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T100 is an annual walking, talking and making festival that encourages multiple stories to surface in Thurrock. T100 continues to grow each year, gaining new activities and events, new walkers, new routes and new partners to support the programme. What began as a walking celebration of Thurrock – 10 miles, 10 walks, 10 days, has developed into an outdoor arts festival stretching along and across the estuary into Southend and Kent, hence the name T100.
Over the last ten years, we’ve travelled on a journey with a growing team of local volunteers, one year spontaneously building the theme for the next, all the time drawing more people in through a range of arts activities.
(c) Mike Johnston
In 2023, T100 was awarded a substantial grant by the National Lottery Reaching Communities Fund to be utilised over the next three years. The funds are currently being used to help deliver more activities in the region as well as engage with more people within the community, while preparing for T100 to becoming an independent organisation.
Once T100 is an independent, community-led organisation it will aim to provide an organisational framework which links grassroots activities to larger initiatives, mechanisms for local people to access and shape place-based strategic narratives and ensure a spatial framework which literally connects people and places together. Furthermore, the support from Reaching Communities will enable T100 to build a sustained programme across the year and to build on its work training and mentoring local children and young people to shape and take on more leadership of the festival activity.
The T100 Festival team is made up of Programme Manager, Nicole Artingstall (nicole@t100festival.co.uk) and Environmental Champion, George Bellamy (george@kinetika.co.uk), alongside founding organisation Kinetika.
Nicole is responsible for community engagement and festival programme management. George develops the community garden and natural dyes at our base in High House Production Park in Purfleet-on-Thames.
(c) Mark Massey
The T100 exhibition captures the spirit of the festival and the people and places who have taken part along the routes over the first five years. Some of the exhibition information can be explored on these web pages, but there is so much more to see in real life, such as the beautiful handmade journals, the gorgeous silk flags, the printed tablecloths, the maps and recipes created and collected as the festival has grown.
The exhibition is available for hire, please email us on hello@t100festival.co.uk to enquire.
Click the below buttons to find out more about each T100 festival year.
In 2015, Kinetika was invited by the Council’s Public Health Department to develop a Thurrock walking arts festival to change people’s attitude to walking, reveal accessible footpaths across Thurrock and get people talking to each other.
What began as a 100-mile marathon across the borough, has developed into a festival that starts and ends in Thurrock and stretches along and across the estuary, into Southend and over to Kent.
The concept of T100 is very simple. In response to a theme selected for the year, a programme of walks and community-led activities is devised by local groups.
The festival takes place in towns and villages across an area over 3 weeks each summer, with a series of walks connecting all the events together.
Leading up to the festival, activities are undertaken in libraries, schools and community spaces and have included writing, drawing, cooking, painting, researching, dancing, audio recording and acting. The results add colour to the walks which have incorporated heritage talks, shared community meals, outdoor theatre, a soundscape installation, silk flags reflecting local stories, singing and even the making and performing of an animated 12-foot-tall Tilbury Docker puppet designed by local high school students.
The magic of T100 is its simplicity as a framework. It enables groups to come up with their own ideas, develop them as separate projects then showcase and share them to the wider community as part of the ten-day festival.
