It’s May and time for the Glos Rd Central Mayfest on Saturday 7 May
May 4th, 2016This extremely popular free community event is part of the Neighbourhood Partnership Festival Week and is a big day on our social calendar. Traders will be offering a range of activities and special sales outside their shops. Bishop Road will be closed to traffic from Gloucester Road to Manor Road, making it safe for loads of activities such as face-painting, needle felting, a tea cup ride, and the arrival of Jack in the Green and his band of dancers and musicians at 3.45 pm. Playing Out will be taking over the residential end of the road offering lots of fun activities. Mr Gotalot plans to make an appearance to tell us about his next show at the Kelvin Players Studio (see performance schedule below).
Anyone interested in sustainable building can wander down Bishop Lane and check out the new 212 Eco house which will be opening its doors for everyone to have a tour and talk to the builders about mud and straw walls, sheep’s wool insulation and a living roof! The gardens have also been landscaped using recycled materials. For info on the build seewww.facebook.com/212strawhouse
Mayfest is the launch date for our pavement planting scheme with Avon Wildlife Trust (see below for more info). The Bishop Road Community choir have already confirmed they will be singing at 2.30 pm and there’ll be other live music laid on by the Golden Lion, who are also setting up a small bar.
This year we will be part of the Bristol Food Connection week of Bristol-wide events. We have many food outlets at Glos Rd Central who will be taking part and offering sumptuous samples including Pizzarova, Cake, Joe’s Bakery, Metro Cafe and Cafe Dream. Fairtrade will have a stall along with the Italian Sausage Company and Nico’s Kitchen, who source nearly all their produce on Gloucester Road. As usual Dave Giles Butchers will be serving up a delicious BBQ and Pawson’s will be open for business with fresh local fruit and veg.
There’ll be some fundraising too, with cakes from the Gloucester Road WI and the Baby Bank Network, who will be set up outside Moodles, selling raffle tickets and raising awareness of the good work they carry out. Lucy from Little Tinkers Silver Company will also be outside the popular children’s clothes shop (read more about the fantastic silver jewellery she produces with tiny hand and foot prints on page 21). Moodles is pleased to be teaming up with local photography business Zzzone, to offer the opportunity to wine a free, one hour photoshoot with print included.
The Golden Lion will be celebrating a whole year under new management and are planning a day and evening of food and live music so look out for their posters with more info. Bishopston Matters looks forward to meeting lots of you on the day, do say hello to Kerry as she hands out red balloons.
The Avon Wildlife Trust has been helping us to create a wildlife corridor along our part of Gloucester Road. The project is called ‘My Wild Business’ and will be a flagship for other areas of Bristol. This month over 40 traders are looking forward to having planters set up outside their shops, full of flowers and pollinator-friendly plants. Shops were asked to create designs and choose the plants they would like to see growing, and the Avon Wildlife Trust gave advice about what are the best for our high street and our pollinators. The Neighbourhood Partnership for Bishopston, Cotham and Redland funded this project, which was inspired following the success of containers of flowers and plants outside a few of our shops last year. The plan is to beautify our high street and encourage pollinating insects such as butterflies and bees. The Avon Wildlife Trust will be at our Mayfest asking the public to make model pollinators for a meadow display later in the year. This scheme is part of the Avon Wildlife Trust My Wild City Project with the aim to ‘green’ up Bristol. You can learn more about the project here www.avonwildlifetrust.org.uk.
Last month saw the launch of a fantastic Bristol colouring book by local well known artist Jenny Urquhart and Bishopston Matters was pleased to inform three lucky, local residents that they have won copies signed and partly coloured by Jenny. Colouring books and groups are very popular these days and local resident Valerie Hall runs a regular free colouring group at Boston Tea Party every Wednesday 3–5 pm. Everyone is welcome and Boston Tea Party give out free cake! Jenny and Val will be running a colouring session outside Room 212 at Mayfest.
This month readers are invited to take part in a competition with Xpress Computers. To win a FREE PC health check, simply email xpresscomputers176@gmail.com with the heading PC Health Comp by 31/05/16 – good luck!
For more information, see www.glosrdcentral.co.uk
Performance Schedule
The Golden Lion are setting up a sound system on Bishop Rd just after Bishop Lane. The line up is as follows
11.30 Bristol Folk Singers
12.30 Ashley Down Choir
13.00 Launch speech of Mayfest and My Wild City pavement planters by Thangam Debbonaire and Avon Wildlife Trust Matt Collis
13.30 Mr Gotalot and his Pop Up Shop
14.30 – 15.30 acoustic performance by Slimline Shuffles
15.30 Arrival of Jack in the Green plus dancers / musicians
16.00 – 17.00 acoustic performance by Lone Wolf
