I visited this splendid festival in 2011 and the Autumn weather relaxed to give a splendid day. And so it was to be on my visit on Saturday 19 October 2013.

The Bonded Warehouse at Stourbridge dating from 1799

I arrived overlooked by gloomy, overcast skies but I’d arrived so better make the best of it.   Mid October is not a date to seek out good weather and the forecasts were of a sunny interval in the middle of the day. So I was living in hope…

But at 12:30 the clouds opened to reveal a glorious blue sky and we were bathed in warm sunlight. My spirits rose instantly and so did the rest of the visitors.

Not a lot has changed in two years. Basically the same stalls, vintage cars and maybe the boats (I haven’t compared the photos from the two date). But, it was still well worth a visit. There’s always something different you can find in such events that you didn’t notice before and you change your purpose a little to search out new views which didn’t exist or were missed last time.

This time I got cornered by the Christian singing group who were there last time – two ladies spent 10 minutes trying to persuade me to acknowledge God before it was too late. “Think of it as an insurance policy” they said, “when you die it will be too late to acknowledge”.

“You could well be right.” I said, and eventually managed to dislocate myself from this religious debate, entertaining though it might have been, and always friendly.

I must say the glass blowing display was very good. It was new this time and the chap doing the blowing said he was an engineer not a professional glass blower. To the left of his display was a poster saying you could buy a portable furnace like the one shown and used by him for £999. A new and not too expensive hobby perhaps?

There was the usual mayoral procession of boats but this time the local character Graham Fisher was missing. He has had to move to Welshpool, I understand, and has sold his boat to people who displayed it in the procession at Braunston this year.

At 2:45pm sharp the clouds had suddenly move in again and torrential rain fell after 5 minutes…..just time to get back to the car….was I glad I’d set off as soon as I saw the threatening clouds.

Here are the photos I took…

To get the most out of the photos:

1. To display a slideshow – Left Click on any image. Then use the large side arrows to move between images.

To get a full screen view of the current image, scroll down and click on “View full size…”
To close the enlarged gallery, left Click outside an image or press ESC

2. To view a larger version of a single image in a separate page – Right Click on the image then Left Click on “Open link in new tab” or “Open link in new window”