Urban Wild 2026 begins!
- urbanwild8
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
Urban Wild 2026 has now begun! The week has gotten off to a great start, with a lovely workshop from writers Nazneen Ahmed Pathak and Yarrow Townsend called See, Sketch, Sew: Crafting a Slower City, where participants went on a short sensory walk in the city parks, and leant how to stitch or sketch their found items find using Bengali naksi kantha techniques. Saturday also marked the St Denys Carnival, and the start of the St Denys Art Festival, which will be running until Friday 29th May.
The festival really kicked off with our festival day on 24th May, Urban Wild on the Common. With the bank holiday weather reaching a scorching 30 degrees, exhibitors, musicians, artists and volunteers braved the heat to provide an excellent celebration of Southampton's green spaces and the people who take care of them. Music was provided by Bunker 178 with the musical contributions from Rhythms of Resistance, Cath Watkins and Nic Bradford, Red Stars Choir, Angling for Farthings, Shanti Green, The Guillotine Union Boys, The MoonEyez Band and Southampton Ukulele Jam. In-Common took some excellent photos of the day, which you can see on their website
while we await the photos taken by In Focus photographers and their young trainees, who covered the day's activities while gaining valuable work experience!
Elsewhere in the Common, people were coming together to imagine a better future for Southampton. The creative workshops provided by Tribe Alternative Stage School helped participants to imagine a redesigned Southampton where health and wellbeing are prioritised, with a workshop later this week to continue the conversation. Transition Southampton brought their Time Machine, where people could be transported to a more sustainable future with the Imagine Southampton 2030 stall, where people could also send letters to the future.
We were also very pleased to welcome organisations from the New Forest and partner organisations that are also part of the YouCAN scheme, the fund that enabled Urban Wild to take place for the last two years. PEDALL All Ability Cycling brought their adapted cycles for people to try out, New Forest Youth Board ran a photo competition and ran a selection of creative activities that linked with their migration project, Nightjar.
At the festival, we also launched a special newspaper specially for Urban Wild! Thank you to In Common News for helping to write up and produce the paper, and for launching some special stories inside, including this write up of an upcoming Urban Wild event, Building with Nature; the paper also has a print only exclusive interview and recipe from Fatima Zaman of Zaman Condiments. There is a special supper club taking place on the 28th May where you can explore the flavours of Zaman Condiments with a few tickets left!
Check out the rest of the festival events to see if you can spot the newspaper at them - or you can download it here!
To help Southampton National Park City with the costs of the newspaper and delivering the festival, we would be grateful for a small donation of £3 to our Collectiv Pot! Click here to donate to Southampton National Park City. And don't forget to check out the rest of our events on the Urban Wild 2026 page on Mighty Network!
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