Pageants on River
Click on the links below or the timeline to view further details about the history of our Pageants on the River Thames.
Annual Events on the Thames Today
Up to 420 crews from British and international boat clubs participate in the Head of the River Race every March. Founded in 1926 by rowing-coach Steve Fairbairn, the race follows the Championship Course – a 4 ¼-mile stretch between Mortlake and Putney – downstream on the ebb tide.
Two crews of eight from Oxford and Cambridge University Rowing Clubs compete in The Boat Race, which has taken place almost every March/ April since 1829. The Championship Course is generally rowed upstream on the flood tide from Putney to Mortlake. It is broadcast around the world and hundreds of thousands line the river to watch the race.
Doggett's Coat and Badge Race, which has taken place every July since 1715, is the longest-running competition on the Thames. Initially organised to commemorate the first anniversary of the accession of King George I to the British throne, it sees up to six newly qualified Thames Watermen and Lightermen, in single sculling boats, race from London Bridge to Chelsea.
Since 1988 the winner of Doggett's Coat and Badge has been invited to compete against amateur crews in The Great River Race in a bid to find the UK's traditional boat champions. Any coxed boat propelled by oars can enter and the race attracts a wide variety of vessels and participants which, with the longer route (21 miles from Greenwich to Richmond), attracts comparison with the London Marathon.
The Thames Festival, a two-day celebration of London and the River Thames held every September, attracts over 800,000 people and is now London's largest free festival. Launched with a high-wire walk across the river in 1997, the festival commissions new river-themed work from artists and works with schools and community groups to transform the landscape of the Thames. All in all, the festival weekend is a vibrant mix of music, dancing, feasting, river races, massed choirs and street arts. The Festival was renamed The Mayor's Thames Festival on gaining mayoral support following the establishment of the Greater London Authority in 2000.
The festival spans more than two miles of the riverside, from the London Eye at Waterloo to St Katharine Docks, east of Tower Bridge. Events take place on the riverside walkways, roads, bridges, docks and of course on the river itself. The finale is a magical illuminated carnival that winds along the south and north banks of the Thames, followed by a fireworks display fired from the centre of the river.
The festival team also delivers an ambitious international project called Rivers of the World which twins the Thames with rivers overseas. Pupils at secondary school level undertake a shared study and appreciation of their waterfront and, with the help of professional artists, create huge riverthemed artworks for public display along the river banks of all the participating cities. By 2012, seventeen countries will be involved in Rivers of the World
Recent Re-enactments
In 1988, the City of London Corporation organised a re-enactment of the 1613 Lord Mayor's procession entitled The Triumphs of Truth, to raise money for an ITV Telethon. The re-enactment included five ordinary barges transformed by set designer Alasdair Flint to represent a dragon, a whale, Truth's Chariot, Time's Chariot and the City Skyline. Each barge was fitted with a platform for singers, musicians and actors. The pageant, which consisted of a circular route between Tower Pier and Festival Pier, was accompanied by several PLA launches and the Lord Mayor in the state barge.
A re-enactment of Admiral Lord Nelson's funeral took place as part of SeaBritain 2005: a year of events to commemorate the bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar and Nelson's death. It was organised by Peter Warwick and Roger Mutton. Over 40 traditional oared craft, including the Royal Thames and Lady Mayoress (barges from the city livery companies), accompanied the Jubilant from Greenwich to Westminster. They were followed by spectator and media boats and thousands lined the four-mile route. The flotilla received a 15-gun salute from HMS Belfast. In 2009 the Thames Traditional Rowing Association organised a Tudor Pageant as part of the GLA's Story of London Festival, building on their 2008 Tudor Pull event. Actors playing Henry VIII and Anne of Cleaves boarded the Jubilant at the Tower of London and were rowed upriver accompanied by shallops and cutters, whose crews wore Tudor costume. Further craft joined the flotilla at Richmond and, at Teddington Lock, were greeted by over 30 skiffs, gondola and rowing boats. The pageant ended with festivities at Hampton Court.
The Queen: Silver Jubilee
To celebrate The Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, a River Progress and Pageant on the Thames was organised by the Port of London Authority under the aegis of HM Lord Lieutenant of Greater London, Lord Elworthy.
