YoCo at the Homestead Park Festival
Joseph Rowntree Foundation filled Homestead Park with activity over the weekend of 5th/6th July 2025 - a joyful free weekend of music, creativity, and connection in the beautiful Homestead Park – a space gifted to the people of York over a century ago.
They aimed to honour the park’s legacy of generosity and community spirit with the Homestead Park Festival: Here is Hope – reviving the tradition of the much-loved family carnivals once held right here.
And YoCo was part of this - sharing a pavilion with our friends Yorspace and with Birmingham’s Civic Square and Threads in the Ground (and huge quantities of mycelium!).
We created a space where we could engage visitors in imaginative thought – bringing them into active conversation about what is important in the place around where they live – play, neighbourliness and meeting people, casual encounters, feeling safe – whatever they felt.
We worked with paper, card, magazine cuttings, pens and pastels to create shapes, stories, images and fragments which built to tell a story about space which enriches lives. We made collages on the walls, we used Post-Its to record thoughts, and most of all we hung things on threads from the roof.
We created a space which prompted those who visited across the two days to engage, to think, to talk and to make. We created useful beginnings of a brief – shaped by all ages – for what a vibrant, inclusive neighbourhood on York Central (or anywhere) needs to be. We made one of the building blocks of “a community made through exchange”.
The weather was “interesting” with sun and strong gusty winds on the Saturday, and a mix of sunshine and showers on the Sunday. The wind meant anything with too much surface area immediately took off upwards when hung above us, so we developed a way of curling pictures to make “lanterns” which behaved themselves well enough to create an animated, lively, intriguing canopy over the tables where Heidi, Phil, Julia and Penny talked, listened, encouraged and prompted. Thanks to everyone else who dropped in to chat, to encourage and generally help out.
What did people say made good neighbourhoods? Trees and green space, and places to grow food and flowers. Good neighbours - and importantly - ways of meeting them; places for casual encounter and shared spaces which truly encouraged sharing. People agreed that neighbourhood was about more than homes and businesses - it was about the civic and social spaces where people spent time together, and it was about celebrating the need to co-operate and negotiate - being positive about the challenge of closeness. The kids - well they wanted space to play and enjoy being with other kids, but also wanted nature close by. There were echoes of YoCo’s community plan - the adults wanted kids playing in the street, and the kids wanted birdsong outside their windows!