Gunnersbury Park is turning 100 years old – come and join the birthday celebrations which will bring together music, dance, family activities and a look back on history.
Party in the park
Everyone is invited to the park’s 100th birthday party on Bank Holiday Monday, 25 May from 11am to 4pm.
The party is one of many events planned by Gunnersbury Museum and Park Development Trust to celebrate the centenary of the park, opened by British politician Neville Chamberlain on 21 May 1926. The free family party will feature dance workshops by Singland Jazz, the Charleston and Lindy Hop, and live bands playing music from the 1920s right the way through the decades.
Giant picnic blanket
The party’s centrepiece will be the ’Gunnersbury Community Picnic Blanket’, a 100-square-metre patchwork made from individual squares decorated and stitched together by residents, community groups including Southall Black Sisters, Himawari and Trinjan, museum staff and volunteers.
Visitors are being encouraged to bring a picnic and gather on the blanket during the celebration. There is still time to create your own piece of patchwork for the blanket at the Gunnersbury Park Community Sewing Sessions in the museum on Friday 8 and Sunday 10 May. No sewing experience is needed and as well as creating a piece of history, refreshments will be on offer and vintage movies will be playing in the background.
For more information on the sewing sessions visit the park and museum’s website.
For visitors to the party interested in the history of the park, there will be tours of Gunnersbury Museum, including its historic kitchens, alongside a guided walk of the park focusing on more than a century of landscape and garden design.
Traditional outdoor games such as quoits and hopscotch are also planned for visitors of all ages. There will also be more than 30 stalls, featuring local artists and makers as well as charity and community groups.
Victoria Barlow, Gunnersbury’s head of museum services, said: “This is a very exciting year for Gunnersbury Park and we are delighted to showcase the history of the park both in the Museum and in our upcoming outdoor exhibition. Gunnersbury Park has always been a park for people, and we’re so excited to share some of the stories of the people who created, cared for and used this amazing local resource.”
Other Gunnersbury 100 events
The first of 2 exhibitions, Gunnersbury Unlocked, is running at the museum until the end of the year. The exhibition covers various chapters in the park and museum’s history over the last century, from its role in supporting the war effort during World War II to its initial transition from a privately owned Rothschild estate to a public park.
The second exhibition is set to open on 4 July. It will be an outdoor photographic exhibition in the park itself, featuring historic photographs from the last 100 years lined up with the existing views so visitors can compare and contrast. Gunnersbury Museum will be working with their Young Curators to develop a complementary photographic exhibition inside the Museum.
There will also be May half-term fun at the park with a ‘toys and games trail’ featuring toys from the last 100 years.
You can read more about the opening of the park and its history on Around Ealing website’s local history pages.
Did you know?
More than 14,000 children visit the museum on school trips every year with many getting to see for themselves how different learning was in a Victorian classroom.
Information
For more information about what’s on and other centenary events, go to the Gunnersbury Park and Museum website.
