#tradition

barber-st-georges-day-downham-market-2019-01.jpg

Mummers recreating the legend of St George & the Dragon on St George’s Day, Downham Market, Norfolk. The dragon is played by the town's mayor, Frank Daymond, St George by Councillor David Sharman.

Whittlesey Straw Bear, Cambridgeshire. Originally held on the first Monday in January, the event has celebrated the beginning of the agricultural year since the Middle Ages. Farm labourers, unemployed in the winter months would black up their faces to prevent identification and perform dances in the town in return for money or food.

Latterly considered begging and criminalised before making a comeback in the 1980s over the weekend of Epiphanytide, the Straw Bear inevitably involves a number of street fights and the occasional good natured stabbing.

In the 2000s as property prices in Whittlesey rose, aspirational people who wanted to live in Cambridge but couldn't afford city prices came to the town and occupied the new builds. They disapproved of the application of blackface and conspired to make it forbidden. These were the same well intentioned, but naïve people who supported the smoking ban which did so damage to the culture of England, closing pubs like the Bricklayers Arms.

Kings Lynn Mart 2013

On the Waltzers at the Mart, King's Lynn.

A customer at Gary Salmon's pie & peas stall on its last day of trading at the old market. The stall has been trading since 1946 and will close when the market moves to a new area in the town