The Royal Cheshire Show 2026: What a Press Pass and a Leica M11 Taught Me About the Show
The Royal Cheshire County Show has been running for 187 years. That's a long time for a place to develop its own grammar its rituals, its rhythms, its cast of regulars. This year I was there with a press pass and a Leica M11, not to document the competition results or the prize livestock, but to see what the show looks like when nobody is performing for the camera.
Tabley Showground, Knutsford, 16–17 June 2026. Two days. A rangefinder. Whatever happened to happen.
Why the Leica M11 for an Agricultural Show
A press pass opens doors. It also assigns expectation, a role, a way of seeing. I pushed against that instinct by bringing the M11 rather than anything with a longer reach and auto focus etc. A rangefinder doesn't announce itself. You can move through a crowd with a Leica and mostly people look through you, which is exactly what you want when you're after candid documentary photography rather than posed portraits.
The Leica M11 is a manual, rangefinder camera that rewards patience and presence over speed. At an event like the Royal Cheshire Show that is dense with noise, spectacle, and distraction that restraint becomes useful. You slow down. You look harder. You make fewer, better frames and I decided to switch between my Leica 28mm Elmarit f2.8 and my 50mm Summicron F1.4 lenses.
The Shot That Mattered Most: A Farmer Asleep in the Cow Shed
Before I'd fully raised the camera, I'd already found the image I was looking for. A farmer asleep in the cow shed, laid back on his camp chair and completely at peace among the animals. The cows didn't seem to mind. The show carried on outside the announcements, the clay shooting, the crowds moving across the show ground and none of it touched him.
That image captures something the Royal Cheshire County Show doesn't put in its own brochure: the labour underneath the spectacle. The people who arrived before dawn, who know these animals by name, who will still be working after everyone else has gone home. For me that element of documentary photography is what interests me. It’s that gap between the official version of an event and the human one.
Cheshire Polo Club: Leica M11 in Black and White
The polo horses were something else. I put these in black and white. Apparently this beauty had 5 washes and kept getting dirty but what a stunner he is. The Cheshire Polo Club brings a particular energy to the show, a world that exists alongside the farming world and a contrast between farming is part of what makes the Royal Cheshire Show worth photographing. You have 187 years of agricultural tradition operating next to a polo club, a Cheshire Mix Stage, and stunt bikes launching off ramps.
The M11 handles monochrome conversion beautifully. Shooting in RAW and converting in post gives you the tonal latitude to let the horse's coat hold detail against a sky that might otherwise blow out.
Candid Portraits: The People Who Make the Show
The candids came in waves across the two days. A man eating an ice cream with the particular concentration of someone who has been on his feet since morning and has earned every mouthful. A gentleman enjoying a drink, his dog settled beside him, both of them watching something I couldn't quite see. A couple asleep together on the grass in the afternoon heat, oblivious to the clay shooting, the announcements, the movement all around them.
There was plenty of hats. so many I had to take mental note to stop shooting people in hats.
These are not the shots that end up in the show's official gallery. They're the shots that tell you what it actually felt like to be there.
The Landscape: A Country Shot Across the Pond
There's a frame I keep returning to. Looking across the pond at the horse trailers lined along the far bank, the Cheshire countryside opening out behind them. Nothing is happening in it. That's precisely why it works for me. It is a pause away from the show. It’s out of sight and out of mind.
This kind of shot is easy to walk past. The instinct at a busy show is to keep moving toward the action. The discipline for me is to document with photography and find something that others walk past.
The Spectacle: Unicorn Ponies, Hot Dogs and Stunt Bikes
And then there's the other Royal Cheshire Show. A pony wearing unicorn wings, clearly unbothered. A hot dog, shot close, doing what hot dogs do. The stunt bike lads throwing themselves into the air Flipping upside down, suspended for a fraction of a second above a crowd that had gathered to watch them defy the obvious.
The animals, the people, the food and the fun. These things coexist in the same afternoon, in the same field. That's the show and the the tradition and the mundane and the spectacular, all of it compressed into two very English days in Cheshire
What the Show Leaves You With
I've been thinking about why a day like this stays with you. I grew up on a farm and travelled the whole country with my dad and Grandad showing sheep and cattle. It's never about the spectacle, the stunt bikes, the unicorn pony, the stage. Those are vivid, but they fade. What lingers is the farmer asleep in the cow shed. The couple on the grass. It’s the community, pride and spirit that comes with these events.
There's something about being given access to a place and choosing to look sideways past the thing you're supposed to be documenting, toward the quieter human fact underneath it. That's what the Leica M11 does for me really. Not the event. The people inside it, when they've forgotten anyone is watching.