Summer Pop-Ups at the Creative Cafe on Marks Gate

We had a brilliant summer back on the Marks Gate estate with the Creative Cafe this year. We hosted a programme of pop-up Creative Café events on the estate during the  school holidays for local families, children and young people to access. We hosted 3 at the Marks Gate Community Centre and 1 pop-up at the Eastern Avenue Baptist Church. Here’s what we did:

Let’s Get Colourful at the Marks Gate Community Centre
Get colourful, explore and discover in our special day dedicated to colour! We will be using a variety of materials to create colourful works of art!

Puppets! At the Eastern Avenue Baptist Church
Make your own fabulous shadow puppet and give a mini performance in our makeshift puppet theatre.

Family Portraits at the Marks Gate Community Centre
Create your very own unique family portrait inspired by Matryoshka Russian nesting dolls. Come and work with us in this workshop to create a doll to represent each member of your special family

Masks in the Making at the Marks Gate Community Centre
Make a mask to show another side of you. Personalise and embellish it with paint, markers, decorative papers, stickers, feathers and more.

The pop-up programme was original and artistic, building on previous and very successful Creative Café activities; they provided residents particularly families with young children with an opportunity to get creative and get together, a few older residents also accessed these activities. We had 220 instances of participation with 158 residents taking part in the summer programme.

Our summer pop-ups provided an opportunity for residents to access free creative, exciting and imaginative activities during the school holidays. The project encourages creative family time, the art activities were for parents/carers to do with their children. An opportunity to learn and make together and take not only their creations home, but some ideas too.

The Creative Café during the summer successfully re-engaged with residents who had previously taken part in Creative Café activities, who were really pleased to have the project back on the estate, as well as build relationships with new families and residents.

It was wonderful to be back!