Partnered by
- Big Lottery Fund - Lottery funded
- MasterCard
- Kingsmill
- Asda
- Halifax
- Communities and Local Government
Big Lunchers all over the UK (and beyond) have submitted nearly 2,000 photos of their street parties to The Big Lunch group on Flickr.
Here’s a slideshow of 50 of my personal favourites. Enjoy!
Keep ‘em coming :)
We just can’t get enough of the stonking Big Lunch that took place on Sunday along Bellenden Road in Peckham SE15. Not only do we have Felix Gonzales’s great video I posted here on Monday, but today I received an email from Jack Kelly, who has shared one of his own. It’s a beautiful piece of work, and I defy anyone not to be moved by it.
Best viewed in larger format on YouTube or Vimeo.
The Big Lunch group on Flickr is looking pretty awesome, too. At the time of writing, 1,378 photos posted by 98 different Big Lunchers! Fantastic!! (I’ll be letting on which ones are my favourites soon.)
Your videos and photos capture the essence of The Big Lunch. “It’s for us!”, or as Jack put it to me…
It was a gorgeous day. It was such a nice feeling to be able to meet loads of people from the community. It’s had a lasting effect too – I feel even more fond of Peckham now!
So – our Big Lunch was FANTASTIC!! Rock FM turned up and really made it as a day, getting people involved etc. Most of all was that people just couldn’t get over the fact that everything was completely FREE (thanks to the Rock FM win and my lovely church topping the money up). It was SO good to see people connecting, young families with young families etc…. just like it used to be!!
9 hours, 5 bands , 20 dancers, 300 to 400 people = 1 Great Day!
After all of the troubles organising the day, it turned out to be a resounding success, with many staying for the full 9 hours.
The rain stayed away until the last couple of hours when we had a couple of heavy showers, but that just got everybody on their feet to dance :o)
Thank you to ‘The Big Lunch’ for giving us the excuse – now to consider the details of how it went and to put some thought to our next community event!
You and I Skills – a social and community focused production company – has done a fantastic job capturing the diverse residents of Bellenden Road in Peckham doing their Big Lunch thing, with a little bit of tuba, bunting, birthdays, carved water melons, a lot of food, and generous dollops of good neighbourliness.
The Big Lunch – Bellenden Road Peckham SE15 from Felix Gonzales on Vimeo.
Near the end of the clip a guy says..
“We should celebrate the people more often.”
Here, here.
Moorland View in Starbeck wanted to celebrate the fact that the houses are one hundred years old this year, so we decided to combine this party with The Big Lunch.
The neighbouring street of Moorland Road (built at the same time) was invited to join in.
We have just cleared away the tables and chairs after enjoying a splendid day in the company of about fifty of our neighbours. The weather was great, as was the food and the company.
Everyone agreed that a street party is a jolly good idea; we must organise another before too long!
Ben learnt to ride a unicycle; the girls made sun-prints; we had table football and a nine hole putting green set up in the garden. The karaoke provided other entertainment.
Thanks to everyone who made this such a great day by joining in, bringing refreshments and talking to people that they had not met before. It really gladdens the heart. Viva la neighbourhood!!
We’re just getting ready for our ‘Big Tea’… but we’re little nervous as no one has turned up yet! We’re on the beach, next to a turquoise sea, and we’ve made banana cake, chocolate brownies, and forty fairy cakes.
We’ve invited our neighbours and have asked them to bring a cutting from their gardens to swap. Hope they turn up soon!
So the Big Day came… and so did the rain. But so did over forty brave souls.
We rigged up a tarpaulin in our back garden for people to shelter under during the sporadic downpours. The rain didn’t put us off as our Big Lunch turned into a Big Afternoon and the last people have only just left.
We had singing, dancing, some games for the kids (and the kids at heart) and more food and chat than we thought possible. But what really made the day for me was that I got to meet and spend time with people who live up the road from me, but whom I never usually see.
When we go to events it’s usually family, or people from the Rugby Club in town, the Church in the village or our walking group. We see our neighbours a lot, but don’t always spend much time with them. Today was a great occasion to do just that. And I was so pleased that everybody had such a great time and said they’d wished they’d done this before.
Perhaps the best part of the day was getting to meet people we didn’t know. There’s a man who lives up the road who moved in last year. He doesn’t know anybody nearby, and none of us knew him. But now we do. And it turns out he makes a fantastic pasta salad. I hope everybody had a great Big Lunch.
I went to the village fete where I grew up in Margaret Marsh, near Shaftesbury in Dorset last weekend. The chap who cut the ribbon to open the Fete this year was Jack Stokes. He’s a local farmer and remembers going to the fete for the last 70 years (well at least to the evening part where the whiskey comes out). He thinks it has been running for much longer. It was a great success, with well over 100 local people coming from surrounding villages to spend their money on a good cause, to catch up on the latest gossip and to have a meal and a laugh with the people in their local community. This sort of neighborly activity was quite common for me growing up in a rural area (there isn’t much alternative to lots of self organised parties to bring people together!) but this is rarer in urban areas.
That’s why today is so important. The Big Lunch, brought to you by the inspirational Eden Project. I’ll be sitting down with the neighbours in the surrounding streets of St Margarets, Twickenham.
Richmond Lock, near St Margarets
We’ll be welcoming newcomers to the area, catching up with neighbours we’ve known for years and introducing ourselves to the ones who never emerged before from behind their curtains. In fact – all of these classic community interactions are things we facilitate every day in the online communities that we work on with our clients at FreshNetworks.
The weather looks like it’s just about holding up but I’m taking no chances and arming myself with brolly and bin liner. More on our party here later!
Big Jubilee Lunch 2012, an Eden Project
Follow us