Firetop

This morning Suzie_Q and I were up relatively early (for us) and so we headed down to the breakfast café on the corner of West Street. You can always guarantee yourself satisfying full English there (if they’re actually open). Upon arriving in West Street I noticed that there were signs up announcing ‘West Street Festival - Today, 10am to 5pm‘ - “How exciting” I thought “A bit of entertainment for us”. At 10am when we left the cafe with full bellies there was very little sign of a festival; one or two of the ‘always empty’ antiques shops had some coloured bunting adorning their shop fronts, at the end of the street a woman beneath a gazebo selling what looked like straw hand bags - and that was it!

Now maybe we were just too early, perhaps the carnival atmosphere will really get started this afternoon - but I doubt it. It’s a shame that the amount of enthusiasm that seemed to have gone into the idea, no doubt to help boost flagging shop sales, was not matched by festivities of any sort whatsoever. The West Street website (yes there is one!) describes the summer festival as ‘The summer Festival of Art & Antiques makes the most of a balmy evening and welcomes browsers and dealers with a glass of cool bubbly. There are a variety of street musicians and stalls selling local produce - all with an air of summer madness!’. Perhaps those agenda items are coming later in the day, but if so I suggest that next year the festival organisers don’t make the official start time 10am. Lord knows what former resident and Pilgrim Father William Mullins would have made of it…

Technorati Tags: dorking, west street, antiques, festival, surrey, summer, café

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