Bankside Open Spaces Festival - stalls and activities 2023!
Join us at Bankside Open Spaces Festival 2023 and enjoy food, drinks, craft, art and antiques from talented local businesses! Alongside all our performers, live music, djs and dogs, we’ll be filling the streets with fabulous stalls and activities to keep you busy and refreshed all afternoon. So pop down to Bankside Open spaces Festival and take a deep dive into the area’s intriguing history with one of London Street Tours BOSFest Tours - crafted especially for the day (book here), indulge in a massage or try out yoga or pilates for free, get crafting, take in some art or throw yourself into one of our many interactive workshops! Read on for details.
* Not to be missed - festival faves UDM Samba will be doing a street performance at 4pm, starting at the crossroads with Union Street/Redcross Way! *
Stalls and activities at Bankside Open Spaces Festival
Meet local organisations, make something lovely to take home, learn about our changing climate, or pick up a plant, tasty treat, new skincare product or a beautiful handmade accessory to show off!
Local organisations with stalls include: Borough Belles, Bee Urban, The Old Operating Theatre, The Outside Project, Coin Street and, of course, Bankside Open Spaces Trust!
Kids big and small will enjoy getting hands-on with arts and craft activities:
Mud Gang return with their fun clay workshop
Fungi Futures have a fun fungi workshop
Our near neighbours M.Y.O are offering a Tile Painting Workshop
Coin Street are back with facepainting and more
Old Operating Theatre’s Herb Garrett are bringing us historical herb facts and crafts
Climate Fresk have a quiz for you
Children can spend a few pocket money pennies at Sweet Treasured.
Come and grab handmade accessories or skincare from Hanna Zakka Handcraft Design, The Fox Cub, Lumi Lumlong, Paquita Ruby, Touch Heart Jewellery, Edible Rotherhithe and The Thought Press Project, Handmade Stories, Starest, Dee Rose, and our regular visitors Nina Bows!
Spruce up your home or open space with vintage treasures from Vintage Paradise, Rust and Dust, and Goose Botanicals or pick up a nice (or naughty) treat from Verena's Kitchen (granola and nut butter), Che Sauce (cooking sauces to add spice to your life!), Doreen’s Rum Cakes and The Nature Queen.
Keeping us all refreshed and refuelled are Deuce Hospitality Limited with Caribbean inspired eats, Lungta Oishi with katsu, noodles and wraps and Pinoy Eat offer you tapa to share. Bars will come from Spit n Sawdust and Pink Marmalade again.
Looking for sports and dance workshops - take a peek at our MSG Community Stage page!
See you on the streets!
Walking Tours - explore Bankside’s history in 45 minutes!
History, stories and strange facts - you’ll get it all with London Street Tours. Now these top rated tour guides are bringing a special version of their London Bridge walking tour to Bankside Open Spaces Festival 2023. Booking is essential - so click below to register for a spot on these fantastic tours.
Tours run at 2 and 5pm from near Union Street.
Breathe London - FREE Festival Massage
Breathe London, a wellbeing clinic based in Waterloo will be offering FREE 10 minute massages at Bankside Open Spaces Festival.
Bankside Open Spaces Trust Massage
Join Breathe London near Red Cross Garden from 1-5 pm. No need to book, come along on the day and choose from three different types, including reflexology massage.
FREE yoga at Bankside Open Spaces Festival
Join Yogarise - South London yoga specialists - for FREE, fun and friendly yoga sessions across the afternoon from 2pm to 6pm from some of their best teachers!
The sessions will take place just off Little Dorrit Court on Redcross way in a gazebo on a shaded grassy area. No need to book, just turn up! Mats will be provided.
Classes are suitable for all levels and are designed for you to try different yoga styles in a relaxed, fun and non-competitive, holistic environment. Whether you're keen to unwind or re-energise, there’s a class for you.
Yoga line up
2-2.30pm Austin Ince teaching beginner friendly Vinyasa flow
3-3.30pm Annie Nicoll teaching beginner friendly Pilates
4-4.30pm Amandine Babine teaching beginner friendly Hatha flow
5-5.30pm Veronique Piercy teaching beginner friendly Flow and restore
6-6.30pm Sarah Logue teaching beginner friendly Slow Flow.
Find out more about Yogarise here: https://www.yogarise.london
The Goose and Graveyard
Tour and talk at Crossbones Graveyard
12pm and 1pm, Sat 10th June
This activity will introduce you to Crossbones Graveyard' rich and vibrant history with Jennifer Cooper and Lucy Coleman Talbot.
Crossbones researcher, Lucy will lead you through the former burial ground's social history from its origins through to the early 1990s. From here, Jennifer, a.k.a Vigil Aunty of the Magical Collective which leads the Crossbones Vigil to Honour the Outcast, will tell the story of The Goose and her secret history, revealed on the 23rd of November 1996.
Crossbones Graveyard - a unique space in London’s Bankside
Crossbones Graveyard is a unique place of peace and tranquillity nestled in the heart of Bankside and surrounded by new developments. It holds a deep cultural, historical and spiritual significance as it tells the history of London as seen from the bottom up.
As well as holding the mortal remains of 15,000 women, children and men, it also carries the memory of the Winchester Geese, the women who worked in the brothels and "stews" of the medieval Liberty of the Clink. Licensed by the Church to ply their prostitute trade but denied a Christian burial.
Free art exhibition in Crossbones Graveyard
A sneak peak of the exhibition being installed from Foxtrot Lighting’s Instagram.
Mexican roadside shrines by Foxtrot Lightning, part of Madre Celestial photo project. Find out more about the artist here:
https://www.instagram.com/foxtrotlightning/
Shrines voice a deeply human need for beauty, symbols and ritual in the everyday.
Like the tributes left to the anonymous dead at Crossbones Graveyard, they are both communal and deeply personal creations, made by people’s own hands. They crop up spontaneously in places charged with meaning, manifesting unspoken feelings - of hope, fear, grief or gratitude.
Assembled from commonplace materials like paper chains, ribbons and plastic flowers, mundane items are deliberately arranged to connect to a mystical world. Shrines form a bridge between the realms of the living and the dead: becoming a place of remembrance and connection.
Built by many hands, street altars contain a spectrum of varying beliefs in a riot of colour and texture: vibrant expressions of pop creativity, spirituality and folk culture.
All images credit: Sophie Polyviou