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Summer Fun at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery

HOT family correspondent and intrepid Mum, Vanessa Alves, wants to spread the word about what’s happening locally during the school holidays. Here she writes about Hastings Museum and Art Gallery quickly becoming a safe haven for her family: “a lovely place to go, wandering around the collections, all very child friendly with lots of things for kids to dress-up in, colour-in and explore”. 

In the past months, I have been particularly impressed by Hastings Museum and Art Gallery’s family-friendly activities and during the summer, they’re holding lots of FREE events.

Storyteller Kevin Graal

Lead Councillor for Culture, Kim Forward said: “We are delighted to offer this fantastic free season of events to the community of Hastings. The Museum and Art Gallery has something to offer everyone – with historic collections, architecture, local history, children’s activities and visual art… but these summer activities are really something special – and it’s all free, as is entrance to the museum.”

Here, There and Everywhere: On Tuesdays 7, 14, 21 August from 10.30am – 12pm, join Kevin Graal for family storytelling with stories from around the world connected to items in the museum, along with the opportunity to do some craft.

Dinosaur Day: On 22 August from 10am – 3pm, featuring the THE IGUANODON RESTAURANT, an outdoor family theatre performance by Emerald Ant.

Performances start at 11.30am and 2pm. FREE family craft activity all day. Please feel free to bring a picnic, but if you do, please also bring an extra carrier bag so that you can take your waste home with you.

The Iguanodon Restaurant

“Imagine it’s New Year’s Eve 1853, in Crystal Palace Park, and a group of leading professors and palaeontologists are holding a sumptuous banquet in an unusual venue; inside the concrete mould of an Iguanodon….”

Guests will feast on fossil-fuelled fun with a julienne of joviality, and a dessert of dinosaur delight! A highly visual, funny and peculiar, fast moving historical romp of a show (35 mins). The Iguanodon Restaurant is inspired by an extraordinary real-life event – and it takes place inside a massive 35 foot beast!

Emerald Ant’s new show inspires audiences in their geological landscape, fossils and local history. Based on events from 1812 to 1860, which saw a rapid growth in scientific discovery, we travel at rollicking speed from Dorset to Sussex and Kent to witness momentous fossil discoveries, and finally to Crystal Palace, where our iguanodon still stands.

Over an outrageously indulgent feast, the guests, famous dinosaur hunters and pioneering geologists, William Buckland, Gideon Mantell, Mary Anning and Richard Owen, compete over their amazing fossil finds – and wrangle over interpretations: Is it a bird? Or a giant fish? Or maybe an ancient crocodile? They debate questions around extinction and evolution: How come dinosaurs no longer exist? What is the stone beneath our feet telling us about the world? And our place in it?

Inside the museum there’ll be real dinosaur bones to handle and dino craft activities.

There is no chance that my family will miss this and I look forward to spending more time at the Hastings Museum and art Gallery this summer. I hope to see you there too!

Find out more: Hastings Museum and Art Gallery: Summer Fun 2018

Also in: Public Arts