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Frost Fair
Until Dec 16 2007
- FREE
This event has finished
Bankside Riverwalk, London, SE1 9DT
By Sara O’Reilly

Posted: Mon Dec 10 2007
We’re not going to kid you – while it’s popular enough to have become an annual fixture in recent years, this new-look frost fair can’t compete with those in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that inspired it. How could it? Back then the Thames froze solid for weeks on end, becoming a playground where Londoners partied and traded.

Thanks to the embanking of the river and rising temperatures, the Thames will flow as always this weekend – but those ready to give themselves up to the Christmas mood will find the section of Bankside from Shakespeare’s Globe to Tate Modern transformed by ice sculptures, atmospheric lighting and a 70-stall market. Bands and street theatre will entertain shoppers and there will be seasonal drinks and nibbles on offer.

A returning highlight are the husky-sledding rides for under-12s (rides £4, husky-hugging photos £5). New this year is the Disney DVD Dream Dome, which will screen free movies including ‘The Jungle Book’ and ‘High School Musical 2’. On Friday at 4pm more than 300 local children will take part in an illuminated parade, carrying lanterns in the shape of the seafaring vessels that used to sail up the Thames and on Saturday at 11am there’s the Thames Cutters boat race from Southwark Bridge to Blackfriars bridge to watch. Other attractions include ice-sculpting workshops and children’s art activities. And at Shakespeare’s Globe on Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 5pm there’s a programme of family events including the opportunity to dress up Elizabethan-style and ‘Permission to Play’, a promenade installation involving 50 actors which is designed to illuminate Shakespeare and the theatrical process.