People in the Park returns to Salisbury's Lizzie Gardens
With a new stage and an app, this year's event promises to be bigger than ever
Salisbury Transition City’s (STC) People in the Park is returning to Queen Elizabeth Gardens today (Saturday 20th May), after being postponed in 2022 following The Queen’s passing.
With free entry, People in the Park is all about having a minimal imprint on the city, with power being generated from renewable sources, including solar power.
And this years event brings a new, third, stage to the day as the Campfire stage joins the Main and Youth stages.
Bradley Thompson helps organise People in the Park with STC, he said the event is coming back stronger than ever:
“We're really excited about the campfire (stage), in 2021, we introduced our youth stage, which was great and loads of people loved it.
“And this year, we kind of wanted to do something that kind of feeds into the spirit of people in the park in that kind of real community sense and learning from each other and networking.
“So, the campfire is kind of the culmination of that, where its own separate space for learning and discussion and just kind of getting to network with people.”
The day features live music, entertainment and interactive stalls from local businesses, including a smoothie making station, where you can create your smoothie by riding a bike.
“We've got something like 50 community stalls, so it's all the kind of great and wonderful people that make Salisbury kind of special,” Bradley said.
STC ask stallholders to consider their impact on the environment when planning their activities or selling goods, to help the event remain as low carbon as possible:
“The phrase we try and use is: (it’s) fun without it costing the earth,” Bradley says, “it's just to show people, you can do all of this fun stuff, but actually you don't have to have big generators running and all these different things going on to power.
“There are ways to do these kind of things in a in a much more sustainable way and kind of the challenge we set to most of our store holders when they approach us, (we ask) how interactive can you be and what kind of fun stuff can you bring to teach people?”
And to allow people attending to tailor their visit to their own interests, STC have developed an app for the event, with the help of Mothership Software:
“They've created a people in the park app for us, which is quite exciting and it's the first time we're going to have it. It'll have all the timings for the different stages on it and all the timings. You can click on a stall and it will tell you who's there and what they're about.”
People in the park opens at 10am on Saturday and the day ends at 4pm.