Summer seems to be Park Festival Season, with barely a weekend passing that doesn’t see at least one London park filled with street performers, music, ice-cream vans and, in extreme cases, fireworks. A week after the relatively sedate Potters Fields Park reopening, it’s time for the raucous Paradise Gardens in the East End’s Victoria Park.
Victoria Park is one of the oldest parks in London, and with its wide ponds and lawns it’s never going to be a bad place to spend a warm summer day; but this weekend… well, even with 200 acres of park, we can’t quite work out how they’re going to fit in:
- 1920s fairground attractions from Carter’s Steam Fair.
- One fete selling arts and crafts, and another doing exactly the same thing, slightly more trendily.
- Bewildering masses of food.
- A tent filled with music organised by the BBC Asian Network.
- Another tent, this one filled with an untraditional circus featuring “break-dancing dodgy geezers, pods fighting to control the world of the ad, characters from computer games” and “puffa rude boys”. Do those words even mean something? Who cares, given that it’s got juggling, trapezes and counterweight abseiling as well?
Tickets for the circus are £5, bookable in advance; the rest of it’s free, running from 1 p.m. to 10:30, well after Victoria Park’s usual dusk bedtime. If you go, it could well be worth staying around till the end: on the 26th the day ends with a firework-lit giant drum played by drummers on stilts, and on the 27th with dancers, giant puppets and still more fireworks.
Carpark spaces are limited, so the organisers are suggesting that visitors use public transport — the park is right near Mile End on the Central line, or Cambridge Heath & Hackney Wick stations by rail.
Paradise Gardens: Victoria Park, Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th of May, 1 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Free.
