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Autumn Equinox: The Druid Order, Primrose Hill – 2007

Autumn Equinox: The Druid Order: The Autumn Equinox was on September 23 in 2007, and as usual The Druid Order celebrated in with their ritual on Primrose Hill and I went to photograph it.

My photographs show the event from the preparations including a brief practice for a few on the hill top in normal clothing, and then their robing and preparation for the march up the hill and the various stages of the ceremony.

I had another event to attend elsewhere and had to rush off before they ended the event with a procession back down the hill, which I did photograph in other years. But I was on my way to a guided walk around ‘London Street Women’, statues on the streets of the City – you can also see pictures of them on My London Diary.

In this post I’ll stick with the Druids. I photographed The Druid Order both in the autumn at Primrose Hill and at Tower Hill for the Spring Equinox on quite a few occasions and in some I give a fairly detailed account of their history (they began early last century) and the more ancient traditions as well as of the various stages in the ceremonies.

Back in September 2007 my account was rather brief but earlier in the year I had written captions to the pictures of the similar Spring celebration which explained what I thought was happening at each stage.

Here is the piece I posted on the September 2007 page with the usual minor corrections:

The Druid Order has three public ceremonies each year, celebrating the Spring Equinox at Tower Hill, Summer Solstice at Stonehenge and Autumn Equinox (Alban Elued) at Primrose Hill.

I got there rather early, and found quite a few people enjoying the hill in their own way – including those who were running up it as well as others merely enjoying the panoramic view over london, as well as a group of half a dozen people in normal clothes practising a simple ritual of Peace To The Four Corners.

At least this told me I was in the right place, and I soon spotted a larger group gathering in under the trees a short distance away.

The ceremony followed the same pattern as in the spring, with a few minor differences.

I did have a small surprise, when i came across a rival druid, Jay The Taylor, the Druid of Wormwood Scrubs, part of the Loose Association Of Druids, who had come to celebrate the event in the Hawthorn Grove (not a feature marked on my map) and seemed surprised to see the other druids.

There are around 80 pictures from Primrose Hill on My London Diary, presented there in the order in which I took them, at Autumn Equinox – The Druid Order.

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Druids, Paddington & Hizb ut-Tahrir – 2013

Druids, Paddington & Hizb ut-Tahrir: This year the Autumn Equinox is on Sunday 22 September at 12.44pm GMT (1.44pm BST), and the Druid Order will again be holding their ceremony on Primrose Hill in London as they have for many years. They meet earlier to get things ready but the ceremmony begins around 12.30 The pictures here are from the event in 2013, and afterwards I took a walk around Paddington Basin before going to photograph the start of a march by the women and children of Hizb ut-Tahrir against the massacres of civilians being committed by the Assad regime in Syria.

Druids Celebrate Autumn Equinox – Primrose Hill

Druids, Paddington & Hizb ut-Tahrir - 2013

The Druid Order celebrated the Autumn Equinox (Alban Elued) with a ceremony on top of Primrose Hill in London at 1pm on Sunday 22 September 2013 in their traditional robes. They have been organising similar celebrations for just over a 100 years.

In My London Diary you can read a description of what takes place at this event, which marks the start of the Druid year.

On their web site they write “The harvest festival, when the power of heaven is infused into the fruits of the earth, and you reap what you have sowed. You see the full reality, what you made of your dreams, projects and plans, the actual reality, the truth that gives understanding and wisdom.”

The pictures on My London Diary are in the order in which I took them and I think include all the key moments in the ceremony, together with some commentary in the captions.

I had photographed this and the Spring Equinox ceremony at Tower Hill on a number of previous occasions and you can find pictures on the March and September pages for most years from 2007 to 2013.

By 2013 I was beginning to feel I had little more to say about the event and the following year, 2014 was the final time I went to take pictures.

A few of the pictures were taken with the help of a monopod which enabled me to hold the camera several feet above my head and take pictures with the help of a remote release. But although I could control the moment of release it was tricky to keep the lens pointing in the right direction.

Also on My London Diary is a brief history of the Druid Order, which although it has ancient roots in the Druidic tradition was founded a little over a hundred years ago.

There are a number of other Druid orders, some with very similar names, and members of the Loose Association of Druids including the Druid of Wormwood Scrubbs watched for a while before leaving for their own ceremony in the nearby Hawthorn Grove.

