This year’s Dalston Pumpkin Lantern Festival has been record-breaking in every way! It’s hard to find words that do it justice and to choose just 10 photos from the thousands that our pumpkin photographers Sandra Keating and Alex Bogdan have taken, to even begin to illustrate it! But here goes....
Over 1,200 pumpkins were carved by children, families and adults on the first marathon carving weekend of 19 & 20 October. It was a community gathering of joy, thousands of children, sheer pandemonium and panic when we ran out of pumpkins! Many thanks to everyone who carved - without them there would be no Lantern Festival.
We welcomed 1,000 people in just one hour for the first and most important Light-up - the Festival Carvers’ ‘Private View’, for everyone who carved a pumpkin on that first weekend. All of the children in the long queue were delighted to be reminded that they were VIPPs - ‘Very Important Pumpkin People’. On the second Sunday of the Festival, thanks in no small part to word of mouth, social media sharing and a lovely blog from Secret London, we had 5,000 people queued around the block to come in!
So much credit for the success of the Dalston Pumpkin Lantern Festival goes to our incredible team of volunteers. They have helped thousands of children carve their own pumpkins and then helped light up all of the lanterns every night. Their dedication, hard-work, patience and good humour know no bounds.
More than 500 families and visitors helped our team of volunteers light up over 2,000 tea-lights every evening for 12 nights. Thousands of visitors enjoyed the spectacle of seeing all of the pumpkins lit up in every corner of the Garden. One of our favourite moments every evening was when all of the lanterns amassed on the stage were finally lit up, the stage lights were turned off and all of the visitors, young and old said ‘Ahhhhhhh’!
In our eyes, every single carved pumpkin lantern is a star, but we are also very much in awe of the imagination, creativity and skill displayed by ‘extreme carvers’ for the Festival every year! We are so lucky to have two amazing ‘resident carvers’ at the Garden, Eco Zhang who carved this year’s ‘Mondrian’ inspired centre-piece and Rosemary Kirton who created several masterpieces, including a giant spider.
This year was the first where the weather caused us problems. Pumpkin lanterns and rain and wind are not a good mix! But despite quite a few rainy days and evenings, the show went on and the visitors kept coming!
Children and our Hackney community are at the heart of Dalston Pumpkin Lantern Festival. In addition to the thousands of children who took part and visited with their families, this year we also loved carving pumpkins with AS1 children's group, hosting a visit from Groundwork London’s CIRCLE project and seeing so many children with their playgroups, playing in the Pumpkin Garden by day.
Thousands of photos and posts were shared on social media with many stunning images and many using our #dalstonpumpkins tag. We’re still working our way through the mighty task of collecting them up for our pumpkin archive. If you have photos still to share, we would love to see them!
We have been completely overwhelmed by the incredible enthusiasm for pumpkin lanterns shared by so many people young and old! We’ve come a long way from that first session in 2010 when we carved 20 pumpkins in a children’s workshop and thought it would be a good idea to make an ‘event of it’ in future years...
All photos copyright Dalston Eastern Curve Garden
