TankFest 2026 + Canon 7D

Let's pop off to TankFest 2026. Technically it's called TANKFEST, all capitals, but I'm not typing that. Life's too short. TankFest.

 

I visited back in 2019, when Britain was at peace, and COVID hadn't happened yet, and then again in 2023, when Britain was still at peace and COVID had happened. Now, in 2026, COVID is a distant memory, and Britain's biggest foe is the sun. We did it no harm, but it wants to kill us. Thanks, the sun!

 

 

 

TankFest began in 2000, with some of the same tanks featured today, including the Matilda I pictured above. Back then it was a low-key affair, but now it attracts around 24,000 visitors over three days in a space only slightly larger than a telephone box. I went on Friday, and I skipped the afternoon display because I've never died of heatstroke before and I don't want to start. The arena was very dusty, and when I say "dusty" I mean "cinematic".

 

Back in 2019 and 2023 you could stand right next to the tank arena, but now there are so many attendees the arena is mostly seating only, so I needed a longer lens with a bit more reach in order to photograph the tanks.

 

In 2019 I took along a Canon 5D with a 300mm f/4L IS, which was mighty fine, but beyond 300mm the price shoots up, so for TankFest 2026 I did a bit of lateral thinking. Why not use an APS-C camera instead? It would be like having a permanent 1.6x teleconverter.

 

 

Furthermore I was always curious about the Canon 7D. Have a look at this: 

I call this image Desire and Depreciation. On the left, a Canon 5D MkII, from 2008. It represents Desire. It's a full-frame digital SLR. Purely as a camera it's mediocre. It was mediocre in 2008. It has the body and autofocus of a 2005 Canon 5D MkI, but with a 21mp sensor and a larger screen on the back. As a camera it came in for criticism at the time for its conservatism.

 

 

But it had one killer feature. It could shoot 1080p hi-def movies. It wasn't the first digital SLR that could capture video, but it was the first with a full-frame 35mm sensor. The sensor is much larger than a digital camcorder sensor, even larger than a frame of 35mm motion picture film. The result is video footage that has a degree of depth separation only previously attainable with 70mm film.

 

The 5D MkII quietly revolutionised the television and movie industries. I bought one brand-new shortly afterwards for what was a painful sum of money. Why did I spent that money? Desire. Desire clouds the minds of men. It clouded my mine. I wanted to possess the secret of fire. Other tribes possessed the secret of fire. I wanted to possess it myself.

 

 

I still have it! It's there, in the picture, up there, on the left. 37,000 photographs, sixteen years, and countless hours of video later, it still functions. Canon replaced the 5D MkII a few years later, and 21mp is paltry in comparison to the 45mp R5 MkII, but it's still pretty good as a stills camera and total overkill for the internet.

 

On the right, depreciation. The 7D was launched about a year after the 5D MkII, in 2009. At the time there was a perception that Canon was weak in the mid-range. The company had a popular series of professional digital SLRs, but the mid-range 50D and 5D felt weak in comparison to the Nikon D200 and D300. Nikon's not-quite-pro cameras had a degree of polish that Canon didn't match.

 

 

Thus the 7D, which was an attempt to compete with the Nikon D300. It essentially took the multi-point, multi-area autofocus system of the 1D / 1Ds and squeezed it into a newer body that had some, but not all, of the 1D's weather sealing. In the hand it feels more solid than the 5D MkII. The 5D's card and battery doors flop open and dangle back and forth, whereas the 7D's doors pop open on little springs, as if they want you to use them. The back has a deeper thumb relief than the 5D and the rubber feels like rubber instead of pleather. The 5D's shutter has a big hollow whirring sound whereas the 7D has a 1D-style CLACK, and the button feels more responsive.

 

The viewfinder has 19 autofocus points, all of which are cross-type. They can focus on horizontal and vertical edges equally well. In contrast the 5D MkII only has 9 autofocus points, clustered in the middle of the frame, and only the central point is cross-type. TankFest wasn't a great test of the 7D's autofocus, because the tanks moved quite slowly, but looking through the images it appears that the camera didn't miss a shot.

 

In continuous shooting mode the 7D will capture 110 JPGs at a rate of 8fps, or 23 RAW files. Movie mode has 1080p at 24/25fps, 720p at 50fps, and 640x480 at 50fps (PAL), or alternatively 1080p at 24/30fps, 720p at 60fps, and 640x480 at 60fps (NTSC). Irritatingly there doesn't appear to be a way to set the movie parameters unless you have the mirror flipped up in movie mode.

