It may well be full of tourists – the really annoying, large groups that manage somehow always to get in the way as you’re moving about, the kind that give all other tourists a bad name – but I do have a penchant for Covent Garden. Not for any of the shops, mind, or indeed the transport museum (haven’t been to one of those since holidays with my grandparents as a child), but for the street performers.

Not the ones that line up by the tube station who seem, by and large, to be the same bunch of stand really still and then scare little children performers who also colonise South Bank, but the ones that actually perform little circus tricks outside the west end of the market, or inside at the other end, are those that really interest me. (We’ll conveniently ignore the classical music performance area downstairs!)

I’ve watched a number of routines in my 3 years in London (some more than once, which is when you really get to know them), and they’re all, I must say, pretty simple. The feats themselves aren’t spectacular – surrounded by large crowds and stone floors, the performers aren’t exactly going to take that many risks that they end up hurting someone. They’re not things I could do, of course, but it is quite evident (despite protestations to the contrary!) that these are well-practised acts.

The audience participation element is ramped up – it can be anything up to six people taking part at any one time, often to keep the performer alive (this performer‘s 15-ft pole was kept steady by four men with ropes, for instance), but more often than not for the unicyclists and rope walkers, it’s a young child throwing items up to juggle.

There are four distinct parts: the warm-up, in which case a minor version of the real act is performed, the ‘ascent’ as I will call it, in which the performer will raise the stakes and put themselves in a dangerous situation, ready for the finale, then the plea for cash – minimum £5 or you can piss off – and then, of course, the finale itself.

In this picture for instance, the performer – ‘The Great Dave’ – is finishing his warm up: he ‘kicked’ cup, saucer and spoon separately onto his head, and did some juggling. He then mounted a unicycle with the help of a Swedish man named Magnus, reminded the audience that he would rather like to be paid for providing half an hour’s entertainment, and then proceeded to re-perform his cup, saucer and spoon from foot to head trick while riding the unicycle.

The best performers are expert at manipulating the crowds in front of them. Not just in attracting them in the first place, but getting them to participate (or allow their 6 year-old to stand beneath a man wobbling around on a unicycle juggling knives he earlier demonstrated cutting through a watermelon…), and to pay. There’s cheeky humour (just you go and try to walk through the middle of a performance!), a fantastic range of expressions and plain old slapstick – plenty to photograph for a few hours. I was there a couple of hours, witnessed five or six separate performances in the two areas, and shot 8GB of photos (514 frames, of which I uploaded five to Flickr!).

If you’re in London either as a tourist or a resident, I do recommend an afternoon in Covent Garden to watch the spectacle. Either sit down on the cobbles and watch up close with a wide-angle, or sit upstairs at the Punch & Judy with a pint and a telephoto, but do go and see it: you won’t see anything else like it.