The Wall of Wombles Art Project - Morden Library

It was quite a sight watching the Wonderful Wall of Wombles being slowly unwound across the library table. Every time I looked it seemed to have grown a few feet longer and I was beginning to doubt whether we would be able to fill it all!

Smile please, Press in the room!

I shouldn’t have worried though. As it turned out we had more than enough wombles to go round although size was still to prove a very tricky issue later down the line…

The Wonderful Wall of Wombles began as a follow up to the summer Paint A Womble project held by AFC Wimbledon in Morden library. This had been a great success with children encouraged to paint, draw or sketch their favourite womble, either from some illustrations or from their own imagination. After having created their wombles the children had then consulted Great Uncle Bulgaria’s large atlas and named their womble through the random pointing of a finger. A method that produced many interesting new womble names…

Second round of photographers. More smiles!

All in all Paint A Womble day had been a great success and Haydon himself had made an appearance to check out the work and to provide his seal of approval on proceedings. Morden library were pleased with the response and the children had a great time. It did seem a pity not to use their splendid pictures in some way though, so we came up with a cunning plan – we would scan them, project them on a banner and copy their outline, allowing the artists and other helpers to reproduce their masterworks in a way that everyone could enjoy! When compete the banner could then be displayed in Morden library and at an AFC Wimbledon home game.


Dad lends a hand



Come the day of the painting there was quite a crowd ready for us to get started, although not all of them were youngsters! Firstly there were two photographers, one from the local Guardian and one from the South London Press. Unfortunately they came at the start of the session, not the end, so there was not too many children around and not too many painted wombles either. Some lucky early birds had their own photo session though and that made their day straight away! The library staff had set everything up for us and we had all we needed and participating artist also left with a few signed copies of recent match programmes, so everything was set for another splendid event




Hard at work!



There was a constant flow of young artists through the morning and several of the original youngsters from the Paint A Womble session came back to work on and complete their own pictures, so it was really nice to see them back again. Parents became absorbed as well and we even had Councillor Nick Draper come along to see what was going on and to lend a welcome hand.

The session continued for several hours before packing up carefully to avoid as much paint smudging as possible.


Next up: The View from Kingsmeadow – How Big Is Your Wall?