Hurst Festival 2019: Super Sunday

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By Kate Cowan

Our Super Sunday returns on 15th September 2019 between 12.30 and 5pm. Super Sunday is a perfect family day. Spend time with loved ones wandering through your village, enjoying the entertainment and chatting with friends and family.

Taking over Hurstpierpoint High Street, Super Sunday will include the parade with Burgess Hill Marching Band and Treasured Transport, delicious food, funfair rides, face-painting, free bow-making and art workshops, a swing band with dance lessons, walkabouts, live music, a craft tent, the fabulous reptiles, local traders and a brilliant inflatable endurance zone!

Our bars stock local wines and beers, plus our services, venues and suppliers are all local, making our footprint small and sustainable. It really will be an incredible, fun-packed day, so cross out 15th September on your calendar and we’ll see you there!

The opening weekend of Hurst Festival is packed full of entertainment in addition to Super Sunday! There are exhibitions aplenty with stunning work on display at Holy Trinity Church, including carving, calligraphy, felting, sculpture, painting, jewellery and ceramics as well as weaving on an inkle!

Hurst Studios are open the 14th and 15th with Hurst College running a shuttle bus between Mossy Mile and College Lane via St Georges between 12noon and 2pm. There are 15 locations to visit!

The Torch Centre is open for a Cream Tea on 14th between 3 and 5pm. Hurstpierpoint Horticultural Society Autumn Show will have displays of chrysanthemums, dahlias, fruit and photography in the Village Centre. There’s Capture the Flag with Hurstpierpoint’s ‘C’ Company Army Cadets teaching evasion and capture techniques on Wolstonbury. Martin O’Donnell leads our Raised Garden Beds workshop, which will be held in Court Bushes Community Hub. The raised beds will remain after the workshop for the community, and we are looking for budding local gardeners to help look after these all year round in return for the produce!

Mid Sussex Ramblers are offering a free walk around our beautiful countryside on Sunday 15th. There is an exhibition in the Village Centre Foyer of 150 years of St Lawrence School, including current work from pupils and many past photographs and historical records. And there’s a Cream Tea Dance in the Village Centre from 2-4.30pm!

Saturday night Cajun Fais Do-Do is brought to you by Rough Chowder. An evening of music and dancing, with a traditional Cajun waltz or two-step and foot stomping Swamp Blues and Zydeco. There is also a beginners Cajun Dance Workshop led by instructors before the music starts for those who want to learn the steps!

Heber Opera presents the Passion of the Opera in Holy Trinity church on Saturday 14th. Love, lust and retribution are the cornerstones of most operatic plots and are the focus of their performance for us, taking excepts from La Bohem and Macbeth amongst others.

On Sunday night the brilliant John Crampton will be in Sayers Common Village Hall for blues and bluegrass on steel slide guitar, banjo, harmonica and vocals. When a single artist sitting on a small chair can get hundreds of screaming blues fans up on their feet then he is pretty damn good!

And that’s just the first weekend! There are two more weeks of brilliant events and entertainment: The Glass Menagerie by Hurst Players, Klio Blonz on flute and Rebecca Hepplewhite on cello, a talk on the Loiyangalani Trust, comedy nights, Midsummer Mystery: Murder Most Sweet! to cherry pick only a few choice pieces.

Go to www.hurstfestival.org now, browse the whole festival and get booking before it’s too late!