Stay in London and Visit the The Mayor’s Thames Festival
The Mayor’s Thames Festival is London’s free arts festival. Activities take place on the River Thames, the riverside walkways, roads, bridges, docks and public open spaces from Westminster Bridge to Tower Bridge and beyond.Please contact Serviced City Pads reservations team on 0844 335 8866.
The festival is a stunning, free celebration of London and its river and it has become a key highlight in the city’s cultural life. Its river and water focused activities aim to inspire and excite and its extensive education programme involving some 300 schools hopes to increase interest in and appreciation of the river and its environment.
Many Thames Festival activities are based on public participation. The festival commissions new work, and transforms unusual spaces on and around the River Thames with a mixture of street art performance and carnival atmosphere.
Over the weekend, the Thames Festival Market showcases the very best of smallscale independent designers/makers, complemented by a selection of superlative food providers. Each area of the festival site will have food stalls, arts and crafts traders, and bars serving a variety of refreshments to cater to your every need. Over 300 individual traders have been carefully selected from across the UK, with an emphasis on artisans producing high quality products, and a clear policy on ethical sourcing for produce. Serviced Apartments through Serviced City Pads.
The Steve Faldo Memorial Barge-Driving Race re-enacts the way watermen manoeuvred their barges on the Thames in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when goods from cargo ships were offloaded onto barges, or ‘lighters’, and rowed with long oars to quayside warehouses.
The teams competing in this impressive race require skill and strength tom propel these heavy un-powered vessels and ride the river currents. The main race features barges crewed by modern day waterman and lightermen. who work on boats up and down the Thames from Woolwich to Hampton Court. The earlier race features novice crews, made up of friends, family and apprentices of The Company of Watermen and Lightermen. The race commemorates the captain of the Marchioness, who died along with fifty other when it sank after being run down by a dredger on 20 August 1989. Serviced Accomodation throughout London with Serviced City Pads.
Join Thames21 as they bring the foreshore to life! Thames21, Londons leading waterways charity, will be running a whole host of fun events for people, young and old, on the foreshore by Gabriel’s Wharf. Build a sandcastle, have a go at welly throwing, or find and decorate an interesting pebble to take away with you. All equipment provided, and suitable for veryone. The Environment Agency Fisheries Department will also be down on the foreshore and carrying out live netting demonstrations, to look at some of the fish that live in the River Thames.
‘As an English pyrotechnic artist there is no greater stage than the Thames.’ So says Mike Jones, designer of the Thames Festival fireworks display, now one of only three displays permitted each year on the Thames in central London.
The display spans nearly half a kilometre of the river as the two barges fire sychronised volleys and strafes of aerial shells erupting into a dramatic canopy of effects. Effects are drawn from China, Taiwan, Spain, Italy and America to modulate not only the colour and shape within each sequence, bit also the brilliance, the dynamic movement and pyrotechnic noise as over one ton pyrotechnics are fired in ten minutes.
From amorphous clouds of strobing blink stars and weaving fiery serpents to the perfect parabolic forms of brocade ring shells, we will see a sequence of beautiful pyroscapes creating a cycle from shapeless energy to symetry and then to chaos. Serviced City Pads supply apartments throughout London.