Spaces and Places

Braunston Playing Field Association hosted a very successful Big Braunston Picnic event on Sunday. This was a day with many hats on - part of the Cultural Olympiad Open Weekend; a consultation on plans to redevelop the play-area; a warm-up for the festival. But chiefly it was an invitation to share a restful Sunday afternoon in the open-air, en masse. I'd say about 40 people brought a picnic and the papers and whiled the afternoon away.

If, as I did, you move from London to a village, you tend to assume that by some rural economy of scale, everyone knows everyone and does everything together, all the time. Maybe that's more about my abiding 'outsider' paranoia. And it's not actually a state of affairs I - or I expect many others - would particularly hanker after: there's a place for anonymity and privacy, or at least an air of mystery...

Nevertheless, opportunities for coming together as a member of a village are fewer than I had expected, despite Braunston having some great open spaces - the vast expanse of the Playing Field. the slopes of Jetty Field. And the curiously shaped Village Green (the least Village Green like Village Green?).

The other day I bumped into a member of the Jetty Field committee, on his knees in the long grass, measuring the distance between the trees in the field. The committee is hoping to plant more trees to restore the avenue which once led from Eastfields House. The Playing Fields committee is to begin fundraising soon to develop the play-area, and improve access.

The festival will try to build on these existing efforts to open up Braunston's spaces and places to more residents and visitors. It'll take more than a bit of bunting, we know (by the way, we're holding a bunting-making workshop on Monday 9th 10-12 in the Village Hall...) and there's a lot of work to be done in terms of getting the word out locally between now and August 28th. If you can help promote the festival in any way, let me know!