More Golden Jubilee Celebrations: Monday June 3 2002 was the official Golden Jubilee Bank Holiday, and a number of events were taking place across the nation. And although I wasn’t myself celebrating I felt I should in some way document the events and picked a couple I felt might be of interest.
Here I’ll reproduce what I wrote in My London Diary in 2002 with the usual minor corrections, along with some of the pictures I posted back then, though the scans I made are sometimes rather primitive. I’ll also link to more pictures on-line, though there are still many from the day I’ve yet to digitise.
“June 3 I went to see how ordinary people were celebrating – first of all to a council organised even in Ilford, and then to a street party in the heart of the East End. “
Redbridge Jubilee Celebrations
Ilford High Rd, Ilford.#
Redbridge is in some ways one of the bleaker London boroughs, and the event seemed to lack any real centre or real conviction.
Perhaps the brightest point was the rain, which brought out a little of the true british spirit.
Mile End – Bow Street Party
Mile End is also bleak when you emerge from the Underground, with too many lanes of road cutting through its centre.
To the north, and running up to the Roman and Vicky Park is one of the remnants of London’s East End, still with many of its Victorian terraces.
The street party was in full swing when I arrived and everyone was out to have a good time.
It was a great event for kids and for grandmas and everyone else, and the bar and the pub were doing good business too.
These were the real East-Enders – with a cast including a real Black Bishop in purple robes, two fancy dress Beefeaters, police who could almost have been from Dock Green (except for the hats), a fire engine and its crew and plenty of characters.
Not a single juggler, mime or performance artist in sight (sometimes I ask myself what did I do to father a unicyclist.) These were people who – like we all used to – could make their own entertainment.
Food, drink, chat, music, a bit of a dance, games for the kids. It was a street rather like the area I grew up in fifty years ago, where everybody knew each other, although now with a rather more multi-ethnic population.
People – apart from the odd shy kid – were happy to have their pictures taken and to talk. One man saw I was photographing the decorations on his house and came over to tell me how his father had decorated it for the Silver Jubilee twenty five years earlier and that he had been determined to do it better.
They hadn’t quite got to a real full-blown knees-up, but it seemed definitely on the cards but it was time for me to go. As I walked away three young women were walking towards the party on the other side of the street, “D’you wanna take our picture“, one shouted, seeing my cameras. “No film left” I replied.
The following day I meant to go out and take more pictures of other Jubilee events, but in the end I couldn’t make it, just feeling it would be too much of an anti-climax.
There are six pages with pictures from the celebrations in Bow. Back in 2002 we were still on dial-up connections and so images were spread out only a few on each page to give sensible loading times. Images were then shared on the web at much lower quality than we would use now. The links to the next page are usually above the final picture and the final page from the event is of black and white images.
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