More than 27,000 people tucked into the variety of delicious street food on offer after walking through the gates of a successful pop-up venture, organisers have confirmed.
Norwich’s Junkyard Market was created earlier this year, during the middle of August, and ran from outside St Mary’s Works, off Duke Street, featuring vendors from Norfolk, East Anglia and across the UK.
The free-to-enter eatery was put on by events organiser AfterDark Promotions, along with The Shoe Factory Social Club, which offers free warehouse space to local creatives at St Mary’s Works, and developers Our Place, which is behind the multi-million pound regeneration project planned for the venue.
Speaking on the final day of the seven week run, Michael Femi-Ola, AfterDark Promotions operations manager, said it had been better than they could have hoped for.
“For us, to do an event catering for everyone, all different walks of life, has been a huge undertaking and brought with it many different challenges.
“Each demographic we’ve seen has had different expectations and it’s been nice trying to bring everything together to cater for everyone. And as a group of people working on this event, we have also come together too.
“We wanted to do this event, we wanted to include our contractors. The whole point was to bring everyone together to enjoy food and drink and experience something somewhat normal in these different times.”
He said traders and staff had given the event 110pc.
More than 130 traders were contacted to be part of the venture and Mr Femi-Ola said he was pleased with the turnout, praising the vendors who took a chance on it.
Junkyard Market also raised money for two local charities by adding a £1 discretionary charge on to each bill.
The event raised £20,000 for the Norwich Soup Movement and more than £7,500 for St Martin’s homelessness charity.
Mr Femi-Ola added: “We swapped charity partners as we had raised our goal for the Norwich Soup Movement earlier than expected, thanks to the generous donations of customers. We saw the recent plights of the St Martin’s charity in the media and decided to try and do our bit to help it out too.”
The open air market had been forced to postpone its final weekend, which had been scheduled for the last week in September, due to an “admin error” with its events licence. But it was able to welcome its final customers over the weekend, capping off a wildly successful run.
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