Thursday 9th June began with Her Majesty's River Progress from Greenwich to Lambeth. The Queen travelled aboard the PLA's launch Nore, which was dressed as the royal barge, and landed several times to meet the mayors of the riparian London Boroughs and various community groups. At the Tower of London a 62-gun salute was fired and as the Progress entered the City of London the Lord Mayor, aboard an RNLI lifeboat, welcomed her Majesty and joined the escort. The Queen gave a luncheon party aboard HMS Britannia, moored by the Tower of London, opened the Jubilee Walkway on the South Bank and took tea with the Archbishop of Canterbury before returning to Buckingham Palace by car. The boats for the River Pageant marshalled in six groups between Greenwich and Blackwall Reach, ready to set off at 6.20pm. With over 140 vessels taking part, and maintaining an average speed of 6 knots, the pageant took 30 minutes to pass any given point. The lead vessel passed Tower Bridge at 7pm and turned at Vauxhall Bridge at 7.30pm, at which point all vessels switched on their lights for an illuminated return. The Queen reviewed the Pageant from County Hall at 8.40pm and vessels began to disperse between Cherry Garden Pier and Greenwich, completing more than 16 miles in total.
The Pageant was ordered along lines of service, each section containing a mix of different vessels, the greatest number of which was barges pulled by motor tugs but also included lifeboats, passenger vessels, steam launches and training ships. The sections included: Lord Mayor's and Armed Services, Thames-side Industry, River Services, Great British Enterprises, Youth Afloat and Dunkirk Little Ships. Many floats, exhibiting tableaux and accompanied by music, were also featured in the pageant.
The Queen: Golden Jubilee
A new royal barge, based on an 18th century oared shallop, was built by the Thames Traditional Rowing Association in honour of the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2002. Its inaugural voyage, from Isleworth to Greenwich, was made on 14th September as part of a pageant entitled ‘The Celebration of Time' in which actors playing King George III and his queen delivered an atomic clock to the Royal Observatory. The Jubilant was accompanied by a dozen Dunkirk Little Ships and was joined, in the Pool of London, by the Lady Daphne sailing barge and the Portwey steam tug among others. A riverside commentary was given as part of the Thames Festival, with which it coincided.
Early 20th Century
In 1919, the Thames Peace Pageant celebrated the efforts of English mariners and merchant seamen in WWI. The five-mile procession from London Bridge to Chelsea, combining royal and civic pageantry, attracted enormous crowds to the river banks, bridges and the Thames itself. The Royal Barge, called the Queen’s Shallop, made her final voyage as part of this pageant. She was the last of the old state barges.
The Queen’s Shallop took centre stage, closely followed by the Lords of the Admiralty in a ten-oared cutter, each accompanied by a steamboat. A green steam barge carried the Lord Mayor, following which were a dozen twelve-oared Navy cutters, four Navy picket boats with guns, an armed motor launch and a barge displaying guns used in the Great War. The main body of the procession featured flagged and decorated craft from maritime institutions and the British Merchant Service.
Décor consisted of bunting and 50’ streamers, decking the bridges, ships, wharves, cranes and scaffolding. Choirs sang sea songs on the Embankment and bands played along the bank and at the piers where King George V entered and disembarked the royal barge. At Cadogan Pier the King disembarked to survey the pageant and receive the salute. Above the saluting point the procession turned and returned eastward.
Two years after his Silver Jubilee, King George V’s son was crowned George VI. Cruise ships lined the Thames from Gravesend to London Bridge carrying overseas visitors to the coronation, and the new King, who had served in the war, was honoured with a naval fleet sailing upriver.
Opening of Bridges
The first bridge at Waterloo, known as the Strand Bridge, was opened by the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Wellington with a grand military cavalcade on 18 June 1817, the second anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.
New London Bridge was opened on 1 August 1831 after a seven-year building programme. Crowds gathered on the north bank and in vessels on the water to watch King William IV and Queen Adelaide embark at Somerset House for a procession, accompanied by livery company barges, culminating in a banquet in a pavilion erected on the bridge. With the exception of an avenue, preserved by "naval officers rowing about in all directions… every part of the river's bold and extensive sweep was crowded with vessels laden as heavily as possible with spectators."
