Bristol’s favourite duo Wallace & Gromit are serving heaps of family fun and holiday cheer at Cabot Circus, where Wallace & Gromit: A Cracking Christmas Experience, the one-of-a-kind festive event full of invention, is in full swing
The Friary Building in Quakers Friars at Cabot Circus has been transformed into Wallace & Gromit: A Cracking Christmas Experience, where fans can help Wallace save Christmas by getting his latest gadget – the Christmas-O-Matic – up and running in the St. Nick-of-time. With a sprinkling of festive spirit, a dash of Christmas-chaos and all the cheesy fun you’d expect from Bristol’s much-loved pair, A Cracking Christmas Experience should be at the top of any Christmas to-do list this holiday season. Once the mission is complete, the new-found Christmas heroes are welcomed into the Cracking Christmas Café. This pop-up festive café set in the stunning Friary building will be open to all, including man’s best friend, as the perfect pit-stop after your Christmas shopping to grab an essential cheese sandwich, cakes, a cracking cup of tea and delicious dog-treats and ‘puppuccinos’ for all furry companions.
Wallace & Gromit: A Cracking Christmas Experience has been brought to life by local creative production company Bakehouse, and The Bristol Magazine caught up with the team there to get the inside scoop on the festive season’s must-see local attraction.
When did the idea of the Christmas experience first come around, and how did you become involved in it?
Being based in Bristol, creating an interactive family experience with Aardman has seemed like a natural choice for Bakehouse for a long time. We have worked with Aardman before and we jumped at the chance to bring something extra special to Bristol this Christmas. It has been so much fun working alongside Aardman and the team at Cabot Circus to bring this idea to life in the heart of our home city!
What can visitors expect when they arrive?
Visitors are invited to imagine they’ve stepped into Wallace’s workshop, where he has been working on his latest cracking contraption. The machine itself is designed to make sure nothing is left to chance in preparation for the ideal festive season, but it’s not quite working! With the support of some of Bristol’s finest workshop assistants, the children will complete puzzles and challenges, and test their families’ levels of joy, to get the machine up and running in time.
Wallace has been pretty keen to keep the Christmas-O-Matic well under wraps until it’s ready for testing, so we’re not at liberty to give away too much more info until you see it for yourselves. Suffice to say that if you like to play and you have a great sense of imagination, you are sure to enjoy the way the performers carry visitors along a carefully crafted narrative that gives everyone the chance to get involved.
What is it about Wallace & Gromit’s world and their characters that makes them so popular here?
Aardman is synonymous with Bristol and the city is so proud to be home to such a powerhouse of animation. From Morph all the way to the eagerly-awaited new film, Bristolians connect most with its sense of fun as well as finding the heroic in the everyday. Creativity, wry humour and genius storytelling abound in Wallace & Gromit’s world. In a nutshell, Bristol identifies as a creative city that can laugh out loud at itself, qualities they find in buckets with Wallace & Gromit.
What’s on offer at the café at The Friary Building?
The Friary Building is such an incredible venue – it really is a treat to behold for guests who haven’t been inside before – and this beautiful eatery in this historic building was crying out to be part of this experience. We are absolutely thrilled that our friends and fellow Bristolians from the much-loved Bristol Loaf team have come on board to serve up some top class grub: from the quintessential to the quirky, their menu (with a slight emphasis on cheese-based dishes) adds an irresistible reason to stay and enjoy A Cracking Christmas for a little longer and offers a chance to pop in for a tasty treat even if you’re not visiting the Experience on the day.
Can you tell us more about the specially-adapted sessions?
All sessions will welcome families with diverse needs but we recognise that some families with children who have special educational needs or disabilities (SEND) might benefit from there being fewer people in the space. We have set up nine dedicated Quieter Sessions for SEND visitors, in which the performers will deliver the same show to fewer families and will adapt as they go to meet their audience. The building has an accessible lift for guests in wheelchairs or those with mobility issues as we hope everyone will want to come and enjoy the experience.
How does the experience appeal to kids and big kids alike?
It’s an interactive theatrical experience for all the family: families and groups of friends can enjoy quality time, with lots of laughter and play, working together to fix the Christmas-O-Matic. Little kids will love loading snowballs into the Christmas machine, while big kids will enjoy stepping into the nostalgic world of Wallace & Gromit.
Tickets to Wallace & Gromit: A Cracking Christmas Experience are on sale now via EventBrite for £7.50 plus fees. The experience is on until Tuesday 24 December at The Friary Building, Broadmead, BS1 3DF.
More information, and links to book tickets, can be found at cabotcircus.com. Bakehouse is a multi-award-winning theatrical production company specialising in delivering interactive events. Its workshop in Bristol is now more than 18,000 sq ft and houses a design studio, costume department, carpentry, metalwork and scenic workshops, photography and tech studio, and a huge store of set, props, costumes and equipment to deliver hundreds of events each year. bakehousefactory.co.uk
