Frank Creber

East London is home to a diverse community of some 12,000 artists. The five Olympic host boroughs are home to the largest cultural quarter in Europe. A new Water City is growing around the rivers, canals, and docks that were neglected after the closure of the docks and the industrial decline of the 1970s.

The ambition of the Water City Festival is to create an international festival in East London with a reputation and longevity comparable to the Edinburgh Festival as one piece of the long term legacy of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. The Water City Festival will use the arts to explore the enormous physical changes taking place in east London. The Festival will allow residents, school pupils and those who live and work in east London to experience making music and creating art as a part of the new metropolitan city emerging around them.

There are plans to commission new pieces of music for the Festival’s culmination in 2011 and we are in the early stages of creating a Water City Orchestra made up of amateur musicians from the East End. The focus of the Festival will be on practical activity and will be driven by the theme “learning by doing” as professional musicians and artists, music college and school students learn to perform and work together.

Read more in this brochure: click here to download (1.6MB PDF)

To Date, about 200 adults and children have been involved in making and exhibitng visual arts works as part of the Water City Festival

Artists , Artist’s groups and organisations who have been involved to date in the visual arts:-

Arteast, disability Enterprise, 20 people

Signs of Life, Mural Project, 20 people

Neha Malik, Painter

Caroline Holden-Hotopf, Artist/Cartoonist

Theo Creber, Photographer

Mark O’Rourke, Painter

Ann-Marie Fairbrother, Artist

Kole Onilere, Film maker

Ian Moore, Designer