Engaging with the Cally Festival

Summary

A blog post covering the three UCL activities that will be appearing at the Cally Festival on July the 6th, and encouraging readers to attend.

This July, UCL Public Engagement will be partnering with the Cally Festival for the first time. Helen Craig, joint Head of Public Engagement, Programmes, previews what you might see and explains why we’ll be there.  

Photograph Credit: Susannah Fields via Cally Festival

The Cally Festival is a community festival that takes place each year on the Caledonian Road in Islington. Families and visitors can experience music, performance, art, hands-on activities, a street market and creative workshops. And over 10,000 attendees across the day will celebrate the best of Caledonian Road and the local area. 

Here in UCL Public Engagement, we’d been looking for a friendly, welcoming festival that we could collaborate with – offering a chance to try something out for those who are new to public engagement. With this partnership, we could build capacity for public engagement at UCL and build relationships with local communities close to the Bloomsbury campus at the same time.   

We were thrilled that in 2025, with the help of a Knowledge Exchange Small Grant, we’ve been able to partner with the festival to enable UCL staff to deliver hands-on activities at the event.  

After a competitive open call for ideas, we worked with a team including festival organisers, representatives from Islington Council, stallholders and community representatives to select our three winning teams. We’ve since worked with them on developing skills and understanding of hands-on engagement. And on July 6th, you’ll be able to visit their stands and share that experience with them.  

We’re really looking forward to “Our voices carry: A living archive of storytelling through sound” from staff and students at The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. This interactive, multi-sensory public engagement activity is rooted in Pan-African and Indigenous traditions and offers a mobile listening lounge and sound storytelling booth inviting festivalgoers to reflect, document, and co-create a living and growing public archive of the sounds of home. 

 We’re also excited to try our hand at ‘Likes, Lies, and Algorithms: Uncovering Misinformation Online’ from staff at The UCL Department of Political Science. This interactive activity will offer the chance to test your skills at identifying misinformation and uncover the truth about (social) media algorithms. You might reveal your own blind spots, but we’ve got lots of practical tips to help you sort fact from fiction.  

Finally, we have “Draw the place you love: What does home mean to you?” from staff in Migrant Research Unite (MRU UCL). This will be a craft-based experience and offering the chance to reflect on the things we carry with us when we move, and what home means to us.  

All three have been joys to work with, and it’s been great to champion public engagement in research areas that may not have appeared at the festival before. We’ve also already seen positive impacts from the work, with connections forming between community projects and the project teams (both successful and unsuccessful) and further community festivals expressing interest in working with us. We hope that this is the beginning of a productive and exciting partnership – and we hope to see you there on Sunday!