Noreen Meehan, who chairs the festival, says: “The festival continues to go from strength to strength and provides a much needed boost to the diverse independent businesses, the fantastic creative people, musicians and artists of the area.
“We are very excited about the future of the festival and want to invite our local community, from interested individuals, venue owners/managers, local traders, creative artistes to community group representatives, to come along and decide the aims, objectives and priorities for the festival going forward.
“We also need new blood on our committee and hope that volunteers will come forward to take up roles for the 2013 festival and the coming years.”
Festival highlights have included performing arts, crafts, sports and kids’ activities, gourmet food and drink stalls and a wide range of great bands on the main music stage in Westow Park. Around the Crystal Palace Triangle, local bars have hosted stalls, gigs and DJs, and there has been shopping and music events in local markets - Church Road and Haynes Lane - with an art market in Victory Place.
The festival has delivered a great day out for the local community each year, absolutely free of charge, staffed entirely by volunteers who live in the area. The festival has been funded by sponsorship and advertising from local businesses and stalls in the Westow Park hub.
Last year, the festival attracted approximately 4,500 people to Crystal Palace but the festival committee anticipate that this could grow with a influx of new skills and volunteers, organising a festival which truly meets the need of the local community and traders.
The meeting is being held on Wednesday 12th December at the Salvation Army community hall, Westow Street, SE19 from 7.30pm to 9:30pm.
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I visited the festival this year and was I was unfortunately very disappointed with what I saw. I went with my girlfriend and our friend, both of whom live about a minutes walk from Westow Park, so they were obviously very excited to see how it was transformed.
As a collection of 20-something year olds, we were extremely put-off by the festival’s childish approach, or at least the focus on children’s activities. The entertainment wasn’t entertaining, and the stalls appeared to be put in an extremely bizarre location – although the variety and cost of the products on offer was much to be desired…
We all imagined that the festival would literally take over the triangle, celebrating the wealth of cuisines and shops on offer. Instead we were left with inconsiderate visitors parking in our personal car parking spaces, pushchairs blocking the pavements, a junk sale by the Phoenix Centre taking up the entire path, and far too many screaming children getting in the way and tripping over on the uneven ground in Westow Park.
Perhaps next year there could be more of a focus on the adults that live in the area, the infusion of cultures that the local restaurants offer, and more involvement with local businesses. What would have been fantastic is Sainsbury’s doing live cooking demonstrations, or Blockbusters (RIP…) showing films on one of their screens. The clothes and shoe shop could have done a runway style show of their collections, and the gift shops could sell Crystal Palace memorabilia. Perhaps they could have done special offers for visitors too to encourage local spending.
I hope there can also be more activities in Crystal Palace Park throughout the day, and not just 13 year olds dancing and singing. After all, it’s the park which unites Crystal Palace with the local areas, and mixes our present with Crystal Palace’s famous and tragic history. Having an interesting talk about the area by someone from the museum would be great, especially as the Park provides an excellent amphitheatre setting. Maybe even a guided tour about where the old crystal palace stood, or even about the disused railway tunnel. These are certainly things which would have interested me.
It’s these small differences that make an impact on the area as whole, and indeed, makes a festival and its location more collectively celebrated. Surely that’s what the committee wanted? Not just a family ‘fun’ day out?!
Hi there – I realise your comment was left some time ago but it has just been pointed to me as chair of the festival. The event has developed over the last few years to include events in Westow Park and is run entirely by local volunteers and funded by local businesses. The festival has grown quite organically and the team try very hard to incorporate as much of the local area into it and also work with businesses to get them involved. Unfortunately we are doing this in our spare time so we don’t have the funding, time and resources to deliver as much as we would like to. Your ideas are great and thank you very much for them. This year we are working hard to engage with local businesses to ensure that the Triangle gets as much festival activity as possible and we have a dedicated Triangle day on Sunday 30 June where we are asking local landowners to let us use the open spaces for events and create a real buzz there. We are also asking traders to get involved and help make the event more engaging. We would love to put more events into Crystal Palace park but even with all the wonderful volunteers we have there simply is not enough resource to do that as yet. Perhaps in the future – that is our dream. I hope you come to the festival and enjoy it this year and perhaps if you would like to help it get even better volunteer your time to help that come true – yours sincerely Noreen Meehan, Chair, Crystal Palace Overground Festival