Picture of the Week: #11

Back on time this week for the PotW, and really, there's only one event that it could have come from.



That's the Sheldonian Theatre, on Broad Street in Oxford. The more eagle-eyed among you will also have noticed the large amount of fire present in the photo; that's because Luminox was taking place. This was nominally a celebration of 1,000 years of Oxfordshire, but in practice was actually an excuse for a French art group and thousands of tourists to let out their inner pyromaniacs and go "ooh, it's all on fire".

It was a bit weird, really. They were obviously going for a "folk" kind of feel overall (probably trying to echo pagan winter festivals), but it certainly wasn't English folk traditions. The music was a mix of Japanese, Eastern European and general beady ethnic, the fire installations were part Wicker Man and part neo-Industrial Revolution steampunk, and some bits of it brought the fires of Isengard to mind more than anything else. It was great fun though, I hope they do something this weird again soon.