Lakes Alive in Kendal

A new festival up in Kendal. I cover so many events and I’m usually rushed off my feet trying to Pokémon it all. This was a festival just as jam packed as any but somehow super chilled out. Maybe it was because it was spread over a few days and we glampped over. Is that how you even use that word? Glamped over. Well thats what we did. Posh tent out in a field 5 minutes from a Morissons and idling sheep. I’m doing a middle class wrist flick snap yo.

Unfortunately we couldn’t see the first days performances due to work but the second and third were lovely. A giraffe roamed Kendal nibbling on the tall trees. There was a permanent full moon inside a church. You made your own screen print totes. Live music filled another church at night. You could fly a drone and a project by Ironbird and Draw & Code, Bird Hive let you fly over the Lakes with a 360 degree VR experience like you were a bird… Or well a bird captured by a robot from a dystopian future perhaps as when you looked up you would see your drone overlord. VR outdoors made for a super accessible experience.

On Sunday a few hundred people helped to build a stunningly beautiful installation about climate change. Everything was in walking distance and there was a festival beer too which I grew to like quite quickly. The installation was called Minimum Monument by Néle Azevedo. 3,500 tiny ice figures had been made by the local community and transported up to Kendal Castle to be installed by whoever visited the castle on the day. It wasn’t just a thing to look at you had the task of building the piece of artwork. It really helped people think about the issue of climate change without thinking about politics and science.

Oh and there was Lego used like putty to fill holes in a wall. This festival had so much to love.