 

 

The 7D was popular, but I avoided it because I already had a 5D MkII. Eighteen years later the two cameras have plummeted in value on the used market, although the 5D MkII has depreciated slightly less on account of its larger sensor. In the intervening years Canon has launched several generations of replacement, plus a digital rangefinder line that has pushed the old flip-mirror SLRs to one side. In addition 4K video is now a thing, and of course a year after the 7D was released Apple launched the iPhone, and thus the modern age.

 

There was a time when SLR cameras were aimed at the enthusiast market, but in the 2000s digital SLRs crossed over into the mainstream, and for a while in the 2000s they were a popular holiday accessory. This was back when the high street still existed. I can remember seeing digital SLRs for sale in high street shops. People nowadays don't believe me, but it happened. Smartphones slowly killed that off, and SLRs have receded from the mainstream again. In fact even within the enthusiast market old-fashioned flippy mirror SLRs are a dying breed, as they are rapidly being replaced with mirrorless cameras.

 

Did I mention drones? Drones are a thing nowadays. TankFest had live aerial footage from a drone, which seemed strangely apt given the course of the war in Ukraine. The 5D MkII and 7D share batteries and chargers, which is nice. The 5D MkII has the edge in terms of resolution, but there's not much in it. Contemplate the following image:

Ruff in the jungle. In the jungle. In the jungle. In-the-in-the jungle. Ruff!

 

That had nothing to do with cameras. I'm just flashing back to my youth. I think the heat got to me. The Prodigy's debut album has aged in a fascinating way. The sequencing is crude, but on the other hand Liam Howlett understood dynamics. The drum programming on "Ruff in the Jungle Bizness", for example, is simple but clever. There's four bars of intro, and then you'd expect the drums to come in, and they do, but they don't quite take off for another four bars. The rest of the tune is basically a series of four-bar segments jammed together with crude transitions, but it never gets boring because Howlett always changes something up. He sticks in a fill or a little melody line, and at least twice the track changes completely.

 

He didn't have to bother. He could have half-assed it. There were an awful lot of generic rave and jungle tracks in the early 1990s that set up a groove but didn't go anywhere, but The Prodigy sounded as if the whole band was on amphetamines. Good amphetamines. I'm tempted to say "that is enough of The Prodigy", but it is not possible to have enough of The Prodigy.

 

Contemplate the following image:

It's an uncropped, 21mp image taken from a Canon 5D MkII and a 300mm lens. The thin orange line represents 18mp. As you can see, the difference isn't huge. The thick green line represents the APS-C crop factor, which in this case is equivalent to a 480mm lens. That's awkwardly long for Bovington.

 

 

I was curious to see whether using an 18mp 7D would give me more detail than using a 21mp 5D MkII and just cropping the images, and the answer is yes. If you crop a 21mp image down to APS-C resolution the end result is about 8mp, which is 10mp less than the 7D.

 

 

Both the 5D MkII and the 7D had new-generation sensors with less shadow noise than earlier digital SLRs. The following image, for example, is mostly a black silhouette straight from the camera, but with dodging there is detail in the shadows.

 

The 7D still struggles with blown-out highlights. The 5D MkII and 7D coincided with the Nikon D3, which had a terrific low-noise sensor. The D3 didn't have movie mode, and the sensor only had twelve megapixels of resolution, but it was possible to expose for the highlights and boost the shadows without the image becoming a noisy mess. You can do that with the 7D, but there are limits. Let's have a look at the high-ISO performance of this seventeen-year-old camera:

 

 

It bothers me that the right edge of the yellow and green boxes don't line up. These are RAW files converted with Photoshop with the noise reduction turned off. At the top, ISO 100. Note the tiny little black hair coming out of the bottom-right corner of the MUTE button. It's almost invisible to the naked eye, but it's there. Note also the little speck of dirt on the yellow-green border, in between the U of MUTE and the P of PITCH.

 

At ISO 3200 (middle) and ISO 6400 (bottom) those two tiny details are still visible, but only just. There is an emergency ISO 12800 setting, but there's too much misery in the world already without me adding more. Scaled down from 18mp the images look fine on the internet, but the 7D is no Nikon D3.

 

Moving swiftly on, this is a FAMAS. I remember looking left and right in case Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons was hovering nearby. And in a way he was. He was hovering in my head.

