All the fun

This one deserves large.

For two days every September, St Giles Fair takes over one of Oxford’s main traffic streets, attracts very large numbers of Oxford residents and incomers, and infuriates drivers. The fair is nearly 500 years old and although it was once a parish festival celebrating the feast of St Giles, and later, in the eighteenth century, a toy fair, nineteenth-century mechanical engineering turned it into the funfair it remains.

By the 1930s John Betjeman described it as ‘about the biggest fair in England. The whole of St Giles' and even Magdalen Street … is thick with freak shows, roundabouts, cake-walks, the whip, and the witching waves.

Today I could find neither freak shows nor witching waves but I found plenty of children. They no longer get the fair days off school but they drag parents and friends along the moment school ends and stay until bedtime when dusk starts to attract screaming teenagers.

The only attraction for me (and, I noticed, rather a lot of other lone adults) is walking round with a camera. I suspect this lad might be a photographer in the making.

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