Tin Pan Alley Festival

Tin Pan Alley & Our Lady of Mount Carmel: Sunday 16th July 2006 I went to the Tin Pan Alley Festival in Denmark Street, a short street off the Charing Cross Road, for many years the centre of the UK popular music industry, but now sadly declined. There are still some shops selling instruments, but the music publishers, newspapers and most recording studios have disappeared, and much redevelopment has taken place, including behind some of the seventeenth century and later facades.

It was a crowded and very noisy event and I found little to photograph, soon leaving for Clerkenwell to photograph the annual Italian festival there.

The 2026 Procession in Honour of Our Lady of Mount Carmel takes place this Sunday, July 19, 2026 at 3:30 but the street festival there begins around noon and continues long after the procession. It’s an event I’ve photographed many years since I first knew about it in the 1990s, but this year I think it will be far to hot for me to travel and work there.

Here as usual is what I wrote back in 2006 with normal capitalisation and spelling corrections, along with a few of my favourite images and links to the many others still on My London Diary.

Tin Pan Alley Festival

Denmark Street

Tin Pan Alley & Our Lady of Mount Carmel - 2006 — *Crowding around the stage in ‘Tin Pan Alley’*

Not a lot to say about the Tin Pan Alley Festival in Denmark Street. It was noisy, fun if you like that kind of thing (but 15 minutes was long enough for me) and for a good cause.

Denmark Street is perhaps more interesting on other days, I must take my “famous” (allegedly ex-beatle) guitar in for repair sometime.

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Procession in Honour of Our Lady Of Mount Carmel

St Peter’s Italian Church, Clerkenwell

The Italian Church festival is one of the great events of the London calendar, which fortunately hasn’t yet been noticed by too many non-Italians.

*Statues and banners are carried in the procession*

*A group of women leave the church to take part in the procession*

The Procession In Honour Of Our Lady Of Mount Carmel Attracts several thousands. Good food, good wine and Italian beer along with other things for sale, colourful statues, and a cast list that included Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus, the Four Evangelists and many more, all parading through the streets around St Peter’s Church in Clerkenwell.

*Padre Carmelo di Giovanni, parish priest from 1991 to 2014*

*There were three baskets each with a pair of doves who were reluctant to fly*

*Another Jesus led the first communicants*

At the end of the procession is Our Lady Of Mount Carmel and the priests; as they join it, doves are released and the crowd of parishioners joins in a solemn procession of witness around the streets.

There are very many pictures from the event beginning here on My London Diary and spread over around a dozen pages, beginning with a number from the Sagra, the street festival in the street below the church. This continues with music and dancing ofter the procession (as well as eating and drinking) but in 2006 I needed to leave rather than continue photographing.

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London Summer Festivals : Sunday 11th July 2004 seemed to be a day of festivals in London and I spent some time at three of them, walking between Trafalgar Square, Denmark Street and St Paul’s Covent Garden and taking a few pictures on the way.

Back then I was still working with the rather primitive Nikon D100 DSLR, with probably the dullest and smallest viewfinder of any camera I’ve used (though I have used deveral with no viewfinder at all.)

But although it only gave 6.1Mp files, (3012X2008 pixels) and the DX sensor was only half the size of a 35mm frame these were of remarkable quality and could be extrapolated to make decent large prints – one taken on another day was blown up to 2.3m wide for a public exhibition.

Nikon at the time and for some years were saying that the DX format was all that was needed for its cameras, and the later decision to move to ‘full-frame’ was driven by marketing – keeping up with Canon – rather than technical considerations.

Of course like most other photographers followd sheep-wise to move to full-frame when these new cameras came out, though most of the time when working with telephoto lenses I switched down to DX format for the greater equivalent focal length this gave.

At first the DX format with its 1.5x focal length multiplier meant I was working without any real wide angle lens. The 24-85mm worked as a 36-127 lens, But by July 2004 I had acquired the remarkable Sigma 12-24mm lens, “the world’s first ultra-wide-angle zoom for DSLRs with full-frame sensors” – 18-36mm equivalent on DX, solving that issue. And since on DX it was not using the corners of the frame it was a better performer than on full-frame.

I put the pictures in this post on the web in 2004, when most of us were still accessing the internet on dial-up modems and even the fastest connections were only 512kbs. To get web pages to load at a sensible speed the jpg image files had to be drastically cut in size to around 50-70kb. Now I would upload the same files the same size at two or three times the size to get visibly better quality.

Here- with some corrections is the text I wrote about the day in 2004:

Sunday I walked into Trafalgar Square to find it full of young Indian girls carrying ornamental jars and dancing with them, rehearsing for the Trafalgar Shores event that afternoon.

I left and went up to Denmark St for a set by 50hz, electrifying the first Tin Pan Alley Festival, organised with Shelter. Great Indie Rock and supporting charity without running.
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Then on to a garden party in St Pauls Covent Garden, which was sprinkled with celebrities, actors (female) and others I’ve not heard of and didn’t recognise. And a picture I didn’t post in 2004

Back in Trafalgar Square the girls had donned traditional garb and were now recognisably the Saraswati Dance Academy in a colourful South Asian show. After this we were treated to some water puppetry from the Vietnamese National Puppetry Theatre (not very photogenic and hard to photograph) so i went back to catch Billy Thompson playing Grapelli to Tim Robinson’s Django with rhythm support from Dukato. Finally back in the square I watched the superb Irie! Caribbean Dance Fusion from Deptford/New Cross, London. Then home for a slightly dark and chilly alfresco dinner with family.
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Tag: Tin Pan Alley Festival

Tin Pan Alley & Our Lady of Mount Carmel – 2006

Tin Pan Alley Festival

Procession in Honour of Our Lady Of Mount Carmel

London Summer Festivals 2004