The annual Broomhouse street party was in full swing yesterday (August 10) – with hundreds attending the community event that included a BBQ, live music, fringe performers and a range of activities for all ages.
Kicking off at 12pm, the event saw Broomhouse Crescent close to traffic at 12pm, transforming the area into a spectacular community venue decorated in flags and balloons. There was a glorious festival vibe with children getting their faces painted and balloon models in the community hub, and a range of bouncy castles across St David's church grounds.
Organised by Space @ The Broomhouse Hub, the annual party is a flagship calendar event where the community can come together, eat for free, enjoy live performances and meet people from a range of organisations that provide support for the local community.
Kicking off at 12pm, the event saw Broomhouse Crescent close to traffic at 12pm, transforming the area into a spectacular community venue decorated in flags and balloons. There was a glorious festival vibe with children getting their faces painted and balloon models in the community hub, and a range of bouncy castles across St David's church grounds.
Organised by Space @ The Broomhouse Hub, the annual party is a flagship calendar event where the community can come together, eat for free, enjoy live performances and meet people from a range of organisations that provide support for the local community.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 The street party has run for a good few years now and it's kind of steadily, steadily grown
00:25 and there are other elements added but at the core of it, it's an all day event for
00:31 the local community. We combine it with a bit of fun, the food's all free, we charge
00:36 for nothing but we have help and advice come by way of organisations who take stalls here
00:42 and anybody who's looking for support can access that support through them. It's growing
00:47 every year, this year we now have fringe festival events coming out and we've got flamethrowers
00:53 and street performers, beatbox artists here, the Ukrainian choir was here this year, we
00:59 have the DJ and another local band play as well so little by little it grows, it grows
01:06 as well as the organisation grows.
01:09 [Music]
01:20 [Music]
01:30 In the old centre they were capped at what they could offer because they had a finite
01:46 amount of space and they had a finite amount of income, funding that they had to deliver
01:53 the programmes at that time. This centre has created so much more space. One of the issues
02:01 that many areas have is they don't have a community hub at the centre of what they do.
02:09 Funders like Foundation Scotland are few and far between and the difference it has made
02:14 in us being able to access a grant plus the loan facility went a long way into the build
02:20 costs to get the building open and it means that we are literally and metaphorically at
02:28 the heart of Broomhouse, we're right in the very centre of it, you don't stumble upon
02:32 us, we're here in the community because this is the bulk of our work and where we serve.
02:38 So Foundation Scotland provided one of our biggest investments of £500,000 to the space
02:44 at Broomhouse for the redevelopment of the space for the community and as you can see
02:49 they've made a great job. We work across Scotland but obviously Broomhouse is a challenged area
02:56 within Edinburgh but they're very lucky to have an organisation like The Space to help
03:02 them through it so we targeted this organisation when they came to us as an organisation that
03:07 we really wanted to support because we saw it as a community that had difficulties but
03:12 we knew Space could help them through it and help support the families and individuals
03:18 to make the best and it's absolutely doing that to its maximum potential. I reckon today
03:24 it will go down in folklore as one of the organisations where one person tells you there
03:28 was 100 people there and by next year there will be probably 1000 people there but it's
03:32 absolutely fantastic and we're delighted to be welcomed along, take part, see the community
03:38 in action and really not just The Space but there's so many organisations behind us that
03:44 are providing such valuable support for the community so it's really excellent, we love
03:48 it. Not everybody has the opportunity to go into the centre of town and experience the
03:53 festival for themselves, that might be that they're isolated, it might be just a loneliness
03:58 factor, it might be money that they can't afford to go and do those things so if we
04:03 can bring a little bit of that out to here it adds to our day, it adds to the local community's
04:09 experience here and it's brilliant. It's in our plans that we continue to do this every
04:14 year, when we finish today we'll ask everybody what they thought of the day, how it went
04:20 well, what they would like to see more of, what they would like to see different and
04:24 we'll take it on board and we'll go from there.