The popular Chandos Road festival returns on Sunday September 22nd from noon to 6pm. Promising to be better than ever, all are welcome to join us for an afternoon of music, entertainment for all and a wide range of delicious refreshments. Organised jointly by the local traders and Chandos Neighbourhood residents, there will be plenty for everyone to enjoy at this relaxed, family-friendly event.
Chandos Road is blessed with a wide variety of restaurants, cafes and bars, so you can expect an eclectic and unbeatable variety of street food to suit all tastes, from delicious curries and tapas, wonderful cakes, yummy ice creams to ever popular fish & chips. Our local hostelries will be open for business, with Chums hosting a beer festival over the weekend.
This year, there will be lots of stalls with several local charities and the University Community Liaison Office will be represented. There’ll be bric-a-brac galore, vintage homeware, clothes and pictures, pottery and crafts and much more, including a yoga demonstration. Entertainments for the younger generations include face painting, imaginative craft activities run by Chandos Atelier, puppet shows, clay workshops and not forgetting the ever-popular Stomp Rockets – more fun than you can possibly imagine from recycled plastic bottles and a bicycle inner tube!
To complete the festive atmosphere, there will be music along the street all afternoon, with a DJ at The Good Measure to get the ball rolling. Outside Snobbys @ Cowper Road, the acoustic stage will feature Bangers ‘n Smash (samba band), Duo 41 (fast and furious folk), Break Out Voices (community choir guaranteed to lift the spirits) with a host of others including Nepali melodies, sea shanties, jazz & blues, witty ditties and more. On our main stage @ Lansdown Road, the afternoon kicks off with the funky, energising Riff Raff Choir, followed by SOL (French café jazz), Nightlarks (classic 50s/60s soul & jazz), Random Numbers (covers with a twist – ‘expect the unexpected’), Love Butter (energetic & wacky – a truly great local student band) and to round off the afternoon, local favourites the rocking country blues band ‘the Harrison’s Trio’, will get toes tapping with their seismic covers from the likes of the Eagles and The Band.
A great way to round off the summer!
At 10.30 on the morning of 11 November about 50 residents of the Chandos Road Neighbourhood gathered at our local war memorial on Chandos Road to mark the 100th anniversary of the Armistice at the end of World War 1. There are 48 names inscribed on the rough granite memorial. We focused on the wartime experience of 9 of these men whose lives had been researched by Geoff Swain, one from each street in the neighbourhood. We learned a little about each of these men and how they died before sharing the poem ‘Reconciliation’, written by Siegfried Sassoon just after the Armistice had been signed in 1918. We then observed the traditional 2 minute silence before setting off to visit the houses where the 9 men had lived. Ellie Breed had put together the information about the men onto a display board, which can be seen by the war memorial on Chandos Road and individually outside their homes, also indicated by a poppy chalked on the pavement. We hope that many local residents will pause and read about these men, who mostly died at a young age in the Great War 100 years ago.
