Yes, as promised, here’s my take on the guardian open weekend. It described itself as a festival of readers and reasonableness. Ashamedly, i was late in knowing about this so all tickets to any talks or readings i wanted to attend were long sold out. Spotting an opportunity to maybe have a peek at the glorious offices of the guardian was enough to drag me there on a sunny saturday, camera in hand, ready to come back and share with you lovely readers.
Mooching around, I became very quickly interested in the following: the first being that this festival was held 5 minutes away from my home, the second was the great community spirit it attracted and the third aspect was the chance to view the guardian’s offices.
Yes, i’m immensely proud of living only a few minutes away from the kings cross regeneration, a truly visionary project which will transform the area into a vibrant 21st century hub of truly inspiring train stations, amazing office spaces, retail units, innovative housing projects and generally convert it into a new area with a creative edge. Central saint martins college of art and design recently moved here into their new home and, of course, the offices of the guardian within kings place, just by regents canal.
Back to the festival.
The place was buzzing with people running around trying to find where their next talk is being held and others drinking and eating or working on their laptops while listening to a life band playing music.
Outside by the canal you had the very quirky le cool team, who ran a collective writing experiment called london, by london. “We invite the public to trawl the vast world of words that’s been written about the capital in search of choice sentences. We’ll take these sentences and chop, rearrange and reframe them to create a new story: the story of london, by london.”
And the eden project was also present. Hello Dave.
T-shirts were being airbrushed….
A big mural was commissioned to capture the weekend and explore some facts about the guardian newspaper.
Here are some photos of the guardian offices. I think they had 5000 people on each day of the weekend. It was a real privilege to be allowed to wonder around.
And so the day came to an end. I hope you enjoyed my little tour of the festival. This was the first time the guardian opened its doors to the public. Judging from the atmosphere the event was a total success. I look forward to the second one next year.
