Posts Tagged ‘Spring’

Vaisakhi in Hounslow – 2008

Sunday, March 30th, 2025

Vaisakhi in Hounslow – Sunday 30th March 2008

Vaisakhi in Hounslow - 2008

Vaisakhi is the traditional New Year and harvest festival of the Punjab in India and Pakistan and gained added significance for Sikhs, the majority population in the area when at Vaisakhi in 1699 Guru Gobind Singh, the 10th Guru, founded the Sikh nation with the establishment of the Khalsa Panth.

Vaisakhi in Hounslow - 2008
Vaisakhi in Hounslow - 2008

Vaisahki is actually the 13th or 14th of April each year, but the festival is celebrated over several weeks at different Gurdwaras. You can read more about Vaisakhi and see some of my earlier pictures from various Nagar Kirtan (Sikh processions) on My London Diary posts from 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 and although they follow a similar pattern there are differences. In Hounslow the event seemed to me to have more active participation by women and girls than in some of the others.

Vaisakhi in Hounslow - 2008
Vaisakhi in Hounslow - 2008

I’d previously photographed the celebrations at most of of the Gurdwaras around London as a part of a larger project on religious celebrations in London, but had somehow missed out on covering the festival in Hounslow.

Vaisakhi in Hounslow - 2008

I’d always enjoyed photographing Vaisahki as the Sikhs were always very hospitable – I was made very welcome and guided and encouraged to take photographs and Hounslow was no exception. I wrote a fairly long description of the event on My London Dairy and included some of my personal history in the area where I – and my father – grew up.

The procession began at the Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha which was built on the site of the dye factory where I had my first full-time job – and where many of the shop-floor workers were Sikh. On the route various people had set up stalls offering free food and soft drinks to everyone in the procession – and I enjoyed their hospitality, but was soon too full to be able to accept more.

It went along streets that were very familiar to me, past the clinic where I was weighed and measured as a baby and my mother was given free orange juice and cod-liver oil (which I didn’t thank them for.) Past the nursery school, Major Drake Brockman’s Academy, from which I was expelled aged 4, past the school my father left in 1913 at the age of 14 (though he wouldn’t recognise it now) on to the Gurdwara Guru Nanak Nishkam Sewak Jatha where the procession halted for more celebrations before continuing back to its starting point.

Much more – and many more pictures at Vaisakhi Celebration in Hounslow

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Spring Time for Druids – 2007

Friday, March 21st, 2025

Spring Time for Druids: in 2007 the Spring Equinox was on 21 March, though I think in most years it is a few hours earlier on the 20th. Yesterday, in 2025 it apparently came at 9.01am, though for me it had come around ten days earlier when a patch of my garden was deep in flowering crocuses (or crocus or croci.) And for weather forecasters Spring starts on March 1st.

Spring Time for Druids - 2007

Later in the day The Druid Order will have come out at 12 noon yesterday at Tower Hill Terrace, but I didn’t feel moved to go to join them. I photographed their ceremonies on several years, both there and at the Autumn Equinox on Primrose Hill, and also published some more detailed reports (having done some research in the Mount Haemus lectures and other sources) with some of my pictures of later events.

Spring Time for Druids - 2007

The pictures here are from March 21st 2007, the first time I had attended a Druid ceremony and I then knew very little about them, and my comments on My London Diary perhaps reflect this. But the pictures I made were rather similar to those I made in later years and as with some other events I no longer feel I have anything new to say and no longer go.

Spring Time for Druids - 2007

I think druids might say their ceremonies were timeless, and certainly The Druid Order still use the order of service which they invented and printed aproaching a hundred years ago and I think the banners they carry and the other items used have a similar inter-war history. But I understand they only began this anunual event at Tower Hill in 1956.

We have very little real evidence of the druids of the distant past in our country, though I think their ceremonies may well have involved rather more bloodthirsty sacrifices than the current rather anodyne public festivities.

Spring Time for Druids - 2007

But here are some of my thoughts from this first encounter back in 2007:

It was in some ways impressive, with their white robes, but rather to staid and measured for my taste. Celebrations need to be done with much more joy. This had more the feeling of a funeral – despite the white dress.

There was an air of dusty scholarship, of dull Victorian scribes trying to major on gravitas in the Order of Service, and a sermon of mumbled though possibly worthy boredom. Hard to imagine William Blake as chief druid of this tribe, I’m sure they must have done things differently in his days.

I’m not sure how far back these celebrations go at Tower Hill. Modern Druidry revived in the eighteenth century, partly as archaeologists re-discovered sites such as Stonehenge and Avebury and asked themselves what went on there. What relationship the rites they came up with bear to those of pre-Christian times is impossible to know (though one suspects rather little.)