For almost all of the images in this post I set the camera to ISO 400, f/4, and used my venerable old Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS, which is even older than the 7D. It was interesting to compare the 7D with my old Canon 1Ds. The original 1Ds is a full-frame digital SLR from 2002. Camera-wise they're very similar. They both have a 100% viewfinder, but the 7D has a much simpler autofocus system, with just 19 points versus 45 in the 1Ds. The 1Ds also has weather sealing and a hair-trigger shutter button. Nonetheless the 7D feels a lot like a baby 1Ds, which just makes me respect the 1Ds even more. It took Canon's non-professional line seven years to almost catch up with it.

Controls? I did mention the controls? They're almost the same as the 5D. The only big difference is a combination button/turny thing that switches on live view and then switches between movie mode and stills mode. As mentioned up the page you can only select the movie options if live view is activated and set to movie mode. Otherwise the option doesn't appear in the menu system.

 

There's a peripheral illumination correction option that reduces vignetting with JPGs. The camera has a bunch of profiles loaded into its memory, but it didn't have one for my 100mm f/2. The only way to load new profiles is via Canon's EOS Utility 2, but annoyingly this is no longer available. For Windows 11 I had to download an updater utility from Canon's Hong Kong website, then apply this registry tweak. EOS Utility 2 is still available for MacOS, but it doesn't appear to work with Sequoia, or at least I couldn't get it to work. Sadly it didn't have correction data for my ancient 100-300mm f/5.6L, perhaps because it's too old.

 

EOS Utility 2 also sets up tethered shooting, and it can be used to turn your 7D into a makeshift webcam. Fortunately Canon still hosts firmware updates for the 7D. Unlike the 5D MkII, firmware updates don't add anything to the movie mode, but they do fix a few bugs, and add an option to process RAW files into JPGs, which triggered fond memories of the old Kodak DCS cameras, which could do the same things. There is an option to apply different picture styles to the image, plus noise reduction and lens correction, but it's surprisingly slow and it appears that you can only process one image at a time, which is unfortunate. You can't select a whole folder and have the camera dump a bunch of JPGs. Perhaps that was too professional for Canon.

 

Still, the 7D is widely available on the used market for around £180 or so in good condition, which is actually cheaper than the MkIII version of the Canon 1.4x Extender. A lot of them were thrashed by professional photographers, but they were built to take punishment. The 7D suffers a lot from not really meaning anything - the 5D MkII revolutionised video, the D3 could see in the dark, the 7D just existed - but it feels a shame to just pack it away into the back of a desk drawer.

Suzuki Burgman 200: Trembling in the Meadow

 

Let's have a look at the Suzuki Burgman 200, a maxi-scooter from the 2000s. My particular model dates from 2010. It was kept in excellent condition by its previous owner. I salute that man. As mentioned passim I passed my motorcycle test back in 2024 and bought a proper, grown-up motorcycle, a Royal Enfield Himalayan. But I feel incredibly self-conscious riding to the shops on a chunky, full-sized motorcycle, especially given that it doesn't have much room for luggage. Furthermore I spent a few weeks earlier in the year in Seoul, where scooters were all the rage, and that lit a fire within me. A fire that could only be quenched by a maxi-scooter.

 

Why a maxi-scooter, and not just a regular scooter? Britain's motorcycle licence categories are frustrating. Learner motorcyclists are only allowed to ride 125cc machines, which is annoying because 125cc scooters and motorcycles are almost, but not quite, good enough. They're about 80% of the way there. The best of them - the Honda PCX 125, or the Honda CB125R or Yamaha XSR125 motorcycles, for example - can maintain 60mph on the flat, but cruising at that speed isn't much fun. And although the engines can cope with A-road traffic, the suspension just isn't good enough. There's a lot to be said for riding a slow bike quickly, but I don't miss the skittery suspension of my Yamaha YS125, although to be fair a better set of tyres might have helped.

 

Despite being sixteen years old it still has the stickers. 

 

The 125cc market also tends to be dominated by cheap imports from China, because there's a general perception that 125cc machines are disposable stepping-stones to a full-sized motorcycle. This puts the Japanese manufacturers in an awkward position. If people were willing to spend money on 125cc motorcycles the breed might evolve into viable general-purpose transport, but it's hard to persuade people to spend a lot of money on a stepping-stone. I have no idea if rising oil prices and generally awful roads will change that, but at least in the UK there's very little reason to go back to 125 once you've passed your motorcycle test.

 

There's a bunch of 150cc, 175cc, and 200cc machines sur le continent. They would be pretty decent all-round transport in the UK, but they aren't imported, because there's no market for them. If you have an A1 licence you can't ride them. If you have an A or A2 licence you can ride a much more powerful machine instead. As a consequence the UK market for maxi-scooters is a niche within a niche. It's dominated by 350/400cc+ models that cost a fortune. The Honda ADV and Piaggio Vespa GTS are no doubt wonderful, but £6000 is a lot of money for a scooter, no matter how good it is.

