Bread Golf and Surbiton Skiing Event recognised in Time & Leisure Magazine Food & Culture Awards

We were over the moon to have two of our unique community-led sporting events shortlisted in this year’s Time & Leisure magazine’s 2023 Food and Culture Awards.

Our International Bread Golf Championship and Ski Sunday & King's Soup events, held last September, were both up for the Most Innovative Arts / Community Project Award.

Each year the lifestyle publication, which is geared towards SW London and North Surrey residents, invites its readers to vote for what they consider to be the very best of what the area has to offer.

Nearly 10,000 votes were received for categories ranging from the best places to eat, drink and shop through to best family attractions.

To be shortlisted for an award, Bread Golf and Ski Sunday received enough votes to make it into the top ten for the Innovative Art / Community Project category.

Dough balls, ice and lots of soup

In summary, Bread Golf saw around 30 competitors strike stale dough balls with golf clubs to try and get a hole in one. To make things even more challenging, the hole was on a boat floating on the River Thames!

While later in the same month, Ski Sunday saw around 25 daredevils strap blocks of ice to their feet and compete to be the fastest to slide down a 21-metre-long piece of recycled lino flooring, rolled out along St Marks Hill, in Surbiton. Then as part of the après-ski, the 100+ spectators and the wider are community were invited to come together to enjoy free entertainment and a warm mug of soup, made collectively from vegetable donations from the community and Waitrose.

Although we didn’t take the top spot, we were all thrilled that our events – and the people who made them happen – were shortlisted.

Polka Theatre Wimbledon was the overall winner, with Surbiton Ski Sunday and Kings Soup awarded a runner-up Commended certificate and Bread Golf awarded Recommended.

Community events like Surbiton Ski Sunday and Bread Golf are just a small part of the wide range of activities we run each year across Kingston. Along with these, we’re also working to deliver a range of social, heritage, food and biodiversity projects, plus much more. If you’d like to find out more or get involved, we’d love to hear from you.