My pictures on My London Diary (link at bottom of this post) are in the order they were taken and together with the captions give a fairly detailed account of the event, although I think I did it a little better in some later years.

William Blake was among a long list named in the ceremony as a former druid. According to the article A Note on William Blake and the Druids of Primrose Hill there is no evidence for the claims that William Blake was a druid or chief druid, although he may have known some who did take part the annual rituals on the hill which were begun by some Welsh Bards in 1792 claiming that their Bardic traditions “had preserved the true esoteric lore of the Druids.”

Back inside the church hall, where I left them and went in search of a cup of tea.

In fact Blake commented negatively on Druids in his writing and images, particularly objecting “to reported Druid practices of ritual human sacrifice, and forced submission to priestly rites and rituals.“

More pictures and captions from the 2007 The Druid Order: Spring Equinox on My London Diary

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Bermondsey Equinox 2015

Wednesday, March 20th, 2024

Bermondsey Equinox: Spring, or rather Astronomical Spring, officially starts today, 20th March, though meteorologists see things differently and start it on March 1st and the weather has its own ideas. Botanists too make up their own minds by looking at plants.

Bermondsey Equinox

Today is the Spring Equinox, which I always assumed meant equal lengths of day and night, but checking the tables I find that today we get 24 minutes more day than night.

Bermondsey Equinox

The actual definition of the Equinox is apparently the moment when the Sun is directly above the equator and the Earth’s rotational axis passes through from being tilted towards the southern hemisphere to the north. So it really is just a moment, this year at 3.06 am UTC 20th March. Most years it falls on 20th March, but in 2007 it was on the 21st in the UK, and this year will be on the 19th across the USA.

Bermondsey Equinox

But watch out for Druids, particularly should you be near Tower Hill, where in some previous years I’ve photographed their celebrations which begin at noon, I think Greenwich Mean Time.

Bermondsey Equinox

It’s an interesting event to watch, and doubtless important for those taking part, and also good to photograph at least once or twice, but when you’ve done it a few times difficult to find anything new to say.

So I won’t be there today. And I won’t write about it here, as last year I posted Druid Order – Spring Equinox at Tower Hill and you can still read all about it there as well on the various other posts here and on My London Diary.

Back in 2015 I didn’t go to Tower Hill but was instead on the opposite side of the River Thames in Bermondsey, out for a walk around one of my favourite areas of London with a few photographer friends.

As I wrote then, it was “really just an excuse to meet up, go to a couple of pubs and then end up with a meal” and though it was a fine afternoon I don’t think any of us took many pictures. I’d photographed the area fairly extensively in previous years and had even written a leaflet with a walk for part of it.

The leaflet came about back in the dark ages of computing, when Desk Top Publishing had more or less just been invented and I was teaching an evening class in the use of Aldus Pagemaker, bought up by Adobe in 1994 who then killed it and brought out Indesign, more powerful but far more difficult to use. West Bermondsey – The leather area was an industrial archaeology walk which I made use of to illustrate some of my lessons.

Over the next few years I printed hundreds of copies on my Epson Dot-Matrix printer – which accounts for the crude illustrations – and sold them at 20p a time – hardly a money spinner but it covered my costs. They were bought and given out by local historian Stephen Humphrey (1952-2017), chief archivist at Southwark’s Local Studies Library for 30 years on his local history walks and sold at the Bermondsey festival. I met Stephen who wrote a number of publications on the history of the area a few times – and had visited him in the Library when researching the leaflet, which also relied on information from a walk led by Tim Smith for the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society where it is one of a very long list of interesting walks in London.

The area has changed considerably since I wrote it, but most of what is mentioned remains despite considerable gentrification. You can find several hundreds of my older images of Bermondsey in colour and black and white on Flickr – including those used in illustrating the leaflet in much better reproduction.

There are a few more images from my 2015 walk on My London Diary at Bermondsey Walk.

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Druid Order – Spring Equinox at Tower Hill

Monday, March 20th, 2023

Spring begins today, Monday, 20 March 2023, officially at 21:24 UTC, though our weather may not reflect this. Thanks to global warming the weather here is increasingly unpredictable and while most of us are protected from its extremes, plants and wild life seem to be getting more and more confused.

Druids celebrate the occasion at noon, with The Druid Order doing so on Tower Hill, processing there this year from The Ship in Hart Street in white robes with their banners and performing a ritual celebration.

Druid Order - Spring Equinox

The Ancient Druids were a Celtic upper class we know relatively about as they kept no written records of their religious activities but there are some descriptions by Caesar and other Roman and Greek authors of their importance and their pagan practices, although some aspects of these may have been based on hearsay and propaganda.

