Christmas walkabout entertainment for a central London winter festival
Our Living Christmas Trees were booked as one of the headline acts for the Hammersmith Christmas Market Winter Festival on 15th November last year. The event took place on a busy public high street, closed to vehicle traffic and lined with independent stalls selling bespoke Christmas gifts and food, alongside a packed entertainment programme.
The main stage hosted professional musical and dance acts alongside local amateur and youth groups. Out on the street, a roaming bill kept the crowds moving: morris dancers, marching drummers, street theatre performers and our Living Christmas Trees, all working a busy public footfall.
The brief
Hammersmith’s organisers needed acts that could hold their own in a high-energy, high-traffic environment and bring Christmas atmosphere to a wide audience moving constantly between stalls and stages. The Living Christmas Trees were a strong fit, but the format of the event pushed the act beyond its usual mode of performance.
Our approach
Arriving and setting up
Being in central London, we built in a generous buffer and arrived at least two hours early to handle any access issues. Once parked, we found the event organiser and walked the site to understand the performance area, dressing room and backstage logistics.
The dressing room was upstairs in a theatre building. That sounds straightforward on paper, but our Living Christmas Trees can’t manage stairs once in costume. The venue staff were brilliant and we worked together to find an alternative: a tucked-away spot in the lobby for the final costume fitting, before stepping through the double doors and straight out onto the street. It worked seamlessly and caused no disruption to the building’s other operations that day.
This is the kind of problem-solving we do as standard. Every venue is different and the difference between a smooth booking and a chaotic one is having an act that flexes around your space, rather than demanding the space flexes around it.
From static to fully roaming
The Living Christmas Trees are normally performed as a static installation, interacting with passers-by who come to them. The footprint of the Hammersmith event made that the wrong fit. The crowd was moving constantly, and a static act would have been missed by most of the audience.
So we adapted. The trees performed as a fully roaming and interactive act, covering ground and meeting people up and down the length of the street.
The one challenge with that decision was the costume itself. The plant-pot shoes that complete the look are difficult to walk long distances in. We solved it with smart black shoes finished with bright gold laces. Practical for a day on the move, on-brand for the costume, and barely noticeable to the audience.
The performance
The performances landed exactly as hoped. We had lovely interactions with children, couples, families and individuals stopping for photographs throughout the day. The roaming format also opened up the chance to play with the other acts on the bill: the trees joined the morris men in a dance, took part in an aerobics class run from the main stage, and went on a pretend date with a Mrs Claus character.
The flexibility of the act, paired with the experience of the performers, meant we could read the room and adapt the level of interaction to suit whoever the trees met. Quieter moments for nervous children, full pantomime energy for the dance numbers on stage.
A short reel from the day: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRuFXTZjrZg/
The outcome
Feedback from the organisers was excellent and we expect to be booked again next year if the event runs.
Book the Living Christmas Trees for your event
The Living Christmas Trees are available for hire across the UK for:
- Christmas markets and winter festivals
- High street and shopping centre activations
- Christmas light switch-on events
- Corporate Christmas parties and staff events
- Council and community events
- Private Christmas functions
Whether your venue needs a static installation that anchors a Christmas feature area, or a fully roaming walkabout act that works a moving crowd, we will adapt the performance to fit the space, the audience and the brief.