Every vessel, even to the smallest and most insignificant boat, was decorated with colours; and among all the gorgeous spectacles which old Father Thames has witnessed this, perhaps, was the most splendid.
On 30 June 1894, Tower Bridge, the thirteenth bridge to span the Thames, was built east of London Bridge. It was opened by The Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) and his wife in a lavish ceremony which included a procession of ships including the Trinity House yacht Irene, the gunboat HMS Landrail, the Bismarck and the Clacton Bell.
Funerals
British tragedies have also been played out on the river. Anne Boleyn was taken to her execution in a barge that followed the same route as her coronation pageant in 1533. Her daughter's reign also began and ended on the Thames. When Elizabeth I died in 1603, her coffin was transported in a black-draped barge in the dead of night from Richmond to Whitehall with a torch-lit procession of draped barges in attendance.
The Queen was brought by water to White-hall, At every stroake the oars did tears let fall…
The Thames has provided the backdrop for two memorable state funerals. In 1806, the body of Admiral Lord Nelson was rowed from Greenwich to Whitehall, accompanied by over sixty boats including a variety of Admiralty and City livery barges. The body was carried in the royal barge built for Charles II, covered with black velvet and adorned with plumes of black feathers. It was escorted by three other barges, draped with black cloth, bearing drums and trumpeters. The procession was followed by gun boats and row boats and minute guns were fired as it passed the Tower of London.
On 30 January 1965, after a service at Westminster, Sir Winston Churchill's body was transported upriver from Tower Pier to Festival Hall Pier aboard the Havengore. His coffin was then carried to Waterloo Station for its final journey to Bladon in Oxfordshire.
Royal Receptions on the Water
On 30 May 1610, James I proclaimed his son Henry to be the Prince of Wales and a celebration was staged on the Thames, "by all the Worshipful Companies of the City, ready in their barges… with streamers and ensigns… drums, trumpets, fifes and other music." This was followed by a three-day river pageant including a staged fight between two merchant vessels, two men-of-war and a pirate ship.
On 23 August 1662, King Charles II and Queen Catherine of Braganza were greeted by an extravagant pageant on their arrival at Whitehall from Hampton Court. The barges belonging to the twelve great Livery Companies were in attendance with a number of "pageants" made up of mythological characters which delivered orations to their Majesties. This event was witnessed by 17th century diarists Pepys and Evelyn:
I was spectator… of the most magnificent triumph that ever floated on the Thames, considering the innumerable boates and vessells dress'd and adorn'd with all imaginable pomp, but above all the thrones, arches, pageants, and other representations, stately barges of the Lord Maior and Companies with various inventions, musiq and peals of ordnance both from ye vessels and the shore…
Shouts and acclamations echoed the guns and music. The people were frenzied in their joy. It must have been hard for the rowers of the Queen's barge to make their way through the crowds that floated about them, but at six in the evening they reached Whitehall
On 17 July 1717, Handel's Water Music was performed on the Thames, for King George I and a party of nobles. The event, which summons images of the Thames as a place of leisure, luxury and refinement, was described by The Daily Courant as follows:
On Wednesday Evening… the King took Water at Whitehall in an open Barge… and went up River towards Chelsea. Many other Barges with Persons of Quality attended, and so great a Number of Boats, that the whole River in a manner was cover’d; a City Company’s Barge was employ’d for the Musick, wherein were 50 instruments of all sorts, who play’d all the Way from Lambeth… the finest Symphonies compos’d express for this Occasion by Mr. Hendel; which his Majesty liked so well that he caus’d it to be plaid over three times in the going and returning.
In 1749, to celebrate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession and the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle the previous year, Handel was again commissioned to write a celebratory piece of music for public performance. The Music for the Royal Fireworks, as it was subsequently named, was accompanied by a significant fireworks display from barges on the Thames on 15 May.
Both pieces by Handel have become associated with a quintessential Englishness, and The Music for the Royal Fireworks was performed as part of the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002.