 

Incidentally the Burgman name dates back to the late 1990s. Throughout its lifespan Suzuki has sold 150, 200, and 250cc Burgmans, plus an extraordinary 650cc, 58bhp model called the Burgman Executive, sadly discontinued:

 

 

The archetype, however, is the Burgman 400, which has been on sale continually since 1999. As of 2026 Suzuki still sells the 400cc model in the UK, plus a 125cc Burgman that feels slightly pointless. It has the same engine power as Suzuki's other scooters, but the body is bigger and heavier. Unfortunately the Burgman 400 is £7100. I may be made of money, but I'm not made of money.

 

There is hope, though. Back in the 2000s - from 2002 until around about 2013 - Suzuki sold a mid-sized Burgman in the UK. Technically it's called the Suzuki UH200, at least according to the manual, but it has Burgman 200 on the bodywork so that's what I'm going to call it. It was launched in 2002 as a 150cc model, then upgraded to 200cc in 2007. The bodywork was restyled, adding a distinctive wrap-around, see-through headlight:

Look, it has the stickers.

The Mark One Burgman 200 has an 18.1hp, fuel-injected, liquid-cooled engine, with an automatic CVT and a combined braking system. It has a 13-inch front wheel and a 12-inch wheel at the back, with disc brakes front and rear. The combination of fuel injection and disc brakes was pretty good for the early 2000s. I believe, but don't quote me, that it's EURO3 compliant. Transport For London's ULEZ website recognises the model and says that it doesn't trigger the congestion charge. Suzuki's press release gives a figure of around 85 miles to the gallon.

 

Until 2013 the Burgman 200 was built in Spain, and only sold in European markets. From 2013 onwards Suzuki moved production to Thailand, and the next year they gave it a facelift, with a less fussy headlight arrangement and a taller screen. The Mark Two, 2014 model was launched internationally.

 

 

As far as I can tell the 2014 model was EURO4 compliant. Alas Suzuki was unwilling to upgrade it to EURO5, and so in 2021 they stopped selling the Burgman 200 in Europe. As of this writing it still appears to be on sale in the United States, for $4,999. I can't imagine it being very popular in the USA, but who perhaps it makes sense in New York or somewhere compact, flat, and without freeways.

 

The Department for Transport has a huge spreadsheet listing vehicle registrations, which reveals that there were 49 of my particular model of Burgman 200 on the road in Q3 2025. There are dozens of us! The small number isn't surprising given the aforementioned licence criteria. With 18.1hp and a 200cc engine the Burgman 200 is over the limit for an A1 licence, but much, much lower than the A2 limit of 47hp. When it was on sale it was aimed at people who had gone to the trouble of getting an A2 or A licence, who wanted a scooter, but were only willing to pay £5000 instead of £7000.

 

Not many people. My hunch is that it mostly sold to elderly riders who passed their motorcycle test aeons ago, and had a car, but fancied a scooter for the occasional trip to the shops, or perhaps to their narrowboat. I could try and tot the cumulative numbers on the DfT's spreadsheet but the machine doesn't appear to have been a best-seller. Which is a shame, because it's nice.

 

 

About the only design limitation is a lack of provision for extra luggage or a mobile phone / GPS navigation holder. The 200cc Burgman predates the modern trend for hanging things off a motorcycle. There are after-market saddlebags with straps that run across the boot, with the seat clamping them in place, and SHAD makes a top box holder, but it involves drilling a hole in the Burgman's bodywork. The official Suzuki top box holder seems to be incredibly rare on the used market, perhaps because no-one bothered with it, because the underseat storage is already massive. The most popular, and seemingly only option for a mobile phone holder is a bar that straddles the gap between the two brake fluid reservoirs, mounting onto the inboard screws.

 

What's it like to drive? Smooooth. Smooth, and slightly disconcerting. 18.1hp isn't much, but the Burgman 200 only weighs about 160kg, so it has almost exactly the same power-to-weight ratio as my Royal Enfield Himalayan (which has 24hp and weighs 200kg). Furthermore it's lower to the ground, the body is more streamlined, and the engine is much quieter. It's in a lower tax bracket than the Himalayan as well, so I saved £30. The fuel-injected engine starts with a chug-chug-vroom, then settles down to a quiet idle.

