London had five heatwaves this summer. Camden Inspire’s response is to spend a weekend building a giant shade canopy in a garden off Camden High Street, and to teach you how to put one up on your own street. It is free to get in.
The festival runs Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 September at Camden Collective, which occupies a former infants’ school and an old auction house just off the high street. This year’s theme is Gathering for Our Future, and the whole thing is built around doing rather than watching.
Guerrilla shading, the headline act
The centrepiece is a multi-sail canopy going up live in the garden with architect Owen Pearce. Drop in on Saturday between 12pm and 6pm to help build it, then come back to dye the sails using natural dyes with artist Auda Sakho.
The point is not the pavilion. It is that shade-building is a skill you can take away and apply to a street, a balcony or a school playground, which is a more useful thing to leave a festival with than a tote bag.
Two panels worth booking ahead for
Both are free and both are in the Auction Rooms on the Saturday, and both need booking.
- Power in Numbers: Grassroots Action Starts at Home, 12.30pm to 2pm. Kareem Dayes of the Rural Urban Synthesis Society, Sirraj Mitha of Open City and Dan Edelstyn of Power Station on what community-led housing, growing spaces and neighbourhood energy co-ops actually take to build
- Building the World We Want: Activism Beyond Borders, 4pm to 5.30pm. Chaired by the Guardian’s climate journalist Damien Gayle, with Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs, campaigner and author Tori Tsui, and Dr Apolline Roger, head of ClientEarth’s innovation lab, on the legal cases and design work shifting what is politically possible
Make: the craft programme
All in the School Hall, all Saturday, all £3 to £5, which is the going rate for about a tenth of what these usually cost. Kintsugi china repair with Dotty by Design, mosaic-making with Debra Collis, Japanese sashiko mending with Central Saint Martins’ Tamsin Lines, kantha blanket-making with Shama Kun, and book-binding from sweet wrappers and paper offcuts with Kami Paper.
Do: the hands-on strand
Mostly drop-in, mostly free. Plastic litter picked out of the Regent’s Canal gets turned into new objects with Are You Mad? on the Saturday. The Fixing Factory runs a Lamp Lab where you bring a broken lamp and leave with a working one, £3. Global Generation teaches food growing on the Sunday.
The pick of it is Sunday’s foraging walk around Camden with Silo, the zero-waste restaurant, followed by building a basket out of reclaimed materials with STORE Projects. £5, and Silo do not do many of these.
Discuss, and what the students are exhibiting
A youth podcast from Transmission Roundhouse records live across both days, Poetry in the Park runs on the Sunday, and Camden Giving’s head of grants runs a funding workshop on Saturday morning for anyone sitting on a climate project idea and no money.
Central Saint Martins’ Material Futures course is exhibiting across the weekend, and the object list is the most interesting sentence in the whole programme: a buildable coppice timber structure, eel bridges made from oyster shell waste, living pigments meant to replace toxic chemicals in fashion, and moss-grown tartan.
Children, dinner and the pub quiz
Children aged eight and up can make cyanotype prints from natural materials with Grace Parker and Up to Earth on Saturday afternoon, £3, and there is kids’ theatre and other making across the weekend. The evening brings a low-carbon community feast, a climate-themed pub quiz and DJs.
The festival is all about bringing people together and thinking seriously but responding creatively and enthusiastically to the climate emergency.
Simon Pitkeathley, chief executive, Camden Town Unlimited
The London x London Take: climate festivals usually mean being told things you already know by someone with a slide deck. This one is mostly workshops, and workshops with people you would normally pay properly to learn from: Silo on foraging, Central Saint Martins on mending, a working architect on shade structures. Book the two panels because they will go, then treat Saturday as the making day and Sunday as the walking day. And bring the broken lamp.
Need to know
- Where: Camden Collective, Buck Street and the former Hawley Infants site, Camden NW1
- When: Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 September 2026
- Price: free entry. Some workshops £3 to £5, panels free but ticketed
- Nearest station: Camden Town
- Programme and booking: camdeninspire.com/allevents
Around the corner: our guide to things to do in Camden covers the rest of the weekend.
