I just came back from the “Mayor’s Thames Festival”:http://www.thamesfestival.org/ and had a great time. It’s a good example of how cities have the scale to produce public goods which tens of thousands can enjoy. Tonight’s event was a two-hour-long parade of groups of varying age and ethnicity joining peacefully simply to have fun themselves and entertain others.
Oh, and I also love the fact that this is an entirely synthetic festival – set up six years ago just for entertainment, with no commercial hook (though of course it is probably good for the tourist trade)…
It’s slightly melancholy, however. as it is about the last of a string of large-scale public free events throughout the summer, and it is notably both colder and darker at this time of the evening than I remembered earlier.
