Peckham Festival returns from 15-18th September with a long weekend of art, live music, performances and activities for everyone. Created in 2016, the free, not-for-profit community event aims to support a more cohesive and diverse multi-generational community through the arts and culture, whilst celebrating the diversity and creativity of Peckham. Free art and culture will be accessible to all.

Festival events will be held across Peckham, with two of the main sites located at Copeland Park and Peckham Levels. Smaller festival hubs include Bold Tendencies; Skylight; Four Quarters; John The Unicorn, the Asylum Space and Theatre Peckham.

The heartbeat of the festival is the family friendly Community Hub, where local community action groups, charities and organisations offer free talks and workshops. This year there will also be a health and well-being element offering free fitness and wellbeing classes including Hip Hop Yoga; Pilates; sleep and nutrition workshops; Sound healing and Gut – Mental Health.

The Made in Peckham, open spaces event will see over a hundred local artists open up their homes, workshops and studios, over two weekends this year, offering the public an intimate and unique insight into their work practices. The Art trail will take you from Victorian warehouses, beneath railway arches to residential streets. Art forms range from fine art to sculpture; jewellery; ceramics; photography; print and furniture design.

One of the underlying themes of this year’s festival is Sustainability. The festival kicks off on the evening of Thursday 15th September featuring a celebratory programme of sustainable events including the opening of the festival community garden, Holdrons Green, which will remain at Copeland Park as a green festival legacy for all to enjoy. The space has been built using recycled materials and skip waste and offers a quiet place for reflection and mental well being just a stone’s throw away from the bustle of Rye Lane. A celebration of Peckham’s sustainable fashion designers will take place in an immersive fashion event and show and there’ll be an outdoor bicycle-powered film screening of Grease simultaneously promoting the value of electricity and cycling.

Copeland Gallery will feature Life after Life, curated by local artist Katrina Adams. By challenging a consumer, habitual society and culture in which goods and services create waste, the exhibition showcases works where artists are predominantly striving to find more sustainable ways to develop their practice and those of others including art pieces created during the pandemic when usual materials were hard to acquire and repurposing ‘lost’ & ‘found’ objects. Through their art, exhibiting artists ask visitors; “Is the future of art changing to help minimise its impact both socially and environmentally?”

Local sustainable mead producer, Gosnell’s Mead, who ferment their honey in Peckham, will be bringing their mead garden to the festival and there’ll be a sustainable makers pop-up curated by local event organisers, Pexmas. 

The Main Stage at Copeland Park will offer a variety of community performances ranging from the Nunhead Community Choir and Rye Chapel reggae gospel band to the Peckham Chamber Orchestra and carnival performance group, Kinetika Bloco; to emerging local talent on the music scene including Morgan Munroe; Jalen; Ceedric Sessions; Anjelo Disons and the Oracle and Wussah (Balamii).