Pancakes in the City: Tuesday 21st February 2012 was Shrove Tuesday – Pancake Day – and there were a number of pancake races taking place around London. I photographed two of these with very different ethos.

At the heart of the City in Guildhall Yard the various City of London Livery companies showed the City at its most competitive in what has now became a tradition of inter-livery pancake races on Shrove Tuesday, organised by the Worshipful Company of Poulters since 2004.

Here there were carefully drawn up rules and practices.
“The Gunmakers start each heat using a miniature cannon (which can make a very loud bang), the Clockmakers hold stopwatches to time the races , the Fruiterers provide lemons, the Cutlers plastic forks, the Glovers white gloves required to be worn by each runner, while the Poulters provide the eggs essential to make the pancakes.”

This is a highly organised event raising funds for the annual Lord Mayor’s charity – in 2012 the Barts and The London Charity, on behalf of the Trauma Unit at The Royal London Hospital.

This was the first year in which women taking part in the Ladies events were allowed to wear trousers – previously they had been required to have skirts reaching below the knee. And there are many other rules including the wearing of special hats for the occasion.

This is the City having fun in their own rather circumscribed and very serious way.
I photographed this event for a number of years, but haven’t done so for a while, partly because it became difficult to work at it without prior accreditation which I couldn’t be bothered with, but mainly because I thought I had got everything I could out of it and I was just repeating myself.

I left before the final races to photograph a very different event taking place in Leadenhall Market, along a much more restricted course and between ad-hoc teams from various businesses in and around the market.

There were far fewer rules, just those needed to outline the races, with teams carrying and tossing the pancakes in this relay event. The narrow space available limited the heats to two teams at a time.

There were prizes provided by The Lamb Tavern in the market, who also fielded a team along with outers including the cheese shop and the shoe shiners who fought it out in the final.

Or at least they did when after an initial run when the cheese shop team simply walked the course as they preferred the second prize – a bottle of champagne and a £50 bar tab at the Lamb – to the first of a restaurant voucher.

“Some haggling followed and a re-run was demanded – and after the Lamb had agreed both teams would get the bar money there was a close-fought battle for the honour of winning, won narrowly for the second year in the short history of the race by the team from the shoe stall.”
Pancakes in the City – Leadenhall Market
Pancakes in the City – Guildhall
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