Theatre Merchants are experts at bringing open spaces to life and building a greater sense of civic pride among the participants. Discover how they brought to life Caledonian Park in London.
They were commissioned by Friends of Caledonian Park and Islington Greenspace to produce an interactive, site-specific promenade production celebrating the history of Caledonian Park. The event was performed in 2005 with the help of children from the local school following a series of workshops.
The production covered 400 years of the park’s history, from the Danish ambassador’s residence in the sixteenth century to its days as a tea garden, its heyday as London’s Metropolitan Cattle Market in Victorian times to the famous inter-wars flea market of the twentieth century where children from the local school played the roles of their forebears, bunking off school to work in the market on Friday each week.
The production featured such diverse activities as the first performance for over two hundred years of Thomas Otway’s version of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and a performance of the Lindy-Hop by ‘Strictly Dance Fever’ finalists Natasha and Paul.
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