 

I find myself struggling to keep at the 20mph limit. Judging by my mobile phone's GPS receiver the speedo is reasonably correct. In a 20mph zone I find myself jumping off the lights and immediately hitting 20mph, at which point I have to let off the throttle a little bit. 30mph is, for want of a better word, boring.

 

 

On a smooth, flat road the Burgman 200 easily and swiftly accelerates up to 50mph, at which point the engine noise seems to vanish. I have a hunch that it was specifically designed to cruise at 50mph all day long. I found 60mph easy enough on a flat, smooth road. Out in the countryside the Burgman tends to go thud-thud instead of rattle-rattle, and perhaps because of the low seat height it feels planted on the road.

 

I have very briefly reached 70mph, although at that point it dawned on me that wearing an open-faced helmet at 70mph was not a good idea. There was a little bit left at that point. This chap got 84mph out of his Mark 2 Burgman 200, albeit that he was in the United States, where they use a slightly shorter mile, and their hours have 61 minutes (fact). This is why US television programmes always appear sped-up when they're shown on Britain television (fact).

 

 

The dashboard has a mobile phone compartment, plus a linear, lockable enclosure that has a 12v socket. The enclosure is split in two, and it's about deep enough for a McDonalds meal, if you don't mind squashing it in there. Sadly there's no cup holder. And as with almost all maxi-scooters the petrol tank is between the rider's feet, so it doesn't have a flat floor, which means that you can't rest a shopping bag between your legs. The boot is, however, massive. In the following photo it has a rain cover, with room for a helmet and a chain as well. Alternatively a backpack full of shopping will fit face-down.

There are two driving positions. Feet on the floor, and feet resting forwards. You know how men often lie about their height? Well I decided to measure myself, for the purpose of this blog post, and I am five feet ten inches tall. That's in my socks, without wearing a wig. I find that the feet resting forwards position is almost, but not quite, comfortable. I can't stretch out my legs properly. The seat itself is fantastically chunky and comfortable. I have yet to persuade a lady to go for a ride on my Suzuki Burgman but it is only a matter of time.

 

 

Overall the Burgman 200 is neat. It feels smooth, acceleration is good, it cruises easily at 50mph. Fuel consumption is noticeably higher than a 125cc - I have to refuel every two-and-a-bit weeks, instead of three - but a full tank still only costs around £12. 

 

The suspension is bumpy, but the bike doesn't feel skittish, and on country roads I had no problem whizzing along at 60mph. About the only bad thing is the complete lack of provision for a mobile phone holder - for navigation - and the brakes, which could do with a little more bite. As far as I can tell mechanical spares are shared with the Mark Two 200cc model, and drive belts are still widely available. The only major problem with the Burgman 200 is that it has a disposable aspect. In the event of a crash, it'll be a write-off, because the plastic bodywork panels are long out of production.

 

Almost twenty years after it was introduced the Mark One Burgman 200's nose looks dated, but the rest of the design hasn't really aged. Perhaps because its natural market was elderly motorcyclists who wanted to relax the few examples I've seen on the used market in the UK have all been in really good condition, including mine. 125cc scooters often end up thrashed, either because they were driven by delivery drivers, or they were learner machines, but as mentioned passim you can't drive a 200cc motorcycle on a learner licence.

 

Still, that's the Burgman 200.

Motorcycle Spotting in Seoul

As a motorcyclist I tend to see motorcycles wherever I go. When some people go on holiday they see people, or restaurants, or pre-Worboys traffic signs, but I see motorcycles. It's a lot like having a gaydar, but with motorcycles.

 

See, some men can look at another man and tell instinctively whether that man has a thing for other men. There are subtle clues. Does that man often dress up in a leather outfit? Does he possess a variety of chains and padlocks? Does he own a motorcycle?

 

Whereas I can look at another man and tell instinctively whether that man is a motorcylist. There are subtle clues. Does that man often dress up in a leather outfit? Does he possess a variety of chains and padlocks? Does he own a motorcycle? I can also look at a two-wheeled vehicle and tell whether it's a motorcyle or not. As far as most people are concerned the Honda Super Cub pictured above is a moped, but that's wrong. It's actually a motorcycle. Specifically an underbone motorcycle.

 

Why is it a motorcycle? Well, mopeds have pedals, and the Super Cub doesn't, so it's not a moped. It's not a scooter, either, because it has a chain, and a gearbox, and footpegs. The gearbox has an automatic clutch, but it's still a gearbox. And the Super Cub is powered by an internal combustion motor, so it's not a bicycle or an e-bike. Ergo it's a motorcycle.

