Welsand's in London

London's New Year's Day Parade

Happy New Year to our family and friends! Today we went to London's annual New Year's Day Parade in central London. There were more than 10,000 performers representing 20 countries world-wide, with more than half a million people crammed London's most famous streets to see the parade as it weaved its way along the 2 mile route over 3 hours. We positioned ourselves along the route near Trafalgar Square (up front with only 1 hour of waiting beforehand) and viewed 1 1/2 hours of the parade before we were frozen. According to the parade souvenir newspaper, when the parade started 20 years ago it had only performers from the US and the UK and apparentely was better known in the US than it was in England at first!

The parade was interesting. It had some similarities to parades in the states and some things which made it unique. There were alot of marching bands from the US. The Brits are not known for this, which surprised us! Marching bands are actually quite new to England according to the parade commentator. The British marching bands had few people, plain costumes, and a range of really young kids to older adults. We didn't see any British cheerleaders either, all were from the US. They have a Donkey society here, didn't know that, there were more than 30 donkeys in the parade. The red hat society is really popular here--they had a huge group of women in the parade. Another cool piece of the parade was the huge parade balloons--Sophie loved these.

Another unique piece of the parade is that each borough of London, there are 31 in total, takes part in the parade. Each borough is supposed to reflect the characters of its community. Parade watchers can text message a vote for their favorite and the winning 3 boroughs get nice cash prizes. We were so surprised that most boroughs didn't do much at all--one borough only had two old guys dressed up as jester's walking with the sign with their text #! It was hilarious! The borough we live in had about 30 people watching with matching shirts, a bit better than the jester's, but still not great--it wasn't even photo worthy! I think I had a better float in college for the social work association that I coordinated myself!

The parade was definately interesting and worth the wait to capture the feel of an annual London event.

posted by Chris @ 1:00 PM