Tall Ships Festival London 2014

It's something us local residents have been hearing about for months now, so by the time The Tall Ships Festival actually got here most people were quite excited by it. 

It is times like this that I love Greenwich. With a rich nautical heritage it's always nice to have something that fits with the image of Greenwich going on. 
 If you visited at all over the festival you'd have noticed the local business had the festival bunting up, everyone got involved and the atmosphere was fantastic. 
Each night there was a firework display which I managed to watch from my bedroom window. You think I'm going to walk all the way into the town centre, be squashed like a sardine to watch something I can see better from my own window? Hmm think again. At least all I had to contend with was the spiders. The displays were amazing, especially the last one on Monday night. I did love how all the ships sounded their fog horns at the end of the displays, a nice touch. 

So on Sunday I decided to have a wander into town see what was going on. 
WHAT A NIGHTMARE!
Greenwich is like a sticky fly trap for tourists any day of the year but this weekend it was even worse. Horrible in fact. For some stupid reason they closed the thames path so you couldn't even walk along the river. So your only option was to walk well more like crawl along in a human conveyer belt of tourists and locals. 
We had a few tall ships in dock at that point but getting decent pics was tricky. 

I'd had enough, it was just too crowded for me. So I decided to hop onto the little old 386, another good idea as the 180 & 177 were murder and off I went to Woolwich. Well what a difference, the security were helping people across the dual carriageway, noone was hustled along, everyone was just walking around in their own time. You had space to walk around and there was a really good festival atmosphere there. Still couldn't see the ships too well. The biggest ships were up at Woolwich and I did manage to take a few half decent shots. 

     

  

    

  

    

It was a really good day out and was well worth going to.