cheese rolling

There are no hills steep enough for us to do this in Regent's Park. Maybe we need to reassess the location.

homemade bunting

a view through the bunting

Bunting is integral to the success of our summer of fetes. Some people measure success by the number of Lambos parked on the gravel drive, whereas we measure it in yards of bunting. So I am very proud to share some excellent bunting photos with you. They're from my wedding, and all of the bunting was handmade by my mother in law. Thanks Jane.

hoist the bunting

At our big London fete, we're looking to break the world record for the longest piece of bunting ever. If you fancy helping, have a look here. It'll probably take you 15 minutes to cobble something together out of your old pyjamas, and imagine the thrill of telling your friends that you hold a world record. They will surely all be jealous.

a ferocious dog guards the bunting

Go on, get the pinking shears out.

a good weekend for umbrella sales

Another rainy day and another missed attempt at fete research. This time at Paradise Gardens festival in Victoria Park, East London. It was billed as having a designer village fete bit so I thought I'd go and have a look. This was as close as I got to the fete though, I think they'd all gone home with soggy socks.

They did have the world's first eco-arcade though.

And more umbrellas at Carter's traditional fun fair...

Plan C was going to be a trip to A Country Affair on Clapham Common on Bank Holiday Monday. Given my previous two attempts, and the weather, they've probably packed up and gone home already though. That's bank holiday weekends for you I suppose.

Trafalgar Square village green

Photo by zeforg linked from flickr

In the build up to our big fete in Regent's Park we're going to do be doing a bit of research into other people's fetes and stuff. Being big city folk this could be a little tricky though. So we were quite interested to read that Trafalgar Square was being turned into a big village green this weekend.

I went to investigate today but only found the below. It looked pretty much the same as usual to me. Rain and concrete (just not as many pigeons as usual). I was a day too late unfortuanetly.

This is what it looked like on Thursday and Friday though.

Gillingham and Shaftesbury fruit & veg show

We love natural things. And we like to help people who grow natural things whenever we can. So back in 2003 we sponsored fruit and vegetable shows up and down the country, which means we could give out rosettes to all of the lucky prize winners.

Like all good ideas we thought this one is worth revisiting so there's most likely to be a Fruit and Veg show at our fete this year. Go get growing.

morris people

Summer wouldn't be summer without a fete and a fete wouldn't be a fete without morris dancing. We love this video for Four Tet by Dougal Wilson (he's quite good at pop videos, you may have seen some of his stuff before) featuring a whole host of morris dancing groups.

Do morris dancers come in groups actually? Tribes? Congregations?. For a bit more on morris dancing have a look here.

please say hello to our new village fete blog...

Hello and welcome to our village fete blog. You may have come across our main innocent drinks blog which we started around this time last year funnily enough. It's all been going pretty well over at that blog so we thought we'd start a new one especially for our summer events this year which are all to do with villlage fetes.

Hopefully you'll be seeing lots of splat the rat, morris dancing, home made cakes, fruit and veg competitions and maybe a tipsy vicar or two as the summer goes on.

To find out where you can see us on the road in our touring fete click here and to find out all about our big innocent fete in Regents Park in August and how to get tickets go here.

Lets meet next to the white elephant stall.