Opera has traditionally been associated with grand theatres, formal dress and expensive tickets. What if it belonged in pub gardens, schools and community spaces too?
Mezzo-soprano, director and writer Bronwen Harding will tell us how her company Rogue Opera brings extraordinary music and stories to unexpected places, breaking down barriers and opening up opera to new audiences.
Discover how singing can bring people together, challenge expectations and help us find our voices. You’ll even have the chance to join in with an adapted opera chorus yourself!
Our singalongs
As usual, there will be four pop songs performed by our Sunday Assembly London band and connected to today’s theme. Get your guesses in now!
The lyrics will be projected on screen and everyone’s welcome to sing (and dance) along.
About Sunday Assembly London
Sunday Assembly London is your regular and reliable stop for a welcoming, accessible and inspiring Sunday community, where you can hear talks and poetry, sing songs and make new friends.
Stay after for tea, biscuits, and chat in the Backyard Comedy Club. Then join us for a local meal, picnic, or a drink and card games at the pub.
A change to our assembly schedule from 2027
From January 2027, Sunday Assembly London’s assemblies will be once a month. To find out why, how everyone benefits and how our community can keep supporting us, read our announcement here.
From 2027, when Sunday Assembly London proudly reaches its 14th anniversary, we’ll be taking a different approach to how often we host assemblies. We’re keen for you, our community, to understand what’s happening and why.
What’s changing
Currently, we host assemblies on the first and third Sundays of the month (with the exception of our August break). From January 2027, our assemblies will be on the third Sunday of the month only.
What’s not changing
The format of our assemblies – combining secular talks, poetry, pop singalongs and socialising over tea and biscuits, all free – will stay the same. So will our home at the Backyard Comedy Club.
Our activities between assemblies will continue throughout the year – from picnics and gallery visits to karaoke and ice cream crawls – driven by you, and helping us all to keep building the Sunday Assembly London community.
Why we’re making this decision
As ever, the values we’ve held since we started – Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More – are guiding us.
Sunday Assembly London’s volunteers are proud to have brought you hundreds of informative, inspiring assemblies since 2013. Beyond what you see on the day, each assembly entails a huge amount of work behind the scenes, freely given by this skilled, talented but ultimately small team.
We are immensely grateful to those volunteers who have enabled us to continue having two assemblies a month for so long, when all our fellow Sunday Assembly communities around the UK and abroad are holding assemblies less frequently than that.
If our volunteers are vital then so is their wellbeing. Many of us know from our working lives that stress and burnout – our own or our colleagues’ – can have a major impact. Volunteering is no different. Given how few people are currently volunteering, we recognise that we can’t continue to pull off two assemblies a month without risking what makes us so special.
By protecting our volunteers, and ensuring that they aren’t prevented from Living Better, we’re protecting Sunday Assembly London’s future.
Some of you will have heard this news at today’s assembly (18th October). We’re also sharing it via our website, email and social media.
The benefits for everyone
Having only one assembly to plan for monthly will give us more capacity to do things that we’ve wanted to do for a while. These include:
More community events and informal get-togethers
Further enhancing the quality of assemblies
Growing the community by exploring more ways to get people attending and donating
These too will strengthen our ability to sustain Sunday Assembly London and this community.
How you can help
We know how special Sunday Assembly London is to so many people, and we never want that to change. So this is our opportunity to remind you that, as a small charity, we need all of you to play your part.
As well as continuing to join us at assemblies, please ask yourself if you can:
Commit to volunteering with us if you don’t already
Organise one-off events and meetups
Keep donating
Invite friends, flatmates, colleagues and other newcomers to give us a try
Interact with our social media posts to help them reach more people
In whatever way you give back, you’ll be helping to keep Sunday Assembly London going for all of us.
We’re here to answer your questions. Email us at london@sundayassembly.com or speak with our Co-ordination Crew Lead (Gwawr) or our trustees (Aaron, Temi, Emily, Karen) at one of our assemblies.
Thank you for being part of this brilliant community.
Halloween is the ideal time to confront the things that scare us, including our own minds. What if getting to know our monsters can help us better understand ourselves, our relationships and what we really want?
Adela Apetroaia – lecturer, writer and psychotherapist – returned to Sunday Assembly London for a playful exploration of our inner demons. Drawing on dream work, existential kink and internal family systems, she explained the hidden motivations and inner conflicts lurking in the shadows. If you’ve never confronted your negative emotions by visualising them, personifying them, interrogating them or singing about them, give it a try!
