We had over 100 people come to our second Fun Palace this Sunday at Conway Hall in partnership with a host of organisations.

Fun Palaces is an annual, free, nationwide celebration of culture at the heart of the community, using arts, science, craft, tech, digital, heritage and sports activities as a catalyst for community engagement. This takes place over the first weekend in October every year.

We had a fun-packed day of adventures and creativity. We kicked off the morning with relaxed Sensory Storytelling with the British Library and a tale of growth and exploration.

For those who were looking for a more noisy start, Wac Arts digital orchestra gave us a creative wake up call for a Sunday morning!

We also painted rocks and potted cuttings with the Calthorpe Community Garden and made herbal soaps with the Museum of the Order of St John. Up in the library, we had a making station which produced some amazing new entries for our Christmas card competition!

San from Thenga Cafe invented a new game, coconut pong, crossing a coconut shy with table tennis (and giving out DELICIOUS coconut balls as prizes)

After lunch The Crick joined us, running their wonderful Creating Colours workshop, lots of families were hard at work creating colourful petrie dishes. In the room, next door Carpmaels & Ransfords solicitors got stuck in with some slime making and pearler bead art, whilst up in the library Matt came along and led a relaxing yoga class for the grown-ups.

The Wraggletaggle Singers joined us for half an hour of beautiful singing, and we rounded off the afternoon with a knitting workshop (and a bit more slime, digital orchestra and storytelling for good measure).

We had some lovely feedback from our guests as well, “great collaborations of organisations coming together as a community” and a local dad saying “I found it interesting, my daughter loved it!”

Hazel East, our Community Arts Manager, said “‘It’s been a brilliant day full of fun and exploration, it’s been so lovely to see the grown-ups having as much fun as the children. We couldn’t do it without the help of all of our brilliant partners, so thank you all who came, made and played.”

To round up a brilliant day later we caught our Fun Palace make the ITV news!

If you missed this year’s Fun Palace don’t worry, HCA has lots of activities taking place all year round – sign up to our mailing list.