There were lots of creative youngsters at the 2018 gardening festival in North Lodge Park, taking advantage of the opportunity to make lighthouses, scarecrows and garden fairies.

The Crab and Lobster Festival is holding its annual art trail…this year the theme is lighthouses. One of our lovely volunteers, Barbara Swarbrick, has designed and painted this beautiful one for the cafe.

Barbara studied art & design in the 1960s, went to Australia in the early 1970s and made her living from ceramic art and design for over 30 years. Her starting point for this work is the glamour, style and opulence of the Liners sailing the world in the years 1920 – 1950. There are also references to the North Lodge Park Tea Rooms where she works as a volunteer.

Our lovely lighthouse sits alongside the porthole and beach hut our previous entries.

We are pleased to welcome back Bodham Croquet Club to North Lodge Park to give you a chance to try out croquet.

If you want to know your roquet from your rover and your pioneer from your peel, come along on Sunday 13th May from 1pm.

The experts will be in the Park from 1pm with their hoops, mallets and balls ready to play.

“The hedgehog was engaged in a fight with another hedgehog, which seemed to Alice an excellent opportunity for croqueting one of them with the other: the only difficulty was,  that her flamingo was gone across to the other side of the garden” – Lewis Carroll

Following the successful GoGoGorillas! 2013 and GoGoDragons! 2015, Break Charity and Wild in Art are this year bringing you GoGoHares. The trail will start on 24th June 2018 and run for 11 weeks until September 8th.

In 2018, as part of Break’s 50th anniversary, there will be18 moongazer sculptures throughout Norfolk, taking people on a magical tour of our beautiful countryside – including a Chrome Hare right here in North Lodge Park Cromer.

Break still need your donations to support this – please hop over to the pledge page at virginmoneygiving.com

We have commissioned AREA Landscape Architects to work with us to develop an outline plan for the Park to provide a context for future improvements, and to bring forward a detailed design for some play opportunities.

AREA have only been appointed a couple of weeks, but we thought you would want to hear from AREA to understand their approach, so we invited Charlotte Norman from AREA to come to the AGM to present the results of their background work to date, which will form the basis of their proposals.

You can see their presentation here: NLP_AGM_Towards_Concept

For those of you not able to come to this year’s AGM, here is the presentation used for the main part of the evening.  A summary of AREA’s presentation will follow shortly.

On Saturday 31st March (Easter Saturday) The Walker Brothers of Norfolk will be singing in North Lodge Park!

This talented group of singers will be entertaining us with songs from the 40’s through to the 70’s, as well as excerpts from well known Musicals. So if you fancy a bit of the Beach Boys, a dose of Dean Martin or a taste of the Temptations then you know where to come!

This is a free event; we suggest you wrap up warm as the brotehrs will be playing outside next to the cafe (where delicious cake awaits!) The fun all starts at 1pm

Through the Easter School holidays families can explore North Lodge Park in rhyme

Thursday  29^th March to  Sunday 15^th April inclusive

This Easter, families can explore North Lodge Park with the help of a special Treasure Hunt. Carefully prepared by a trainee Bard, the rhyming couplets will encourage children to look around them and find the answers to the simple clues around the Park. On completion of the Treasure Hunt, the use of the magic word in the cafe will release an Easter Egg for successful children. Come and see what wonders there are in North Lodge Park.

The treasure hunt (and Easter Eggs!) will be available during cafe hours (10am-4pm Tuesday to Sunday)

Nominal Entry cost: £1 each (with Easter Egg for all who complete it)

“Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade.” ― Rudyard Kipling

Your responses to our surveys, and ongoing feedback we get, show that one of your top priorities is to bring opportunities for play to the Park. In 2016 we worked with a number of play park equipment suppliers to develop ideas for a play park on the old bowling green, looking for innovative ideas that would help to make the Park more attractive to visitors. For a number of reasons the proposals weren’t suitable to be implemented.

Developing a concept for the whole Park
Learning from this project, rather than rush into bringing forward another play project out of context, we have stood back and taken a broader look at the Park, so that we can put any future proposals for play in the Park into context.

With support from NNDC, we have commissioned a landscape architect, with experience of play in public parks, to work with us to develop an outline plan for the Park to provide a context for future improvements, and to bring forward a detailed design for some play opportunities.

Play time
As part of the brief we have asked for any proposals to address the perceived remoteness and access challenges of the upper lawn, introducing play in innovative ways that are in keeping with the nature of the Park. We have asked the designers to look into using the topography of the upper lawn as a basis for designing play opportunities, rather than implementing a standard play park.

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing”
– George Bernard Shaw

This approach has a number of advantages, not least that it will give us a blue-print for the Park that we can all work towards over the coming years, and enable us to deliver opportunities for play within this in the near term (all being well, before the end of the year).

The appointed designers, AREA Landscape Architects, will be at the AGM on 21st March to present their initial thoughts and to give you all a chance to join the debate.

AGM
The AGM will start at 7.30pm on 21st March in Cromer Community Hall. We’ll look at the highs and lows of the last year, share the charity’s financial statement and forecast and then move onto plans for 2018 which will include giving time to discuss the AREA ideas.

Looking forward to seeing you all at the AGM, if not before.

Barry Meadows

The Crab and Lobster Festival is a lively weekend celebration; now into it’s 9^th year it has become a major fixture on the Cromer calendar drawing many thousands of visitors to the town. It is a feast of fun, food, art, heritage and entertainment, with a wide range of events and activities – the festival celebrates local links with the sea over the festival weekend, this year May 19 – 20 May 2018. The fun starts on Friday night with a traditional seaside variety concert at the Famous Pier Pavilion Theatre in Cromer and continues over the weekend.

For 2018 there is a new addition to the festival on Saturday 19^th May: the Crab and Lobster Gardening Festival to be held in North Lodge Park. This festival fringe event will build on the enormous success of the Crab and Lobster Festival, providing the thousands of visitors with an extra focus. During the day there will be numerous gardening themed events for all from experienced gardeners to young (aspiring) gardeners, with a range of gardening related stalls, including many plant specialists, selling a range of plants and other products for the garden.

North Lodge Park is a cliff top park on the eastern edge of the town centre, with a volunteer group helping look after some of the gardens, operate the cafe and organise events across the year. The garden Fringe Festival will be run by the Friends.

If you would like to take part in this exciting new experience, please get in touch with your proposals for the day. We are looking for creative ideas around the gardening theme to make the day really special.

If you would like a stall to sell products, these are available under the same terms as the main Crab and Lobster festival, but with discounts for booking early.   Please print off the booking form and send it with your fee to us via the cafe in North Lodge Park (Overstrand Road, NR27 0AH).

Stall Booking Form

Please get in touch should you need more information: friends@northlodgepark.org.uk