Moby on the Thames

The day started under the iron roof of Borough Market at nine minutes past three, bunting and a Union Jack over the stalls and a red crane over the lot, which is the only still photograph I took all day. Everything else is film, shot on a phone, and you will see it below at the size it was shot. From London Bridge the College is twenty-five minutes down the river on Uber Boat by Thames Clippers, or the DLR to Cutty Sark, which puts you a few minutes from the gate. Gates were two, last entry seven. However you arrive, arrive early. The afternoon is half the point.

The stage closes one end of the square, so the sound has stone on both sides and sky on top, and the colonnades do what colonnades have done to crowds for three hundred years, which is make them feel let in. In the afternoon the sky was the colour of wet slate and the crowd was thin enough to walk through. By dark the domes were lit, purple first, then red when the stage smoke drifted across, and every time the lights went to the domes the phones went up: a thousand small rectangles pointing at a building finished in 1712. Wren would have been baffled and, I think, pleased.

Sonic Paths has a strapline, beautiful music in beautiful places, and I have said it often enough that I notice when something actually meets it. This was the height of it. I have heard electronic music in basements, in warehouses and, this spring, in a tent in North Berwick. I had not heard it between two Wren domes with the Thames at the end of the square. Now that I have, the basements have a problem.

Labyrinth on the Thames is the name of the series. Labyrinth Events put eight sold-out shows into the square between 31 July and 16 August 2026 and counted 76,000 people through the gates, up from 57,000 the year before, with 47 artists across the run: The Kooks, Dom Dolla, Peggy Gou, Overmono, Adriatique, Anjunadeep, Moby, Michael Bibi. Nick Castleman and Michael Dicks, who founded it, told Music Week they were "already excited about what comes next", which is promoter for nothing announced yet. When I checked on 26 October 2026 there was no 2027 line-up. Watch labyrinthevents.com and ornc.org, sign up for the pre-sale, and book the day it lands: the Moby pre-sale opened at eleven on a January morning, and every show of the summer sold out.