Summerfest in Grimston Park was a great success! Thanks to everyone who came. The turnout surpassed our expectations. We estimated that we had about 500 people at the movie alone, and maybe 1000 over the course of the afternoon. Our sleepy little West End park was packed with happy families!

Bring your swimsuits and a picnic blanket to Grimston Park on Saturday, July 17 for Summerfest, a new community celebration in New Westminster’s West End. Enjoy a family-friendly evening of play and live music, shop the mini-Farmer’s Market, and finish the evening off with a special free screening of E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial under the stars.

New Westminster Museum & Archvies’ Rob McCullough is working on creating an interpretive panel about the history of Grimston Park to be unveiled at the inaugural Summerfest in Grimston Park, Saturday, July 17. Rob is currently seeking photos, stories and comments from those who have enjoyed the park over the years since it opened.

The new playground at Grimston Park is now open, and it is AWESOME. The park’s designers have done an incredible job creating a welcoming and imaginative space to play for kids of all ages. While the temporary fence is still partially up, and there’s still some work to do (laying sod, painting the wading pool), the playground and pool are now open for play.

Boy, it sure doesn’t feel like summer outside. As some of you know, I am in the midst of planning a new summer festival for New West, appropriately called Summerfest in Grimston Park. It hardly seems possibly that we’re only a little more than a month away from the July 17 event with all this rain!

The Grimston Park playground consultation is chugging along. For those who are curious, two proposed design directions are now up on the web, and the Parks dept. is looking for feedback on which one most appeals to the community, as well as specific feedback on types of equipment we want to see.
It seems a few things have changed since the first consultation: now one of the options includes salvaged pieces of the old playground, possibly including the tower (roof removed to discourage late-night partiers and homeless sleepers) and the iconic …

This time next year, Grimston Park could look substantially different.
The summer wading pool and winter toboggan hill will remain untouched, as will the lacrosse box and tennis courts. But the towering adventure playground with the plunging slides and the rattling drawbridge will be gone. So too the iconic tires cupping the border of the playground at the edge of the steep slope to the lacrosse box. Replacing these will be … well, we don’t know exactly what yet.
Today was the day of the first public consultation about the park. After the …

 
Over the last weekend, our family took advantage of the beautiful weather and the crowd gathered for our son’s birthday and we launched off a couple of model rockets from the Grimston Park field. We had a BLAST, (Yuk Yuk)! We do this ever so often. Once, last April, as soon as we had everything set up, it started to snow and the rocket launched into a growing blizzard of white.
 
The launches have been nothing fancy, a little kit rocket that we painted red and blue and stuff with an …