A hundred events and a light work on a bridge that carries nothing

There is a set of red columns in the Thames beside Blackfriars that hold up nothing whatsoever. This month they become the best thing in the festival.

The month

Totally Thames runs 1–30 September 2026, with more than 100 events between Richmond and Barking and Dagenham.

Catherine Yass's Turning the Tide occupies the disused columns of the old Blackfriars Railway Bridge from 17 to 20 September.

Why those columns are the right site

They are the remains of a bridge demolished in 1985 because it could not carry modern trains. The piers were left because removing them was more trouble than leaving them, and they have stood in the water ever since as an unusually honest piece of civic archaeology: infrastructure that failed, kept in place because demolition was inconvenient.

Using them for four nights is a considerably better idea than any of the periodic proposals to build something on top.

Richmond to Barking is the ambitious part

That is very nearly the whole tidal river, and it deliberately includes the stretches east of the Isle of Dogs that London's cultural programming habitually forgets. The Thames downstream of Tower Bridge is where the river actually worked for four centuries, and it is the part with the fewest festivals.

One might observe that a river festival confined to the postcard reach would be a rather poor river festival.

The tide, which nobody schedules around

The Thames moves about seven metres between low and high water at London Bridge. A foreshore event is governed by that and not by the programme, so anything happening on the shore has a real start time and an absolutely non-negotiable finish.