The Lord Mayor's Show
In the 12th century, London was granted its own government and required to elect a new Mayor every year. The day after the oath-taking ceremony at the Guildhall, the new Mayor would journey to Westminster to swear allegiance to the Crown. At some point between the late 14th and mid 15th centuries, the procession made by the Mayor, accompanied by the livery companies in full ceremonial dress and with minstrels playing, took to the water in hired barges. The first barge built for this purpose was for Sir John Norman, of the Drapers' Company, in 1453.
In the Elizabethan period such processions grew in size, cost and artistic complexity and began to include dramatic action and speech. In addition to the twelve great livery company barges – sixty to eighty feet in length, elaborately decorated, canopied and rowed by eighteen oarsman – boats were fitted up as pageants or living tableaux. As well as promoting the Mayor's own livery trade and the importance of the Thames to England's prosperity, the processions referenced history, mythology, moral allegory and topical subjects such as the union of England and Scotland under James VI in the 1605 show, ‘The Triumphes of Re-united Brittania'. In 1615, ‘Metropolis Coronata, the Triumphs of Ancient Drapery' included two pageants on the Thames, one representing Jason and Medea, and one Neptune and Thamesis in a sea chariot shaped like a whale.
The last Lord Mayor to journey by water to Westminster was Thomas Finnis in 1856, when jurisdiction for the crowded river was moved from the City of London to the Thames Conservancy. Many of the livery companies also struggled to keep up with the expense of maintaining such opulent vessels, none of which survive today.
15th and 16th Century Coronations
Richard III may have been the first English monarch to go to his coronation by water, rather than by land, in 1483. As early as 1487 this journey was accompanied by some kind of special pyrotechnical display as when Henry VII's queen processed by water from Greenwich to the Tower of London with an escort of livery company barges and "a Barge… garnysshed and apparellede, passing al other, wherin was ordeynede a great red Dragon spowting Flamys of Fyer into Temmys".
The procession from Greenwich to the Tower of London for Anne Boleyn's coronation on 29 May 1533 was a grand spectacle. Fifty barges of the London livery companies, decorated with banners and draped in gold cloth, accompanied the lavishly apparelled barges of the Lord Mayor and Crown, with a further 250 vessels forming an impressive armada. The queen was preceded by two barges: one mounted with mechanical monsters and a fire-breathing dragon that was continually moving with monsters and wild men casting fire and making hideous noises, and a second sporting her emblem, a crowned white falcon on a rose, surrounded by "virgyns singyng and plaiyng swetely".
This tremendous pageant and display of power was influenced by the evolution of what we now know as The Lord Mayor's show, as can be seen in Henry VIII's letter to the city asking for the livery company's barges to be prepared with banners and streamers as "when the mayor is presented at Westminster on the morrow after Simon and Jude".
The Queen: Coronation
On 22 July 1953, six weeks after her coronation, a Royal River Pageant was held for The Queen on the Thames. It was held under the auspices of The Lord Mayor of London and was managed by an Executive Committee chaired by Sir Douglas Ritchie. The organisational team also included Pageant Master Jack Swinburne, a Musical Adviser and Master of Craft. The pageant comprised 149 vessels and floats, divided into seven thematic sections: The Lord Mayor's Procession, Her Majesty's Services, Historical Tableaux, Marine Services, Industry and Commerce, River Services and Private motor yachts. The six-mile route began in Greenwich and ended with the Queen's salute at Westminster.
Continuing the tradition of Royal Receptions on the Thames, Queen Elizabeth II was met by the Queen Mother with the Princess Royal and Winston Churchill on her return from a tour of the Commonwealth in 1954. The Royal Yacht Britannia was escorted to the Thames by warships and sailed into the Pool of London to be greeted by an official launch.
The Queen has also opened her fair share of bridges including the present day London Bridge in 1973 and Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, crossing the Thames Estuary at Dartford, in 1991. In 1984, The Queen presided over the inauguration of the Thames Barrier, in an event organised and paid for by the GLC.
The royal barge… sailed beneath bridges decorated with bunting. An armada of smaller craft…jammed with cheering pensioners, schoolchildren and the families of Barrier workers, accompanied [it]… Vessels along the shore sounded their klaxons and sent up water jets as the convoy passed.