 

The Super Cub has a long and rich history. It was invented in the mid-50s as mass transport for Japan's post-war population. It was designed so that delivery drivers could park in first gear with the engine running, rush off and grab a bag of post-war reconstruction, and get back on the bike without having to fiddle around with a clutch. Today the Super Cub is obsolescent - scooters have underseat storage and a gear-free CVT transmission - but Honda still sells a 125cc version of the Super Cub, because it looks awesome.

 

 

Earlier in the year I visited Seoul. My mental stereotype of East Asia and South-East Asia is of masses of scooters waiting for the traffic lights to change, but Seoul isn't like that. South Korea is slightly odd from a motorcycling point of view. From 1972 onwards motorcycles were completely forbidden from the motorways, something that South Korea shares with Taiwan and nowhere else. The official view appears to be that all motorcycles are 50cc scooters and are thus unsafe on high-speed roads, so as a consequence the market in South Korea for full-sized touring bikes is limited.

 

One side-effect of this rule is that it's not possible to ride a motorcycle from Seoul to nearby Incheon Airport, because the only two roads leading there are motorways. This is awkward if you're doing an international motorcycle tour. You have to transport your motorcycle on a ferry to Wolmido, on the shores of Incheon, and make your way via the A-roads and B-roads to Seoul, with the complicating factor that some roads start off as A-roads and then seamlessly turn into motorways.

 

I saw only a handful of larger bikes, including this fetching Honda Rebel 500 outside the COEX mall:

 

And this BMW G310GS further afield. It seemed huge in context, but it's actually the smallest of BMW's adventure bikes:

 

I did spot a few other mid-to-small-capacity bikes here and there. In Itaewon, not far from a famous bookshop, I saw this fetching Honda GB350C:

 

The basic design has been on sale in Japan since 2020, but it wasn't launched in the UK until 2025, as the Honda GB350S. It's keenly priced at £3999, exactly the same as the Super Cub pictured up the page. Traditionally, motorcyclists in the UK train on a 125cc before passing their test and buying a 600cc model, but the 300-400cc segment has expanded in recent years. How come? My hunch is that a mixture of soaring insurance premiums, general economic malaise, and potholes have made small-capacity bikes attractive again. The GB350S competes directly with Royal Enfield's 350cc models, and also the slightly more expensive Triumph 400 Scrambler. It is by all accounts nifty, although in my opinion the bright paint scheme makes the tank look slightly too large.

 

Back in 2021 Seoul's government declared that 100% of delivery bikes would be electric by 2025. However it seems that this was merely a symbolic target, and the actual percentage of electric delivery bikes in 2025 was 3-4%. So the government has instead declared that 60% of new delivery motorcycle sales will be electric by the year 2035, which sounds a lot more achievable. I did bump into this, which admittedly isn't a delivery bike:

 

It's a Super Soco TC. It looks fantastic, but unfortunately it's only equivalent to a 50cc scooter, with a top speed of around 30mph and a range of 45 miles. In the UK it sells for around £3000. I have no idea how much it sells for in Korea. There were also a fair amount of these electric fun scooters:

 

There were fewer delivery motorcycles than I expected. Seoul was full of cars, including a lot of electric models, which I could tell from the quiet swoosh they made as they started up. Motorcycle delivery drivers were in the minority, but they did still have a presence. In this photo notice the chap pushing his bike across the pedestrian crossing. I think the idea is that if they use their feet, they are a pedestrian:

 

Perhaps Seoul is gentrifying, and people are swapping their Super Cubs for cars, or perhaps the people of Seoul already have everything they need. A lot of the Super Cubs I saw were actually Korean clones, such as this fetching Daelim Citi Ace, which seems to have an auxiliary fuel tank attached where the rider's knees go ordinarily. Or is it a small helmet box?

 

Here's another Citi Ace, with big handwarmers, which must have come in handy given that the temperature was around minus eleven centigrade:

 

Just along the road from the Honda GB350 was this elderly, denuded Super Cub, which looked to be in working condition, although it may well have just been a living billboard.

 

 

Along Toegye-ro street I stumbled on a row of shops selling motorcycles, including this Honda Grom with the seat still wrapped in plastic:

 

The Grom would be perfect in Seoul's traffic. I think the bike in green, just behind the Grom, is a Honda Trail 125, which sadly isn't sold in the UK. Sandwiched between the two is, yes, another Super Cub.

