24 – 28 June: Crystal Palace Overground Festival

Despite what many people think, Crystal Palace is not an independent nation state. Most of it lies in Croydon, so we claim this as one of our own!

 

The Crystal Palace Overground Festival is a mainly free community arts and culture festival run by a team of dedicated volunteers.

It was launched in 2006 by the Upper Norwood Triangle traders and has gone from strength to strength with over 8,000 people attending the 2014 event.

The festival is now in its 9th year and gets bigger and better every year! This is all the more admirable given that it is entirely led and organised by volunteers.

Some 6,000 man hours are donated by local people to put on this festival – that’s £100,000 at a living wage of £15 per hour and £37,000 at the minimum wage. Incredible, isn’t it?

The festival’s values are community, diversity, inclusiveness, creativity, and fun. This means we actively seek to involve you, our local community, in developing the programme, or participating as performers, workshop participants, as volunteers to ensure the festival runs smoothly, or simply as visitors.

What does the festival achieve?

• We enable people to access many free cultural events
• We create over 200 volunteering opportunities
• We enable our volunteers to gain desirable work place and life skills
• We promote Crystal Palace and provide an economic benefit to the local area
• We support cohesion for our diverse community
• We give local people access to information and advice to improve their health and wellbeing.