You could have built a tent city from all the red chinos: Aci by the River reviewed

The Thames cruise for which Handel composed his Water Music in 1717 famously went on until around 4 a.m. The boat trip downstream that formed part of the London Handel Festival’s Aci by the River was a bit zippier. We piled onto a chartered Thames Clipper at Westminster Pier, and a quartet of wind players were already huddled in the gangway, playing suitably aquatic Handel favourites. A bassoonist gave an anxious grimace as the captain floored the throttle and the boat lurched forward.

You do get to see an older, more Hogarthian city from the river, even if the skies were London-drab rather than the hoped-for Canaletto blue. One rationale for interactive music events is to attract that elusive younger, funkier audience, but this looked very much like the standard opera crowd to me.