seen his pictures of the event, and in 2011 he twisted my arm to get me to accompany him to the festival. We met at London Bridge station and took the train for the roughly 75 minute journey to Rochester.
It wasn’t the happiest of days for either of us. John lost his wallet which fell out of his pocket in a café and had disappeared by the time he realised and returned to look for it, and I managed to poke myself in the eye with the slanted end of a nylon camera strap that turned out to be remarkably sharp, after which everything seen through my normal camera eye was rather a blur. I still managed to take a great many pictures.
The best part of the day for me was actually the train journeys there and back with John where we had some stimulating conversations, with both of us enjoying a good argument about photography and photographers. He had a phenomenal knowledge of photographers and photography in New York where he had grown up and known many in person – which powered the iconic 1985 Barbican show and book American Images: Photography 1945-1980 , but he failed to appreciate many of the later photographers I admired.
When I wrote briefly about the festival on My London Diary I noted that “what seems to be entirely missing are the kind of drunken orgies that used to mark the spring festival. Or perhaps I was just in the wrong place? ” For all the unusual costumes and masks somehow the festival did seem rather tame, lacking any of the kind of energy that makes Notting Hill carnival so special. But it was also very much kinder on the ears, almost entirely acoustic and never reaching the intense high horsepower decibel levels of Ladbroke Grove.
We were there on Monday 2nd May 2011, the final day of the three day festival, as I hadn’t been prepared to miss the London May Day march the previous day or the protest in Brighton on the Saturday and had thought that the final procession would be worth photographing. But as I commented “What I hadn’t realised was that relatively few of the dancers stay on for the final day, and although the procession was interesting, it was considerably smaller than I expected.”
Given the circumstances I think I managed fairly well with my pictures, but I don’t think either John or I made any pictures that would stand among our best. Following his untimely death last August his own personal website is now offline, but you can see some of his work at the Mary Evans picture library (click on the image to see more) – but nothing there from his many visits to Rochester, nor in the 2021 Huck Feature or his APAG entry. Still online are a few of his critical articles which give a good idea of his thinking on photography on his The Photo Pundit blog.
John thought highly of some of his pictures from previous Rochester festivals and included around 15 of them in the roughly 150 images in his unpublished ‘Mad Hatters – a diary of a secret people‘, a book of his pictures of the English which I helped him produce. I worked on all the pictures and gave him a great deal of advice of which he very occasionally took notice.
I resisted later attempts to go to Rochester with him for this and other festivals there, and should I go back again its likely to be on a day without the festival crowds. Rochester does seem a very interesting historic town and there are some great places to walk in the area.
More pictures on My London Diary at Rochester Sweeps Festival.
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