City of London announces events at Dundas Place all summer long

CREDIT: MAURICIO PRADO
One of the events is a partnership between The London Public Library and the London Music Office to present TD Music Mondays, a series of free outdoor concerts offered now until Oct. 2 at the Central Library Rotary Reading Garden.

The City of London will hold a series of summer time events at Dundas Place from now until Sept. 15. Each day of the week has a theme of events that promote culture and art from local Londoners’, like Salsa dancing lessons on Friday evenings, various concerts, games, and more.

One of the events is a partnership between The London Public Library and the London Music Office to present TD Music Mondays, a series of free outdoor concerts offered now until Oct. 2 at the Central Library Rotary Reading Garden.

“The purpose of this event is to bring people together to celebrate music and celebrate being downtown. We want to celebrate the start of a week with a great lunch hour together,” Ellen Hobin Manager of Communications at London Public Library said. “We want to celebrate the fact that TD has funded the library to offer this to the community, there's so much to celebrate today.”

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The garden shows have been a popular event for Londoners in the past, despite the halt from the pandemic, it still proves to just as successful today, according to Hobin.

“I think that anyone who has gone out to see music in the city in the last few years can understand the excitement that’s out there, that there are so many amazing artists in our city and there’s so many new artists coming along,” Hobin said. “We offered this event before the pandemic and we had built up a really big following every week, then we took a break but now it’s back.”

The focus is not just to bring the community together, but to highlight the amazing and unique artists who produce music that contribute to London’s diverse music scene. It’s a time where many local performers from different backgrounds look forward to performing the music they’ve written and sharing it with the community, like Lorraine Klaasen, a singer from South Africa who performed at TD Music Mondays on June 19.

“It’s lovely. It’s wonderful. We have the space and we have the will to be able to bring music to the community and I love the times that we’re doing it because it’s…an opportunity to get out of the house and enjoy this lovely music.”

Klaasen also said how music connects her to her African origins and how it brings her joy when performing as she feels it brings the community out from the darkness society faces.

“I visualize a lot because most of my songs are in African so I put myself back there,” Klaasen explained. “I close my eyes and I pretend like I’m in Soweto someplace and then I remember my mom’s words of wisdom because music makes you happy.”

For a full list of events happening on Dundas Place this summer, visit london.ca/DundasWeekly.