Community Summer Fiesta 2026

Throughout June, Seven Sisters Market came alive with our Community Summer Festival — a month of activities, workshops and celebrations bringing together traders, local communities, families, young people and visitors from across London and beyond.

The festival was an opportunity to celebrate the Market as more than a place to shop and eat. It is a place shaped by community, culture, migration, resistance and collective action — and a space where people continue to meet, organise, create and celebrate together.

La Casita: welcoming people into the Market

At the entrance to the Market, La Casita welcomed everyone throughout the festival. Designed by UNIT38, the temporary structure created a colourful new threshold to Seven Sisters Market and was the result of days of building, installing and painting, with many hours contributed by volunteers who helped bring it to life.

The story of La Casita does not end with the festival. We are now working with traders to give its materials a second life, reusing the wooden boxes that formed its building blocks to create a community garden for the Market. The garden will become another shared space shaped collectively by the people who use the Market.

A Living Archive of Latin American life in London

As part of the Community Summer Festival, we also created a Living Archive, developed by Verónica Posada, Juan Pablo Angarita, Tatiana Vega and María Catalina Venegas, to strengthen and make visible the Networks of Care that have shaped Latin American life in London.

At the centre of the Living Archive is a timeline tracing some of the people, organisations, movements, campaigns and spaces that have contributed to the history of Latin American communities in the city. Creating it reminded us why documenting these histories matters. Too often, the experiences and contributions of migrant communities remain fragmented, undocumented or absent from conventional accounts of the city.

More than a historical record, the timeline has therefore become a living and collective archive, continually shaped by the people who contribute their memories, photographs, knowledge and lived experiences.

Throughout the process of installing and developing the timeline in the Market, we welcomed community members, researchers, artists and long-standing community leaders who helped us build this collective history. Contributors including José Luis Seijas (LatinoLife), Patria Román-Velásquez (Latin Elephant, who coined the term “Latin London”), Cal Jader (Movimientos), writer Patricia Díaz Daza, and activist and academic Catalina Ortiz, alongside many others, generously shared their knowledge and experiences, helping us trace important milestones, organisations and campaigns that have shaped Latin American life in the UK.

The Living Archive also brought attention to the networks of care that sustain our communities. Beyond preserving memories, it opened conversations about mutual support, wellbeing, migration, collective resilience and belonging. These networks — formal and informal, visible and sometimes invisible — have been fundamental to how Latin American communities organise, support one another and create a sense of home in London.

Installed within Seven Sisters Market, the archive continues to grow as people encounter it, recognise their own histories within it and contribute new stories. In this way, it connects the Market's own history of migration, community organising and resistance with a much wider story of Latin American London.

A month of activities and celebration

Throughout June, the festival was accompanied by a programme of creative workshops, music, dance, activities for children and young people, community engagement and opportunities to learn more about Seven Sisters Market and its story.

Of course, we couldn't miss the Lookalike Contest, which brought even more energy and excitement to the celebrations. A huge thank you to Haringey Culture Collective for organising the day and for all the excitement and joy surrounding the ticket raffle.

The festival culminated in our Summer Fiesta weekend on 27–28 June, when the Market welcomed an incredible mix of people from different parts of London and the world. We danced, celebrated, ate, created and spent time together — with people who have known and supported Seven Sisters Market for many years, as well as visitors discovering it for the first time.

For us, that was an important part of the festival: opening the Market to new people while sharing the community and history behind it. Seven Sisters Market exists today because of decades of organising, campaigning and collective struggle. Celebrating here also means recognising that history and inviting new people to understand it and become part of what comes next.

None of this would have been possible without the people behind it. We are incredibly grateful to all the traders, volunteers, artists, organisations, partners and community members who gave their time, knowledge and energy throughout June, as well as everyone who helped share and promote the festival across their networks.

The Community Summer Festival may be over, but what was created together continues — through the relationships built, the histories documented in our Living Archive, the stories shared and, soon, through a new community garden growing from La Casita.