We also get to enjoy Sunday Assembly London’s own Kay Scorah putting the poet into poltergeist with original poems about ghosting, love and witches.
Our singalongs
As usual, there were four pop songs performed by our Sunday Assembly London band and connected to today’s theme and Halloween. Three of them were from Sunday Assembly’s founding year:
Wake Me Up – Avicii (2013)
Riptide – Vance Joy (2013)
Demons – Imagine Dragons (2013)
Time Warp – from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Community craft session
This assembly was followed by a Hallowe’en themed community craft session led by our Community Lead Tanya.
About Sunday Assembly London
Sunday Assembly London is your regular and reliable stop for a welcoming, accessible and inspiring Sunday community, where you can hear talks and poetry, sing songs and make new friends.
Stay after for tea, biscuits, and chat in the Backyard Comedy Club. Then join us for a local meal, picnic, or a drink and card games at the pub.
When the weather is good we eat outside and ask people to bring blankets and food to share. On colder days, we head for a local restaurant, café or pub that serves food. (We’ll confirm which one during the assembly.)
Keep an eye on the weather and event listing in case we need to change venue. And if you have any portable games (card or board games that are quick to play), bring them too. Newcomers are very welcome.
Exploring London and other cities, millions of people set eyes on the circular blue plaques that honour significant people, locations and events. But you may not have seen the even more colourful plaques bringing overlooked stories to light.
David Robson, Rainbow Plaques project lead from the London LGBT+ Forums’ Network, explained how the programme has worked to honour LGBTQ+ figures and their heritage, at a time when the community continues to deal with exclusion and hostility.
As the ideal accompaniment, queer disabled poet George Parker (they/them) returned to our stage to weave words into messages of pride and protest.
Our singalongs
As usual, there were four pop songs performed by our Sunday Assembly London band and connected to today’s theme:
The Whole of the Moon – The Waterboys (1985)
True Colours – Cyndi Lauper (1986)
Rainbow Connection – Kermit the Frog (1979)
Freedom! ’90 – George Michael (1990)
The lyrics were projected on screen and everyone was welcome to sing (and dance) along.
As a secular community that welcomes all, we’re proud to host events where our LGBTQ+ members, volunteers, speakers and poets give each other a sense of belonging.
About Sunday Assembly London
Sunday Assembly London is your regular and reliable stop for a welcoming, accessible and inspiring Sunday community, where you can hear talks and poetry, sing songs and make new friends.
Stay after for tea, biscuits, and chat in the Backyard Comedy Club. Then join us for a local meal, picnic, or a drink and card games at the pub.
Article Club is where the Sunday Assembly London community read a diverse range of articles, share them with like-minded people and deal with our anxiety that we aren’t reading books.
We’ve had over 75 meetings and it’s never too late to join! Just like at our assemblies, we love welcoming new members and their unique opinions.
How Article Club works
1. We meet every 1-2 months in the National Theatre building in Central London by the river. We go for the round seats in the Lyttelton Theatre bar on the first floor.
2. We vote in advance and pick two articles from a short list to read before we meet. Usually one relates to politics/current affairs and the other to history, culture or science.
3. We talk about each one for around half an hour. The beauty of Article Club is that we can think more deeply about the broader themes of a topic, and how well the article gets to grips with them.
4. We each give a score out of 10 for the articles that have been discussed.
5. We set the date for the next Article Club and sometimes adjourn to the pub.
We also have Article Club meetings coming up on:
Thursday 14th January
Thursday 25th February
Thursday 8th April
To meet more of the Sunday Assembly London community while learning about a new or familiar topic, you’re always welcome at our Sunday Assemblies too!
We have access to more food that any generation before us – so why are we hungrier than ever? We digested the answer…
Laz Ranasinghe is an award-winning doctor, personal trainer and nutrition coach: the ideal speaker to help us explore the science of hunger and satiety, and to explain what happens when the evolutionary biology that once helped us survive scarcity meets a modern food environment designed to keep us consuming.
Laz drew on his observations of diet-related disease, alongside evidence on ultra processed food and appetite. We found out what’s happening in our bodies, why some foods leave us wanting more, how knowing about fibre and whole foods can help us make more informed choices.
