A big thank you to everybody who helped to turn this year’s Fun Palace into a full-fledged street party! The weather gods were kind to us and stopped the rain for the duration of the Fun Palace while still keeping some dramatic clouds in the sky, just to make our photographs from the day that tiny little bit more moody.
With almost 470 visitors through the doors in the Marble Hall and hundreds more enjoying the stalls and performances on Henley Street, this has been the most successful Fun Palace so far, and we were particularly proud to team up with a dozen other organisations, businesses and community groups from Stratford to make this day possible. We even welcomed our first Fun Palaces dog, terrier lady Kiki, who came with Sunny Side Up’s rag rugging crew and enjoyed a relaxed afternoon in her colour-coordinated basket.
Here are some stats from the day: we used 75m of bunting to decorate Henley Street and the Marble Hall; 1,000 sticky gems made their way onto ruffs and crowns, 125 lavender bags were produced to ward off the plague, and 15kg of jelly babies ended up being catapulted towards toy castles (we are sure, however, that some of them actually never made it onto the catapult in the first place…).
All of this would have been impossible without the bakers and eaters of our cake sales, the support of PR and Marketing to get word out, the volunteers and staff who sacrificed their Saturday to give us a helping hand, and of course our Fun Palaces supporters and partners: Hedgehog Friendly Town, Sunny Side Up, Welcombe Radio, Warwick University Life Sciences Outreach Team, Sew Me Something, The Ogden Trust, the RSC, Stratford Library, Kate’s Storytree, Blueberry Balloons, Stratforward, Shakespeare’s England, and above all the crew at LSD Promotions, who supplied us with market stalls for the day! Thank you for coming and enjoying these wonderful activites.
Serena Avery, Anjna Chouhan, Nicola Hawley and Lisa Peter, Learning and Participation