More on My London Diary at Druids Celebrate Autumn Equinox.

Paddington Basin

I had some time after the end of the Equinox ceremony before a protest I was to photograph and decided to take a walk around Paddington Basin, close to where that was to start.

Paddington Basin is the London end of the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal and was opened in 1801 to bring goods by canal into Westminster and to the start of the New Road, a toll road across the north of London, now the A501. The Paddington end is now Marylebone Road and further on it becomes Euston Road.

Paddington Basin lost some of its traffic a little over twenty years later with the opening of the Regent’s Canal, which led from the Paddington Arm at Little Venice directly to the edge of the City and on to the River Thames at Limehouse.

Development of the area around the canal began in 1998 in one of London’s larger development areas under the Paddington Regeneration Partnership, later the Paddington Waterside Partnership.

Hizb ut-Tahrir Women March for Syria – Paddington Green

Women of Hizb ut-Tahrir appalled by the chemical attack and other massacres of women and children in Syria marched in London to show solidarity and called for Muslim armies to mobilise to defend the blood of their Ummah.

Hizb ut-Tahrir protests are always segregated and often seem to marginalise women, but this was clearly their show, with only one small group of men with a banner and a heavy public address system and around a thousand women and children.

The call to the march stated “rows upon rows of dead children in their burial shrouds have no doubt brought us to tears as Muslim women, for this is our beloved Ummah that is being killed.” They called on women to “Stand in solidarity with your sisters in Syria and speak out against the shedding of their blood and that of their families and children.”

Hizb ut-Tahrir oppose the current corrupt rulers in Islamic states and call on Muslims to rise up and get rid of corruption, and in particular of “the criminal regime of the butcher Bashar Al Assad” in Syria, and for “Muslim armies to mobilise and replace the rule of the dictator with the rule of Allah.”

I left the marchers as they went down the Edgware Road on their way to the Syrian Embassy in Belgrave Square.

Hizb ut-Tahrir was banned in the UK as a terrorist organisation in January 2024 after protests in London in which it praised attacks on Israel.

Hizb ut-Tahrir Women March for Syria

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Autumn Equinox & Druids

Autumn Equinox & Druids: In 2023 the Autumn Equinox is at 6.50am Greenwich Mean Time on 23rd September (7.50am British Summer Time.) The exact timing timing is when the sun’s path crosses the Equator and it happens at slightly different time each year between the 21st and 24th of September, though mainly on the 22nd or 23rd.

In 2009 the Equinox was at 10.19pm BST on September 22nd, and nine hours earlier I was photographing the Druid Order celebrating the event with their annual ceremony at Primrose Hill in London.

I’ve photographed the Druid Order on a number of occasions both at Primrose Hill and also for the Spring Solstice at Tower Hill in March. I think 2009 was my first visit to the autumn ceremony and probably my best attempt to cover it as a whole, though I did take one or two striking images in a later year.

The ceremony follows closely the pattern laid out possibly a hundred years ago. The Druid Order dates from around 1909 or 1912, though it claims to be a continuation of much older druidry. You can read more about its founder in a lecture by Dr Adam Stout.

All we know about the ancient druids who worshipped in these islands for thousands of years before the Romans came is from their monumental structures such as Stonehenge and the brief and probably rather biased comments of Roman historians which described them as wise but bloodthirsty and given to human sacrifice, staining the altars of Angelsey with blood.

As I commented on My London Diary, “Fortunately today the members of The Druid Order are peace loving. free-thinking and rather photogenic in their white robes, and their main aim is to develop themselves through being rather than through intellectual learning.”

My post on My London Diary describes the Alban Elued (Autumn Equinox) ceremony in some detail both through the text and my photographs, and I won’t repeat myself here. You can read various versions of the ceremony on-line (also called Alban Elfed) and also watch a 49 minute video on the Druid Order website which also has a reflection on the Autumn Equinox.

Before the ceremony I also photographed a memorial plaque to Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826) unveiled in June 2009 at the top of the hill which had been unveiled earlier in the year, marking the site of the first meeting of the Gorsedd of the Bards of the Isle of Britain on Midsummer’s day 1792.

