Art,  England,  Flowers,  Gardens,  London,  The Changing Seasons,  Themed galleries

Gallery: a July selection (2025)

August 1, 2025 / 33 Comments

The London trees are dusty-brown, Beneath the summer sky; My love, she dwells in London town, Nor leaves it in July.

Amy Levy

Our June heatwaves stretched into the first half of July before more normal London summer weather returned: warm but not hot, and with the odd day of rain. But whatever the weather, we found plenty of opportunities to get out and about. Although, as the quote above suggests, we didn’t leave London during this particular month.

July marks the start of summer festivals time in Ealing, when our local Walpole Park is transformed for several weeks. Hoardings appear to section off part of it, large tents are erected, and banners announce a series of events. Whatever your interests, you should find a festival to appeal to you. We went to both the beer festival and the blues festival, our two favourites. Comedy, which we sometimes go to, and jazz, which we’re less keen on, will follow in August, but we will be away then, so beer and blues are it for us this year!

July 4th in Greenwich

There were other pleasures too. A US friend from my Virtual Tourist was spending a few days in London with her mother before taking a cruise from Southampton. Their visit coincided with a busy time for me so I was only able to offer July 4th to meet up with them. I thought they might prefer to be celebrating with other Americans but they told me they weren’t in the mood to mark the day this year and were happy to spend it with a Brit! So we had a lovely day out in one of my favourite parts of the city, Greenwich, with a walk by the river, a visit to the spectacular Painted Hall in the old Royal Naval College, an excellent pub lunch and a bit of shopping in the market.

Exhibitions, eats, walks and talks

Other treats included lunch with my oldest friends from my school days, a great evening at a riverside restaurant catching up with some work colleagues; and visits to exhibitions at the Saatchi Gallery, the Photographers’ Gallery, our local Pitzhanger Manor and the Victoria & Albert Museum. The Photographers Gallery exhibition of work by Dennis Morris was excellent. I especially liked his early work photographing Bob Marley, as well as his less well-known documentary work, reflecting life in various multicultural neighbourhoods of post-war London. The V&A currently has an exhibition in its photography galleries entitled ‘American Photographs‘. This takes its name from the book by Walker Evans and ‘uses his title to examine how photography has documented and shaped the United States’. While I didn’t find all the photos interesting there were some gems among them.

There was a lovely Sunday spent with my family at my nephew’s house, and a Sunday morning stroll by the Thames in Hammersmith. We went to the cinema once, to see the excellent From Hilde with Love (highly recommended). And I went to an interesting U3A talk by a fellow member who in the 1970s packed in his job as a teacher to farm in mid-Wales! At my photography group’s monthly meeting I shared some photos from our Philippines trip which were well-received, and a couple were subsequently published on the website.

Technical notes

Unusually for me I think all of my photos this month were taken with my phone, with one exception. That’s the one of the cat on a neighbour’s roof. I shot that through our spare room window and used my Lumix bridge camera because of its excellent zoom.

Most have been at least a little edited with Photoshop Elements and some more heavily edited with Nik Color Efex. The sepia lamppost shot from Syon Park was created using Nik Silver Efex Pro.

As always I am linking my selection to Ju-Lyn’s and Brian’s Changing Seasons challenge. Use the arrows to navigate the slideshow if you want to see all the images.

My feature photo is of a begonia in our back garden.



This is likely to be my last post for a couple of weeks as we’re off on an Arctic cruise soon and we’ve been warned the wifi on board isn’t good for much more than simple messaging. So apologies in advance if I go very quiet and don’t respond to comments or check in with anyone for a while. And I don’t expect to be able to send any virtual ‘postcards’ either!

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