Although Autumn seems to have a good few weeks left in it yet, some trees are already showing off some fine colours. Here’s a favourite from a wander around Rickmansworth yesterday:
This weekend sees the Rickmansworth Canal Festival; two days of music, activities, stalls, rides and dozens of canal boats. We went along on the Saturday to see what was going on. It’s an impressive event for a town of some 14,000 and the festival was suitably heaving with people. It was fine to see many local groups present and greater range and variety of stalls than normal present as these type of events. Although there was a period stand with an archery demonstration we would have fancied the chance to have a go ourselves, or other traditional fare such as a coconut shy. Still, those with a destructive streak could have had a go on the crockery smashing stall, pictured below. The festival certainly provided a good day’s entertainment for us and had we chosen we could have stayed late into the evening with a number of music stages and beer tent to provide entertainment.
Here are some highlights of our day at the festival, mostly from around the canal area, which offers a feast of sights, scenes and shapes for the camera lens (click thumbnail to view full-size photo):
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- Shire horse from Chiltern Open Air Museum
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- Traditional crafts and … cooking!
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- Bring the vandal out in you and smash some crockery
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- A path by Bury Lake
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- Lake near Rickmansworth
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- View from Stockers Lock
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- Stockers Lock
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- Ricky Canal Festival barge
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- D-Day boat ‘Quisisana’
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- Tesco offers canal mooring for customers
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- Canal boats moor upto four deep in places
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- Canal boat adornments
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- Canal boat selling coal
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- View from Batchworth Lock
Other bloggers have also been talking about the festival:
- Lazy Days canal boat blog
- Gig photographer (seems there was a power issue with the evening’s entertainment)
I was already composing a blog post of the clamping down on photographers by the authorities when I noticed a piece on this morning’s BBC breakfast news about a local, long-standing photographer arrested for photographing buildings in Elephant and Castle. Now I can understand the privately employed jobsworth security officer asserting his power over his little domain, be it a supermarket or so on but being arrested in a public place by the police seems to be venturing further into disturbing territory.
Having been unable to track the story down on the BBC News website, I eventually located it on the Independent website, where it highlights further examples of photographers being prevented from going about entirely law-abiding and proper activities, such as reporting a protest and snapping a passing steam train. These invariably result in apologies and inquiries from the authorities concerned, yet an increasingly prevalent precedent seems to becoming the norm.
Suggest a walk in London and the closest most people will envisage to a ramble in fresh air and countryside will likely be strolling down the South Bank or perhaps along one of the canals. However not all of London is the swath of urban sprawl so associated with the city. Here are a few snaps from our latest walk, and yes it’s in Greater London:
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- A rural scene within Greater London
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- The cow shed
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- Minature horses!
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- Beware of the bull
As I walked to work this morning with a spring in my step following the US election results I was pleased to see that Dickensian London lives on still:
