Children’s Festival

Celebrating its 36^th year, our Children’s Festival is a festival within a festival, a secluded space set aside to inspire and entertain our smaller Woodfordians. Entertainment starts from 8am each day and runs until 5pm. 

Activities range from puppet shows, to craft, games, theatre, circus, dance and storytelling. It’s full-time fun for everyone and anyone looking to play the day away. 

The 2023/24 festival features over 55 acts presenting more than 260 performances and workshops, included in your Woodford Folk Festival children’s ticket. 

HISTORY

The Children’s Festival began a long time ago, long before iPads and mobile phones, before themed birthday parties and jumping castles. But not before Play School.

When you combine a group of friends, their love of folk music and fun, the children that belong to these friends and the desire to create an ongoing event that celebrates this, the festival was born and cradled within that, the Children’s Festival. It was, from those first days, a place for the kids to bring their parents to.

Initially, the children’s programme consisted of family and friends presenting the workshops and performing the music – it was a few paragraphs in the pages of the festival programme. In 1990 we went big time and booked the well-known Don Spencer from Play School.

Today there are nine venues with six pages dedicated to the Children’s Festival programme with circus, drama, craft workshops, environmental discovery, music mentoring and performances.

Over the years the number of venues have increased, each one with a different theme. Mish Mash, a venue especially for the preschoolers began in 2004, Big Ideas in 2006 focusing on skills based workshops and Mind Games in 2016, a space for educational, environmental based workshops. Some ideas became part of the annual fabric of today’s festival – circus skills, the storytellers chair, and the Hoopla, a giant bamboo framed series of hoops.

The generations that have passed through the Children’s Festival, many of them are now the performers, organisers, volunteers and festival goers and here is where the future lies. It continues to be a world of wonder and fun for the small and not so small, and one to keep coming back for.