image courtesy of Wandsworth Heritage Service
The Junction Cinema, Lavender Hill, Battersea c1912
This year’s festival features a wide variety of talks, walks, and workshops exploring the theme of ‘Entertaining Wandsworth’. From music halls and cinemas to bowling and velodromes, many events highlight the role entertainment has played in the lives of Wandsworth residents past and present.
The festival’s highlights include a tour of the former Granada Cinema in Tooting; a talk on Wandsworth and Battersea’s music halls by local historian Neil Robson; a talk by author Pat Heery on the Putney Velodrome; a guided walk showing Battersea Park’s role in the 1951 festival of Britain celebrations; a literary themed murder mystery staged by Wandsworth’s ever-entertaining librarians; a tour, talk, and exhibition at Whitelands College showcasing the wealth of costume and archives the college has collected from 138 years of May Day revels; a talk on the history of Putney’s cinemas from local historian Philip Evison; a talk from Wandsworth Prison Museum’s curator exploring the role the prison has played in fiction and film; and a guided walk round Wandsworth Town charting it’s entertaining past.
Additional highlights include a talk at Tara Arts Theatre from Dr Cathy Hunt about the Corruganza factory strike; a guided walk along the course of the Heathwall from historian and writer Jon Newman; and a magic show where children can join former Battersea magician and watchmaker John Neville Maskelyne in 19th century Wandsworth for some magic tricks interspersed with weird and wonderful facts from the borough’s history!