The start of the 18th century saw a revival of interest in druidry by people including Irish freethinker and philosopher John Toland (1670-1722). Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826) invented descriptions of Druid ceremonies and added these, together with some of his poems, into the translations he made of medieval Welsh manuscripts. He also introduced the ‘Awen’ symbol with its three ‘rays’ still used by the Druid Order.

The Druid Order are not the only druids who celebrate the Autumn Equinox on Primrose Hill. A little further west down the hill in a small hawthorn grove you may see the celebration of a smaller group of the Loose Association of Druids of Primrose Hill.

More at Autumn Equinox: Druids at Primrose Hill.

Druids, Paddington & Women March For Syria

On Sunday 22nd September 2013 Druids carried out their annual Autumn Equinox (Alban Elued) ceremony on Primrose Hill at noon and later in the day women from the radical fundamentalist Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain marched from Paddington Green in protest against the chemical attacks and massacres of women and children by the Assad regime in Syria. Between the two events I spent some time taking pictures around the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal.

Druids Celebrate Autumn Equinox – Primrose Hill

Every year for a little over 100 years the Druid Order have celebrated the Autumn Equinox on Primrose Hill, a site of historical significance in the history of Druidism and the re-invention of a Druidic tradition. Here on the Autumn Equinox in 1716 John Toland made a call for a meeting of Druids a year and a day later at the Apple Tree Tavern in Covent Garden, and on Midsummer’s day 1792 Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826) held the first meeting of the Gorsedd of the Bards of the Isle of Britain, the precursor of the modern Eisteddfod.

Morganwg was the bardic name of Edward Williams and his work “was a prime force behind the cultural revival that saw the birth of modern Wales” according to the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies whose web site describes him as “a profoundly complicated character: a struggling provincial poet in London, a manipulator and victim of the world of literary patronage, a radical, a medievalist, a forger of pasts, an opium eater and a forceful and opinionated critic.”

Most of the Druidic traditions we now have come from forged manuscripts he produced in particular the “Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain” (“The Gorsedd of Bards of the Isles of Britain”.) It was only in the twentieth century that the extent of his imaginative forgeries became clear. But although his work came almost entirely from his own extremely fertile imagination it had a dramatic effect in creating a new view of the Welsh nation.

The Druid Order made its first recorded appearance at the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge in 2021, though its founder, the remarkable George Watson MacGregor Reid, a trade union and Labour party activist with a great interest in oriental mysticism was probably there 3 years earlier. In 2014 he returned for the Solstice describing himself as a High Priest and “the direct successor of the Chief Druids who have been” and dressed in a very similar manner to that still adopted by The Druid Order.

I’ve photographed the Equinox ceremonies of the Druid Order, Spring at Tower Hill and Autumn on Primrose Hill on several occasions and have been impressed by the solemnity and spirituality of those taking part. Whatever its origins, it is a movement which respects the Earth and is peace loving and free-thinking with the apparent aim of developing themselves through being rather than through intellectual learning.

My account on My London Diary gives quite a detailed description of the event both in pictures and text so I won’t repeat that here.

Druids Celebrate Autumn Equinox

Paddington Basin – Paddington

The main line of the Grand Union Canal enters the River Thames at Brentford, from where it was possible for goods to travel along the river to London, but a direct canal route was obviously desirable and only two years after the Act of Parliament for the main route to Brentford was passed a further Act to allow the construction of a canal joining the this to a canal basin at Paddington, then on the western edge of London. This opened in 1801.

Unusually there are no locks on the 22km of the Paddington Arm – and you can travel a total of around 43 lock-free miles along the pound made up by it the Grand Union and Regents canal.

The area around the final length of the Paddington Arm from Little Venice to Paddington Basin has been the site of huge redevelopments in the past thirty or so years. A few older canalside buildings remain. Much of the land and paths open to the public in the area are on private land.

Paddington Basin

Hizb ut-Tahrir Women March for Syria – Paddington Green

Over a thousand woman gathered on Paddington Green for a march to the Syrian Embassy to show solidarity with women and children in Syria and to condemn the chemical attacks and massacres being carried out by the Assad regime.