 

I have no idea of the legality of foreign ownership of motorcycles in Korea. I only stayed for a couple of weeks, and Seoul has an extensive metro system, so I didn't need my own transport. It seems that I can swap my existing UK licence for a 125cc licence, but for anything over that there's a MOD 1-style gymkhana test that involves doing a lot of right-angled turns between a pair of closely-spaced lines. The supplied bike is a chopper-style cruiser rather than something more agile.

 

This chap covers the test, which actually doesn't look all that hard, but then again he's a highly-experienced motorcyclist and I am not. My guess is that nerves of steel are a massive asset:

 

Seoul also has a fair amount of three-wheeler delivery bikes, some of which looked purpose-made, others looked to have been customised. The three-wheeler at the top here has MONO written on the side, but I couldn't find anything about it. Just beneath it is a Daelim VS 125 cruiser-style bike, and below that is, I think, an early-90s Honda CB125T, although the plastics don't quite match the photos I can find.

 

Perhaps it's a Franken-bike made out of lots of different components. As I walked away the Honda's owner got on, and it started first time, so there's a lot to be said for thirty-year-old Hondas. Every time your motorcycle fails to start, remember that there are people in Seoul buzzing around in January in temperatures of minus eleven centigrade on thirty-year-old Hondas.

Yongsan Electronics Market, Seoul

 

Earlier in the year I visited Seoul, capital of South Korea. While on the plane I made a list of places that I should visit. I wrote them down on a piece of paper. I still have that piece of paper. The first item on the list is "Seoul". The second item is "hotel". I wanted to visit my hotel because it had a shower and a bed. The third item reads "USB plug / adapter". The fourth item reads "no plane internet".

 

For some reason I also wrote "chloe kim" in one of the corners. I wish I had made the list before I got on the plane. In the end I just picked places at random. But that's okay, because Seoul is the kind of place where you can walk for half an hour and find something interesting.

 

One place I was keen to visit was Yongsan Electronics Market. In the 1990s it was a legendarily seedy dive where you could pick up computer components and cameras that were unavailable elsewhere. "Anam"-branded Nikons, rare toys and the like. Yongsan was also legendarily overpriced and user-hostile, but in the words of Oscar Wilde, "the one thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about".

 

 

Alas, time has not been kind. Yongsan still exists, but it has been strangled by the modern age. It's not alone. I'm old enough to remember when Tottenham Court Road in London was famous for its electronics shops. They're all gone now. I'm also old enough to remember the Something And Something Exchange shops in Notting Hill, which are also gone.

 

Heck, I'm old enough to remember when it felt exciting to go out to the shops. That doesn't happen any more. The buildings remain, but the shops are now coffee shops, banks, fashion shops, American candy shops, vape shops, just like everywhere else.

 

 

Central Seoul is slick, the edges less so

 

Back in 2019 I visited Hong Kong. I popped along to a place called Sim City, which is another famous electronics shop. To my surprise Sim City was actually pretty healthy. It was bustling, the prices were decent - no cheaper than online, but at the same time no more expensive - and it still felt like a going concern. Yongsan on the other hand is moribund. Judging by this story in the Korean Herald it has been in trouble since at least 2018, and there are constant rumours that it will be demolished.

 

The major issue is high rent, presumably from landlords who want to squeeze the last few drops of juice from their asset, which is ironic because the shops in Yongsan had exactly the same business model. They had a lot of junk at inflated prices, and they wanted to squeeze the last few drops of juice from the junk, and they would rather have died than admit defeat and offer a discount. In the end they did just that, they died.

 

 

I was directly inspired to visit the place by this fascinating blog post by a chap called Lui Gough. He visited at the tail end of 2024. I visited a year and a month later and it was no better. How do you get there? Go to Seoul first. Then take the underground to Yongsan station. Alternatively, and this is what I did, get off at Namyeong and head west, through the little streets. They're full of small shops selling CCTV cameras and memory sticks, although they have the same problem as Yongsan.

 

Yongsan is a complex of buildings. I visited 19-20-21-22. The ground floor, on the street, was the most active:

 

The second shop had what appeared to be an Apple XServe in the window. Not something you see every day. In order to convert Korean Won into British GBP you have to halve the result and chop off the thousands. 200,000 Won is £100. That's a bit steep for an 2013-vintage i5-4570 desktop machine with 8gb of memory. In comparison an equivalent HP EliteDesk or Acer Aspire sells for around £60 on eBay in the UK.

