This coming Saturday (July 6th), London finally gets its own Maker Faire (albeit a mini one), to be held from 10am until 6pm at the London College of Communication, in Elephant & Castle (yes, that really is what it’s called). As always the event is sponsored by the good people at Make, but run as a separate entity with further support from local businesses and makers including the V&A Museum, Sugru, Codasign, and Faberdashery amongst others.
The event is free to enter, but you must register your interest via Eventbrite and there will be several hands-on ‘drop in’ workshops for you and your kids running throughout the day, some of which will incur a small fee. These include basic soldering, screen printing, repairing your stuff, playing with electro dough and even building a mini synthesiser. There are also several other more in depth workshops on working with Arduino, MaKey MaKey, 3D printing and coding with Processing and Raspberry Pi – but they’re mostly fully booked already unfortunately.
The following day, the V&A are also hosting a meetup at the museum in Kensington, with a series of keynotes and discussion panels on the social and cultural significance of the Maker Movement featuring author and Boing Boing co-founder Cory Doctorow, Tim Hunkin, creator of some truly bonkers amusement arcade machines, as well as other artists, designers, tinkerers and writers. The full schedule is available on the Elephant & Castle Mini Maker Faire site.
I’m so excited to finally get to attend a Maker Faire after seeing all the great things that go on at the big one in the San Francisco Bay Area. There have been other faires here in the UK before, including the main one up in Newcastle, but the timings have always been wrong for me, and although I know this one won’t be as epic it should still be a great chance to meet up with some of London’s makers and hackers. In fact the GeekDad Show and Tell group from Kent are holding their second meet up at the faire. I’ll be wearing my GeekDad t-shirt, so say hello if you spot me!
