It is a new Chinese lunar year, and families across China, and in Chinese heritage communities across the world, have been celebrating the festivities together.
Travel to be with family members in China may create the world’s largest “annual human migration”! The Chinese web-services company Baidu have used data to create striking live mapping of people’s travel for the New Year holidays. London’s celebrations this year will centre around Trafalgar Square on the 22nd February.
Our image this week refers to the symbol for the lunar year starting on 19th February 2015, yang, which can refer to any member of the caprinae subfamily, so a symbol of a goat or sheep is often also represented.
The sheep pictured are at Mudchute Farm, on the Isle of Dogs, which is also one of the 12 city farms with land designated as a Site of Importance for Nature Conservation. You can visit goats and sheep here, and also have a chance of observing urban wildlife and habitats not otherwise accessible in the built environment.
It’s not as unusual as you might think to find sheep grazing in inner London. The GiGL open spaces dataset reveals that there are 16 spaces with a ‘principal space type’ of City Farm, and a further five with this listed as their ‘other space type’. Some of the farms are very central, including Vauxhall City Farm and Surrey Docks Farm near the Thames, and Spitalfields City Farm, Stepney City Farm and Hackney City Farm all in the densely populated east end.
See our archive of more images of the week
February 2015