Coming soon Little Venice

The Canalway Cavalcade festival returns to London’s Little Venice for the May Day weekend - and needs a team to help set it up and take it down

Canalway Cavalcade support camp, Little Venice 26 April - 2 May

Canalway Cavalcade is the Inland Waterways Association’s annual festival at Little Venice (near Paddington Station in London) which will return for the May Day Bank Holiday in 2023 to celebrate its 40th Anniversary. It’s one of the most colourful and popular events in the waterways calendar. And one thing that makes it happen is a team of site services volunteers – not an official Waterway Recovery Group Camp, but generally a bunch of mostly WRGies who set up and manage the festival infrastructure and site.

The camp runs from mid-morning on Wednesday 26th April (when stuff starts arriving and we build our camp) through Thursday and Friday, when we build the festival. The three days of the weekend during the actual festival generally involve site management activities before the take down of the event on the Monday evening and Tuesday morning, with the aim to have cleared the site by mid-afternoon on Tuesday 2nd May.

To make it all happen we’d like the experienced volunteers who have helped in previous years to come again, and we’d also like some new faces to join the team to ensure the future of the event. We recognise that you may not be able to attend the whole camp because it does run mid-week to mid-week, but we do need people to attend on the weekdays, in particular on the Monday evening and Tuesday because this is when we most need them! We welcome people who are only able to help for a day or two. There will be a plan of work activities so that everyone gets a chance to enjoy some of the festival and take in the amazing atmosphere of the event.

The accommodation is limited and restricted to two narrow boats for sleeping on, plus a field kitchen (which needs to be built on day 1) for cooking and eating. Work activities include putting up (and taking down) marquees, market stalls and banners around the site, fencing, and general event management.

Outside of the work camp activities the event also needs volunteers to assist with other aspects of the event such as donation collecting, giving information to the public and children’s activities – if this is of interest please let me know. Contact me by email on Pete.Fleming@ waterways.org.uk for more information.

Pete Fleming