London Santacon 2024

London Santacon 2024

When Santa says Merry Christmas, he means it.

How did it all start?

Well, to be perfectly honest, I have no idea. How it started for me though was when I chanced upon a scene on the South Bank of the river Thames last year. It was about thirty or forty Santas outside The Founder’s Arms. They were all rather drunk and I snapped a picture of one being given a drink out of a bottler of Bailey’s.

Who on Earth drinks a bottle of Bailey’s on a pub crawl? Oh…Santa, that’s who.

This piqued an interest so I did some digging and learned about ‘Santacon’.

It’s a Christmas pub crawl where everyone is dressed as Santa. Now, ‘dressed as Santa’ is a very basic description of the dress code. As long as it’s not just a hat and a Christmas jumper the organisers say. Apart from that, it seems that anything goes.

And pretty much anything and everything is drunk too. Although as mentioned above, I’m not sure a bottle of Bailey’s is the ideal companion in your stomach on a pub crawl.

This year’s crawl started off at Paddington Basin at 1100. Very quickly Santa was on the pop. Quaffing copious quantities of whatever was on offer. Each Santa had many provisions. Bottles, cans, you name it, Santa had it. I even noticed another bottle of Bailey’s. Maybe it was the same Santa with a strong stomach as last year.

After many cries of ‘What do we want?…Christmas. When do we want it?…Now.’ Santas were on their way.

One of the more surreal parts of Santacon is that at points, a couple of hundred Santas have to get from A to B. This is sometimes via The Tube. People’s faces as this mass of jolly, drunken Santas were an absolute joy to behold. Everyone we passed had their phones up filming (I don’t know what the collective noun for many Santas is) this Christmas procession.

I had to make my excuses and leave as Santa crossed The Thames from Blackfriars to head onto The South Bank as I had a meeting to go to with my gallery. The party continued on though with Discord alerts telling me that Santa had finally arrived in Trafalgar Square.

Maybe I’ll visit again next year. Maybe I’ll shoot some colour film. All these pictures were shot with my Leica M6 on my preferred Kodak Tri-X black and white film as I’m not a fan of colour. We’ll see.

Thankfully the weather Gods were kind to Santa and I think that much fun was had all around.

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