The Avebury Papers - Fae And Folk Of Avebury

Lucie Smith is running a folklore and storytelling workshop at Southampton City Art Gallery on Saturday 8 August, from 11am to 3pm. It's a drop-in session, so you can pop in whenever suits you rather than committing to the whole day, though the last entry is 2.45pm. It's open to everyone from age six up, so it works as a family thing or just something to do on your own.

The session is part of The Avebury Papers, a four-year UKRI-funded project that's been digitising and sharing a multimedia archive of Avebury's Neolithic origins. To get people using that material, the project commissioned two artists, Gayle Chong Kwan and Kialy Tihngang, whose work is on display in the gallery's commission exhibition, which runs from 13 June to 17 October 2026. The workshop takes that archive and puts it in your hands: you're invited to imagine the creatures and lost souls of Avebury and create your own imagined portraits and short stories or poems about them, all bound together in a zig-zag book. It's a way of playing with the history and folklore of the place rather than just reading about it.

Under the hood, the whole project brings art and archaeology together, drawing on the 1930s and 1940s diaries of William Young. If you're into that kind of thing, the exhibition is there to browse around the workshop, too. The session is free to attend, with optional donations of £3, £5 or £8 on the day. It runs from 11am to 3pm at the gallery on Commercial Road, with last entry at 2.45pm.