At midday yesterday, London’s 33rd New Year’s Day Parade and Festival saw the city’s streets filled with thousands of performers and colourful floats from across the world, including dancers, acrobats, cheerleaders, marching bands, huge balloons, confetti, historic vehicles, old steam traction engines, horses and much more, to celebrate kicking 2019 off in true London style!
London’s New Year’s Day Parade, more commonly known as LNYDP is also run alongside the Grand Finale of the London International Choral Festival, which is performed in top music venues in London. In addition, the LNYDP also raises funds for mayoral charities across London and to date has raised in excess of £1 million.
The first parade was held back in 1987 with 2,000 performers, today it totals almost 10,000 participants, representing all the London boroughs and performers from not only the UK but also the US and Europe, with over 26 countries taking part in the festivities. An estimated 500,000 people turned out yesterday to watch this spectacular event, lining the parade route and waving flags. The parade was also broadcast on television both here in the UK and abroad.
Fortunately, the good old British weather played its part and sun even tried to shine during the afternoon.
The parade started on Piccadilly near Green Park Tube Station and ran all the way along Piccadilly to Piccadilly Circus and then followed a route down Regent Street, Lower Regent Street into Waterloo Place, down Pall Mall and onto Cockspur Street, into Trafalgar Square, then down Whitehall and Parliament Street, ending up in Parliament Square at 3:30pm.
As London Mayor, Sadiq Khan said: “There really is no better place to welcome in the New Year than London. From the world’s greatest fireworks show on New Year’s Eve, to the fun-filled New Year’s Day Parade and Festival, our capital will be celebrating our unity and diversity as we again show the world that London is open to all.”
We hope that you enjoy this photographic montage of many of yesterday’s wonderful performers and participants following on from our review of the parade preview on Sunday in Trafalgar Square.
Editorial by Simon Burrell, Editor-in-Chief of Our Man On The Ground and photographs by Pietro Recchia, a London-based photographer specialising in fashion, portraits and luxury events.
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