Shoreditch and South Africa: Saturday 21st August 2004 was a fine day for a carnival parade in Shoreditch and a South African festival, part of the Coin Street Festival in Bernie Spain Gardens by the River Thames near Waterloo, just on the Lambeth side of the border with Southwark.
Here with a little correction and capitalisation (back in 2004 My London Dairy was firmly lowercase) and brief introductions is the text I wrote, which you can find some way down the August 2004 page. Below I’ll give links to the pages with more pictures from each event.
Shoreditch Parade, Hoxton
The parade was a part of the Shoreditch Festival and took place not in what we now normally call Shoreditch but a little to the north in Hoxton. Hoxton and Haggerston were historically part of Shoreditch and they were all part of the Shoreditch Metropolitan Borough until the 1965 reorganisation took them into the London Borough of Hackney. The park were the parade began is Shoreditch Park, off the New North Road just a short distance south of the Regent’s Canal.
Saturday turned out fine for the Carnival Parade in Shoreditch, starting from the park and going round through the Hoxton Street market. Apart from the shire horses from Wandsworth Brewery it was very much a community-based event, and had obviously generated a lot of interest and effort.
Part of the Shoreditch festival, its the first parade there for many years, and seemed to me to be a great success. Some of the kids really loved being photographed, and I was pleased I was using digital and didn’t have to worry about using up film.
More pictures from the Shoreditch Parade
Coin Street Festival: Viva South Africa – Bernie Spain Gardens
I left the parade as it left Hoxton Street market, and ran for a bus to points south, going to Bernie Spain gardens where there was a South African festival.
The music was great, but the wine was disappointing, really a waste of the chance to show what South Africa has to offer, and too expensive for the very little glasses that were on offer.
I had to leave before some of the more interesting sounding groups made the stage, but there were some nice dancers, and the audience was starting to join in.
More pictures from Viva South Africa