We also welcomed back Joe James to meet our craving for bittersweet poetry, from the travails of the food diary to the conspiracy of non-rhyming food words.
Our singalongs
Music is the food of love. So, as usual, there were four pop songs performed by our Sunday Assembly London band and connected to today’s theme.
Hungry Eyes – Eric Carmen (1987)
Hungry Like the Wolf – Duran Duran (1982)
Raspberry Beret – Prince (1985)
Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Deep Blue Something (1995)
The lyrics were projected on screen and everyone was welcome to sing (and dance) along.
In space, no one can hear you sing. At our assembly on 15th November, you’ll get music, poetry, company, and the tale of an iconic film becoming an out-of-this-world play that started in Dorset and ended up in London’s West End…
What happens when a group of bus drivers decide to stage Alien – complete with chestbursters, xenomorphs and all – on a tiny budget? Against all odds, their wonderfully bonkers idea became an unforgettable celebration of imagination, friendship and community, and the subject of an award-winning documentary, Alien On Stage.
Danielle Kummer, co-director of that documentary, will share the remarkable story behind it. It has something to teach us all about creativity, taking risks, finding joy in the impossible, and why sometimes the most extraordinary things begin with a gloriously ridiculous idea.
To keep us out of stasis, Rick Dove will be making a welcome return to the Sunday Assembly London stage to perform his poetry.
Our singalongs
As usual, there will be four pop songs performed by our Sunday Assembly London band and connected to today’s theme. Get your alien related guesses in now!
The lyrics will be projected on screen and everyone’s welcome to sing (and dance) along.
About Sunday Assembly London
Sunday Assembly London is your regular and reliable stop for a welcoming, accessible and inspiring Sunday community, where you can hear talks and poetry, sing songs and make new friends.
Stay after for tea, biscuits, and chat in the Backyard Comedy Club. Then join us for a local meal, picnic, or a drink and card games at the pub.
A change to our assembly schedule from 2027
From January 2027, Sunday Assembly London’s assemblies will be once a month. To find out why, how everyone benefits and how our community can keep supporting us, read our announcement here.
→ Our next assembly:Flight Free (TBC), 6th December ← Our previous assembly:Rogue Opera, 1st November
We don’t like changing our minds, but topic & speaker are to be confirmed! Check our website again nearer the time.
Our singalongs
As usual, there will be four pop songs performed by our Sunday Assembly London band and connected to today’s theme.
The lyrics will be projected on screen and everyone’s welcome to sing (and dance) along.
About Sunday Assembly London
Sunday Assembly London is your regular and reliable stop for a welcoming, accessible and inspiring Sunday community, where you can hear talks and poetry, sing songs and make new friends.
Stay after for tea, biscuits, and chat in the Backyard Comedy Club. Then join us for a local meal, picnic, or a drink and card games at the pub.
A change to our assembly schedule
This will be our last assembly of 2026: the third Sunday of December is close to Christmas and, based on experience, a lot of people have plans that keep them from joining us.
From January 2027, Sunday Assembly London’s assemblies will be once a month. To find out why, how everyone benefits and how our community can keep supporting us, read our announcement here.
→ Our next assembly: TBC, 17th January 2027 ← Our previous assembly:Alien On Stage, 15th November
Here’s a question you may not have been asked yet this year: could you be happier checking mousetraps than mailboxes?
Recent research reveals that professional pest controllers experience surprisingly high levels of job satisfaction. What does this tell us about how ‘dirty work’ is valued in society, and what are the unexpected qualities that make labour enjoyable and meaningful?
Dr Hannah Fair is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Southampton. As part of her Economic and Social Research Council funded project SPIDER (Situating Pests: Impacts, Disgust, Expertise and Responsibility), Hannah explores everyday and often unwanted experiences with nature in our homes, from rats and mice to moths and bed bugs.
We were treated to an insect-themed musical extravaganza ‘Guess the Earworm’ medley courtesy of our Community Lead and keyboard queen Tanya!
Our singalongs
As usual, there were four pop songs performed by our Sunday Assembly London band. Three were connected to today’s theme, one was a tribute to a late, great singer-songwriter:
Everyday – Buddy Holly and the Crickets (1957)
Wind of Change – Scorpions (1991)
Fields of Gold – Sting (1993)
9 to 5 – Dolly Parton (1980)
The lyrics were projected on screen and everyone was welcome to sing (and dance) along.
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