people carrying flowers

Tour de France, More Cyclists & Flowers: On Sunday 8th July 2007 I began work in Woolwich where briefly cyclists flashed past me in the Tour de France, a few minutes from the start in Greenwich. From there I went to Hyde Park for another cycling event before meeting a friend to go to Hampton Court to photograph people leaving the flower show there.

Tour de Woolwich

Tour de France, Woolwich

Tour de France, More Cyclists & Flowers - 2007

After a time trial around London on Saturday, which I missed because I was at college, the Tour de France started for real at Greenwich on Sunday morning, after the cyclists had warmed up a little with a ride from central London.

I decided I’d like to see the real race, and chose Woolwich, just a few miles from the start as offering some decent viewpoints and also the background of the Thames for at least some of my pictures. [Though not those of the Tour itself.]

I arrived an hour or so before the riders, and found there were already people by the roadside sitting and waiting, building up to a fair crowd by the time the race reached us around 8 minutes after the start.

From the time I first saw the riders in the distance to when the last rider passed was 28 seconds, so I didn’t get a great deal of time to take pictures, although I soon ran out of space in the 21 raw shot buffer and had then to wait a second or so between shots.

Then the cyclists were gone, followed by car after car with spare bikes and it was time to go elsewhere

[I took a few pictures as I walked from Woolwich Arsenal station to the roadside point I had decided to view the race from, including of people waiting to see the race.

I was working with the Nikon D200, a great camera but with hindsight should have switched from RAW mode to jpeg when I would have been able to take many more frames as the cyclists flashed past. The pictures of the cyclists were made with my zoom telephoto lens at or close to its longest focal length at 200mm.

In retrospect perhaps I should not have pretended to be a sports photographer and gone instead for a single image looking down on whole the event from the hill above.]

More pictures on My London Diary: Tour de France, Woolwich

The Peoples’ Village

Hyde Park

Back in Hyde Park, another cycling event, the Peoples’ Village was taking place, with various events on a loop of track around the Serpentine and the southern edge of the park.

There were also a number of stalls and a giant screen showing the Tour.

*For a fiver, you could have your picture taken with a wax Lance Armstrong*

I ate my sandwiches on the grass watching [the screen], though just as I sat down the peleton decided it was time for a ‘natural break’.

Peoples’ village

Hampton Court Flower Show

Hampton Court

From Hyde Park I made my way down Oxford St to meet Paul, and we took the train [from Waterloo, after a pint or two in a pub] to Hampton Court to take some pictures of people leaving the Hampton Court Flower Show, carrying plants of various colours and sizes.

More at Hampton Court Flower Show.

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Chelsea Flower Show: I have never had any desire to go to the Chelsea Flower Show and still have never been, but in 2005 I was persuaded by friends to go with them to photograph people on the streets taking flowers home at the end of the show. I’d previously largely and deliberately avoided this and other events that were part of London’s Social Season and I’ve not been since.

I hadn’t known that this happened, but here is what I wrote back in 2005 (with the usual minor corrections):

“Chelsea Flower Show is the biggest event of the gardening season, and the crowds are huge. This year an extra day was added to cut down on the jams, though i don’t know how effective it was. Unless you are a gardening photographer, the most interesting part of the whole event is the end, when many of the plants on show are sold off and proudly carried home by their purchasers. As you can see from the pictures, they carry them along the streets to the bus stop or car park or coach, providing a rather unusual spectacle.”

Looking through the work now, here are some of the pictures that caught my eye.