There are a few spots in Portsmouth that have periodically closed the roads in order to line the pavements with stalls, get local and not-so-local people shopping, and entertain the attendees with music or some other form of distraction. Albert Road did it for a while until policing costs put a stop to that, although with it being a very long, main road across the city with a large number of pubs along it that was partly understandable. A smaller road, lacking that same density of drinking dens and therefore more able to be shut to traffic without giving the constabulary the vapours, is Castle Road, and in 2013 it held a Spring and Vintage Fair and we decided to take a walk down there to see if anything interested us.
To be honest, nothing really did. The shops along Castle Road aren’t really our sort of thing, with perhaps the exception of Pie & Vinyl (where you can eat pie and buy old vinyl) but it’s a cramped place that can be busy at the best of times and a bright, sunny day with hundreds of people milling about in the vicinity is not the best of times for a casual browser. So while the shops didn’t entice us to enter and the stalls didn’t wow us with their offerings we contented ourselves with some people-watching and event-photographing. There was plenty to see and buy and we saw plenty of business taking place so there’s definitely an attraction to the Castle Road fair for many people.
Photographs taken during a stroll down the road then an amble back up it now follow. I don’t tend to have anything specific in mind when I’m taking photos at events like this; it’s mostly just a capture people going about their day thing to get a feel for the atmosphere without worrying about overloading it all with some deep artistic explanation of the shot.
An iconic sight along Castle Road is the Tudor-style but definitely not Tudor clock tower. The Ernest Smith Clock Tower – if you look at the clock face you can see it has letters instead of numbers – only actually dates from 1903.
Every city has its claims to fame and Castle Road can count one of Portsmouth’s claims as its very own as it was the birthplace of the actor Peter Sellers, a fact you’ll see identified on a blue plaque. Sellers and his family spent the first decade of his life in Portsmouth and at only two weeks of age he appeared on stage in Albert Road’s King’s Theatre.
After we’d passed along Castle Road’s length once and had a quick look around Old Portsmouth and Southsea seafront we came back through the vintage fair still taking place while a musician was now entertaining visitors. I know that there were multiple entertainers during the couple of days over which this fair took place but I don’t know who this man was nor can I remember what sort of music he was playing, but the photos seem to indicate the crowd enjoyed it.