Hizb ut-Tahrir oppose Western military intervention in Syria but call for the replacement of the current corrupt rulers in Islamic states by a Khilifah (caliphate), a state that will truly implement Islamic values and end the corruption and oppression of the current states. They call for Muslims to rise up and get rid of corruption, and in particular of “the criminal regime of the butcher Bashar Al Assad” in Syria, and for “Muslim armies to mobilise and replace the rule of the dictator with the rule of Allah.“

At the front of the march children carried a small coffin and other children and women carried bundles representing dead children. There were a few young boys taking part, but I saw few men – just one small group with a banner and a heavy public address system – and the event was clearly led by the women, almost all of whom were wearing headscarves, with very few in niqabs or burqas which covered the whole face.

At most other Hizb ut-Tahrir protests I’ve photographed there have been clearly separate groups of men and women, and I’ve sometimes had problems with male stewards for photographing the women, though not from the women themselves. At this event most seemed keen to be photographed to help get their message across. I left the march which was going to the Syrian Embassy in Belgrave Square at Edgware Road.

Hizb ut-Tahrir Women March for Syria

Autumn Equinox on Primrose Hill

I’ve photographed the ceremonies performed by Druid Order on the the Spring and Autumn Equinox on several occasions, and feel that interesting though these events are there is little more I can say about either of them. Probably I won’t attend them again, or at least I don’t feel any need to.

The Spring Ceremony takes place at Tower Hill and the Autumn at the top of Primrose Hill, which is a rather more atmospheric location with its extensive view of London. Tower Hill does have the Tower of London in the background, but not a great view of it, and the actual yard in which the ceremony takes place has all the appeal of any urban car park. In some earlier years there was something of a procession through city streets, but more recently the preparation has taken place in a hall of the adjacent church.

The Druids get ready for the Autumn ceremony under some splendid trees on the edge of the park and process to the top of the hill for the ceremony. My pictures in 2007 concentrated on describing the various stages of the event and I think do so well. Here I’ll post just a few of them but you can see the rest online – link below.

In 2014 I also showed the various stages of the ceremony, but managed to also show more of the druids and their getting ready for the event. I also took a monopod with me (as I had also in 2013) and was able to use it to hold a camera around 10 ft above ground to get a better picture showing the druid circle with the view of London in the distance.

I also talked more to some of those taking part before and after the event, and wrote a longer than usual introduction to the pictures describing the ceremony and giving some of the history of Druidism and the Druid Order.

Autumn Equinox on Primrose Hill

2007
2009
2013
2014

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Architectural Icing

Brunswick Gardens, Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea 87-10d-35-positive_2400

I suppose my photography is always a catalogue of obsessions, but at times and in particular places this shows more strongly.

Palace Garden Terrace, Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea 87-10d-43-positive_2400

Most of these pictures were taken in Kensington, with just a couple in Primrose Hill.

Brunswick Gardens, Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea 87-10d-32-positive_2400

Photographically there is a certain interest in rendering these essentially white surfaces – as some photographers have found with subjects like white eggs on a white plate.

Inverness Gardens, Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea 87-10d-26-positive_2400

But I suppose that there might be more Freudian interpretations of at least some of these pictures.

Inverness Gardens, Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea 87-10d-24-positive_2400

London developed hugely in the nineteenth century with stock brick for the workers and stucco for the middle classes, and I still feel something of an outsider in these wealthy areas, although some had become pretty down-at-heel by the 70s and 80s when I was making these pictures.

Inverness Gardens, Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea 87-10d-22-positive_2400

Since then, most of them have been tidied up and refurbished, and more divided into flats now often worth rather my than my own outer suburban house.

St Mark's Square, Primrose Hill, Camden, 1987 87-10c-53-positive_2400

There are times I find myself rather despising what appears to be overdone icing on the architectural cake, and looking for something with a little more depth and variation.

Park Village East, Regent's Park Camden, 1987 87-10c-31-positive_2400

Kensington Church St, Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea 87-10c-15-positive_2400

There is something of the fairly tale about these houses and the pictures, and although I had committed myself to photographing all of London I felt a longing to get away from Kensington and back to the real world.

Clicking on any of the pictures above will take you to my Flickr Album 1987 London Photos where you can view larger versions.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

January 1987 continued

Regents Canal, Gloucester Ave, Primrose Hill, Camden, 1987 87-1c-22_2400 — Regents Canal, Gloucester Ave, Primrose Hill, Camden, 1987

think I had a good month taking pictures in January 1987. I always liked the winter months for photographing places, although the weather wasn’t always kind. But London is a city of many trees, and though they enhance it greatly they also obscure many views. And I do like the way you can see the structure of the trees after they have shed their leaves for the winter, though perhaps they are at their best in spring as they begin to sprout again.