 

Venturing inside the complex was an odd experience. Over the years the shops have transformed from actual shops into storage areas for eBay businesses. A few of them give the impression that you could knock on the window and order something in-person, but most were unstaffed:

 

 

Peculiar things I saw included a stack of CRTs, a load of fans, a hoarder's lair, and STALKER 2. As a little interactive exercise I've jumbled up the following images so that they aren't in the same order as the text. Try to match the descriptions to the images:

 

In the end Chloe Kim was beaten into silver place by Choi Ga-on of, yes, South Korea. Perhaps that's why I wrote "chloe kim" on my itinerary. I was fatigued after a twelve-hour flight and I wanted to cling to something nice, like a little monkey clinging onto a piece of wire with cloth on it.

 

But the Winter Olympics didn't start until a fortnight after I returned from Seoul. How could I have known?

 

 

Further into the building were some hi-fi shops that seemed to be staffed, selling DJ gear and what looked like quite posh speakers and so forth. That part of the complex appeared to be actually working. But most of the other shops seemed to have piles of old computer junk, so after wandering through the different floors I made my leave. It wasn't until the very end that one of the staff tried to engage with me, but my French simply wasn't good enough to conduct a business deal so my dreams of coming back to the UK with a cheap M1 Mac Mini were dashed.

 

So I popped along to Filmlog, a shop on the other side of Seoul that has a film vending machine outside:

Looking through my old emails, I can see that back in 2009 I paid £7.90 for two rolls of Fuji Velvia 50, from 7DayShop. Does 7DayShop still exist? Apparently so, but it doesn't sell film any more. Now film is £15 or so for a single roll. Filmlog's prices were no lower than the rest of the world, but no higher either.

 

I stood outside Filmlog, thinking "if a refrigerator is warmer than the outside air, is it still a refrigerator", and "why do we write fridge with the letter D, but re-frige-rator without the letter D", and "my nose is cold". Then I made my way to Makercity Sewoon, which is basically the same as Yongsan but closer to the centre. It's mid-way along Cheonggyecheon.

 

There used to be a blog called Things White People Like. I don't know if it's still around, but if it was, it would have an article on Cheonggyecheon. As I looked at the stream I was not a tourist, I was an urbanist. A documentarian. An urbanist documentarian. And a curator.

 

Makercity Sewoon is in theory a mixture of shops and workspaces, funded by the government as a way of kickstarting the economy, but it's basically the same as Yongsan. A lot of eBay storage areas. It's located in a curiously massive linear complex that stretches north-south for almost a kilometre, just to the east of Central Seoul. The surrounds are being excavated, so who knows how long it will last.

 

In general Sewoon seemed to have a lot of electronics gear that had been dumped there in 1995, and not updated since:

 

I've never seen a DAT recorder before. DAT was a digital tape format from the late 1980s. It was like compact disc, but tape. A few albums were released on DAT - Factory Records went big on the format - but the music industry hated it because it was lossless and could in theory be used to create perfect pirate copies of compact discs. It took off in the professional audio and radio markets, where it became a standard for exchanging digital masters of recordings, although surprisingly it was never popular as a recording format (the Alesis ADAT used standard VHS video tapes instead).

 

A few years later it was displaced by Sony's Minidisc and Philips' Digital Compact Cassette, which both used lossy compression. Of the two new formats Minidisc survived longer, although as of 2026 the players and the recording media have all been discontinued. A mutant offspring of DAT survives as a type of computer backup tape. They are all equal now.

 

Ironically analogue compact cassette is still around. Maxwell still manufactures new cassette tapes, because hipsters dig them. A bit of Googling suggests that the tape decks pictured above are pretty decent, but even if they had been cheap, and recently serviced, I would have had no way to bring them back to the UK. Imagine being stopped by customs for trying to smuggle a tape deck into the UK, in 2026.

And so both Yongsand and Sewoon are experiences rather than practical shopping destinations. The feeling of wandering through piles of junk from the 1990s was powerfully melancholic. Curiously there were no games consoles and only a handful of video games, and they tended to be PlayStation 4 discs rather than retro OG PlayStation titles from the 1990s. Perhaps there's a completely separate retro console scene.

 

I finished off the day by checking out some of the camera shops at Namdaemun, just north-east of Seoul Station. They're intimidating, and I didn't go in, but if you fancy a Rollei 35 and you speak a bit of Korean and are willing to pay through the nose, Bob's your uncle.

I even saw a couple of Mamiya C3s, looking the worse for wear. They stood out because I actually had a Mamiya C3 with me. I took it to Seoul, with some Kodak TMAX that expired back in 2007:

 

And that was my experience of shopping in Seoul. The high street is not what it was, not just in Britain but in the whole world.