Well wasn't it wet! "Little Hulton Goes Large" was first thought of after the Lowry announced that the "Roundabout Theatre" would be coming to Little Hulton roughly 12 months ago.
The desire of those involved was to give the local residents a festival that Little Hulton would enjoy, its aims to bring community together to have some fun and to showcase some of the local groups and businesses that exist in the area. A group of local residents and council workers as well as staff from the Lowry came together to organise what we hoped would be a great event and have worked together over the last 11 months planning the event.
As the saying goes "The best laid plans of mice and men can often go awry" and in this case the weather did not play fair. Now we all know that the British weather is often dodgy but the amount of rain we saw in the week before the festival, not including on the day was ridiculous.
A few of our dadz were in the group that organised the festival and despite having a dry weather plan and a wet weather plan even those were not enough to cope with what we were presented with on the day.
The marquee that had been hired to house community stalls as well as craft stalls and food had to be abandoned as the ground was more like a swamp than a playing field. The festival flags, that people had worked hard to obtain, had to be taken down as the poles were set to snap with the weight of the wet flags.
All of the inflatables (bouncy castles, slides, obstacle course etc) had to be cancelled as it was simply to wet to be safe. The guys who were going to set up a parkour (free running) course couldn't provide it due to the rain and safety concerns and of course some people had to cancel their stalls simply due to the weather.
Even so with some quick work and re siting the event right next to the roundabout the festival went ahead albeit it in a much smaller way. Personally I applaud all that stayed to the end, I know my feet were soaked and looked like i'd been sitting in a bath for the day. It was great to see everyone working together, from squeezing up a little in their gazebos to make room for someone else through to helping people erect their stalls community spirit was definitely there!
For Salford Dadz - Little Hulton it was also the first time we had used our new flyers, flags and roll up banners so we had spent some time on thinking about how our gazebo would be set up. The demise of the marquee meant that everyone mucked in and shared their gazebos with other people and we offered space to a local cake maker (Ikman Cakes). Our offer was absolutely nothing to do with the lovely cakes that were being sold, promise, but they looked great.
It was a massive pity that the rain stopped a lot of people coming out and we didn't have the chance to see many people, even so we managed to talk to quite a few people to explain what we are about and what we do.
The new advertising kit is the first to publicize our web site so again it was a pity more people didn't get to see it.
Even though we got thoroughly soaked all of us at Salford Dadz - Little Hulton would do it again, just hopefully next year it will be drier.