Most of the month I was in Camden, and walked a little beside the Regent’s Canal as it goes through Primrose Hill. There were just a few boats moving – the canals were less busy back then. I’ve always had an interest in the canals in London – and this year was to have exhibited a set of panoramas to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Regent’s Canal, officially opened in August 1820. You can read more about that show which had to be abandoned in an earlier post here, and the set of pictures I took in preparation for it are – including the one from Camden below – are on Flickr.

Regents Canal 2020: Camden High St13-20190308-d0708 — Regent’s Canal, Camden, 2019 – from ‘Regents Canal 200’

Primrose Hill, Camden, 1987 87-1c-51_2400 — Primrose Hill, Camden, 1987

One of my favourite portraits is Bill Brandt’s 1963 photograph of a rather morose Francis Bacon looking out of the left of the frame at twilight in front of a lamp post on Primrose Hill. Of course my picture is nothing like his, an empty path and rather more naturalistic, but I think it captures something of the atmosphere of the place which attracted Brandt and made him choose it as a suitable stage for his picture.

Sir John Soane, memorial, Old St Pancras Burial Ground, Pancras Rd, Camden, 1987 87-1d-15_2400 — Sir John Soane memorial, Old St Pancras Burial Ground, Pancras Rd, Camden

Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was a leading British architect working in a neo-Classical style. Although prolific, many of his buildings have been demolished or, like the Bank of England, greatly remodelled, though his three London churches, St Peter’s Walworth, Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone and St John, Bethnal Green remain, as does the Dulwich picture gallery and work at various stately homes.

His family tomb in the Old St Pancras churchyard, designed the year after his wife’s death in 1815 is perhaps the most clear example of his work, and is said to be the inspiration behind Giles Gilbert Scott’s red telephone box, made in 1924 shortly after Scott had been made a trustee of the Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – possibly London’s best and certainly one of its quirkiest museums.

Fence, Grafton Rd, Gospel Oak, Camden, 1987 87-1h-14_2400 — Fence, Grafton Rd, Gospel Oak, Camden, 1987

I made several exposures of this short alley in Gospel Oak, beside a tall fence partly covered by dead creeping plants. and with a rectangular block behind. Fortunately fairly early on a Sunday morning in January there were few passers-by to doubt my sanity and I didn’t have to wait long for the passageway to be empty.

The barriers, the fence and the building each define planes with rectangular blocks at different angles – with both creeper and clear space roughly defining rectangles at an angle, and through that space the rectangle of the building seemed to me to match that of the barrier on the footpath.

Gilden Crescent, Kentish Town, Camden, 1987 87-1g-46_2400 — Gilden Crescent, Kentish Town, Camden, 1987

You could furnish a home from the street in front of this shop selling (and buying) “All types of Old & Modern Furniture” and of course many did. We still use the chairs we carried home from a shop like this, and a few other pieces of furniture, though we had our own photographs of ancestors for the wall rather than buy those on display.

But other things too attracted me about this display as well as the neat rows of chairs, the mattresses and the gas cookers. There was the antique lamp post in the middle of the display at right, and, above the door, presumably from an earlier use, the advertisement in lieu of a shop name ‘WEIGHTS Cigarettes… For More Pleasure.”

Hockey, St Leonard's Square, Kentish Town, Camden, 1987 87-1i-46_2400 — Hockey, St Leonard’s Square, Kentish Town, Camden, 1987

Two house bricks stand as a goal for these boys playing roller hockey on quad skates in a cul-de-sac in Kentish Town. I think it was a sport I had not met before – and those hockey sticks were made in the USSR.

Hockey Players, Holmes Rd, Kentish Town, Camden, 1987 87-1j-41_2400 — Hockey Players, Holmes Rd, Kentish Town, Camden, 1987

A short walk away I came across another group of hockey players, standing with large sports bags and hockey sticks next to a mural showing roller hockey players on the wall of a skate shop. Their bags and sticks say ‘CANADIEN’ . I can’t remember now what they told me, and whether or not they were Canadian.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.