London’s biggest free outdoor arts festival takes place on 11–12 September. The Mayor’s Thames Festival is an outdoor celebration of London and its river and takes place in the public open spaces between the London Eye and Tower Bridge. Events are a mixture of music, dancing, choral performances, carnival, feasting, river races and street arts.
Highlights include Feast on the Bridge on 11 September, with food from some of the UK’s best sustainable food producers served on Southwark Bridge. Events on the water include the River Parade with a flotilla of working old and new boats sailing from Tower Bridge to Westminster Bridge. The Thames Festival Classic is a collection of classic wooden sailing boats at St Katharine Docks, and the Barge Pulling Race will re-enact the way watermen used to manoeuvre cargo barges on the Thames before the age of steam.
Festival music and street theatre includes music and dance from South Korea and a 21st Century Hoedown. Sing for Water will bring together community choirs from across the UK to sing a special repertoire of songs and raise money for WaterAid. A mass choral performance of Jonathan Dove’s new work River Songs will be performed for the first time by 1000 London schoolchildren.
On the evening of 12 September more than 2,000 dancers, musicians and masqueraders with lanterns, illuminated costumes and fantastic structures will take part in the Night Carnival. This will be followed by a fireworks finale, fired from two barges on the Thames between Waterloo and Blackfriars Bridges.
Last year the Mayor’s Thames Festival attracted three-quarters of a million people to central London.
Website: www.thamesfestival.co.uk
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