What Goes Around: A Bandstand for Mitcham Fair Green
What Goes Around offers a reinterpretation of the traditional band stand as a contemporary focus for performance, music, gatherings and events of all kinds. Working with fabricators RASKL, CHA won an open design competition organised by the London Borough of Merton for a pavilion on Mitcham Fair Green.
Fair Green was once the home of Mitcham’s annual summer fair which it hosted from the 17th century until the 1920s. During this time, exuberant pavilions and fairground rides would populate the green. The site also hosted a bandstand, which was removed in the mid-twentieth century.
What Goes Around forms a key part of a wider effort to boost civic pride by renewing this space, helping to shape the town centre together with its communities. Since its installation in July 2025, What Goes Around has become an important part of Mitcham’s diverse and vibrant cultural life hosting music and events of all kinds.
The colourful new bandstand in Mitcham town centre is so bright and joyful, and is already bringing the community together through a series of events and activities. It’s an uplifting addition to the area and part of our efforts to improve the town centre.
Councillor Eleanor Stringer
Merton Council’s Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Civic Pride and Climate Change
The design responds to the brief as well as to the history and character of the site and the practical need for the bandstand to be dismantled and stored over winter. The idea of the structure as an annual event — a flower that blooms on the green — emerged early in the design process. This concept also draws on the area’s historic association with the growing of medicinal plants such as lavender, peppermint and liquorice.
The process involved the local community through co-design and engagement, including a print workshop led by CHA at the local Saturday market. Ideas were tested, and designs for the pattern, colour, and decorative aspects of the bandstand were developed through printed motifs and models.
The resulting structure is highly colourful and ornamental, a sixteen-sided, fan-shaped canopy supported on a timber frame that reinterprets the historic bandstand in a contemporary form. The elegant timber frame is bolted together using colourful metal flitch joints that allow it to be easily assembled and disassembled.
Over the summer of 2025, the bandstand has hosted a wide and diverse range of events and activities including drumming classes, brass bands, an urban opera, dance troupes, storytelling groups and jazz quartets, culminating in a late summer coming together featuring a set by street performer DJ AG.
It will be put away for winter and reinstalled, like a flower in bloom, each spring — ready for another summer of community events and civic enjoyment.