Druid Order - Spring Equinox

Druidry was apparently an entirely oral tradition, with druids spending years of study and learning texts and rituals by heart; some of these may have been passed down through the years in folklore, particularly in Ireland, but much or all of this may well be later romantic invention.

Druid Order - Spring Equinox

According to Wikipedia Caesar “wrote that they were one of the two most important social groups in the region (alongside the equites, or nobles) and were responsible for organizing worship and sacrifices, divination, and judicial procedure in Gallic, British, and Irish societies.”

Most of the ancient sources state that one aspect of their religious practices was human sacrifice, possibly of criminals “but when criminals were in short supply, innocents would be acceptable.”

One form that is said to have been used for this sacrifice was the “wicker man” where the victim was encased in a large wooden human effigy and was then burnt alive. But they are also said to have practised divination by stabbing a victim in the chest and observing the flow of blood and the convulsive movement of the limbs as the victim died.

Modern-day druid ceremonies are considerably tamer, with druids appearing as peaceful lovers of nature, which of course had much more obvious importance in ancient times – though we are now realising fairly desperately that our modern neglect or indifference to it is having disastrous consequences on biodiversity and future food supplies.

Some trees, in particular oak and hawthorn seem to have played a large role in the worship of ancient druids, and there are many groves of trees around the country believed by some to (sorry) have druidic roots. Certainly some of these ancient groves, whatever their origins seem to have a spiritual nature.

The Romans also wrote about the druids as philosophers, and Wikipedia has an quote from Caesar on this where he writes that they believed the human soul was indestructible, passing at death from one body to another. He also commented on their interest in astronomical matters – perhaps most obviously expressed at Stonehenge and other ancient monuments, as well as “on the extent and geographical distribution of the earth, on the different branches of natural philosophy, and on many problems connected with religion.“

I’ve photographed the Druid Order ceremonies in several years on both the Spring Equinox at Tower Hill and the Autumn Equinox on Primrose Hill, a more dramatic setting. The pictures here come from 2008, but I’ve taken very similar ones in other years. Although inspired by earlier activities and mentioning some of those involved during their rituals, the actual form of their celebration is not ancient, but a little over a hundred years old.

More pictures from 2008: Druid Order – Spring Equinox.

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Spring Equinox

Saturday, March 20th, 2021


I’m not sure how Druids will be celebrating this year’s Spring Equinox on today, March 20th, but for several years I went to photograph the annual celebration at noon at Tower Hill. But after I’d photographed the event several times I decided there seemed to be very little more I could say about it and it was no longer something I felt a need to cover.

Spring comes every year, and we celebrate it in different ways, and I think that other festivals around this time of year, including St Patrick’s Day and Easter all owe something to this Druidic festival of new life. Before Julius Caesar updated the Roman calendar a date around the Equinox was often chosen to celebrate the New Year, and this lives on in our names for the months of September and October, the seventh and eight months of a year starting in March. In London we can join with the Kurds in celebrating their New Year, Newroz, at the Equinox.

Druids claim to have a long history but we know very little about how the ancient inhabitants of our country actually celebrated, though clearly they did mark the solstices and equinoxes as sites such as Stonehenge attest. But there is no record of exactly what they did and what they believed, and traditional Druidic ceremonies are a relatively modern creation.

Wikipedia has a lengthy article on modern Druidry, which includes the following:

Many forms of modern Druidry are modern Pagan religions, although most of the earliest modern Druids identified as Christians. Originating in Britain during the 18th century, Druidry was originally a cultural movement, and only gained religious or spiritual connotations later in the 19th century.

Druidry (modern)

The oldest remaining of these modern druidic groups is the Ancient Order of Druids founded in 1781. The public ceremonies at Tower Hill and for the Autum equinox at Primrose Hill are by The Druid Order, founded in1909 by George Watson MacGregor Reid but claiming lineage from earlier Druids. They have apparently also been known as The Ancient Druid Order, An Druidh Uileach Braithreachas, and The British Circle of the Universal Bond. Their public rituals have now been carried on for over a century.

On My London Diary you can see the pictures I took in the various years and in each report I’ve posted the images in chronological order and I try to give my interpretation of the various aspects of the ceremony. But mine is an outsider’s view and you can also find out more from their web site.

The Druids process away to a nearby hall at the end of the ceremony. Most years they have used the church next door, but one year this was not available and they had to go a short distance through the city, crossing the road through an underpass.

You can see my pictures and text from the Spring Equinox ceremonies in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2014 on My London Diary – and if you look on some of the October pages – or use the search on the site – there are also pictures from the Autumn Equinox at Primrose Hill.





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