Main Events

Main Events

11:00 am, April 6 2025

The Mindful Photo Lab: love your camera, make some memories

The smartphone and social media age has made taking photos a part of our lives like never before. But is there a more fulfilling way to approach photography?

Join us on Sunday 6 April to hear from guest speaker Pierre Bureau, Founder of Mindful Photo Lab and the East London Photography Festival, an exciting initiative that blends mindfulness, creativity, and community engagement through photography.

Pierre will be telling us how he was inspired to start a community that used photography to improve mental health, and the festival’s mission to celebrate East London’s rich cultural diversity and its focus on fostering wellbeing and connection through visual storytelling.

There will also be a wonderful activity that Pierre will be asking for the audience to take part in. We’d love you to bring a meaningful object with you should you feel comfortable. An old camera, a hat, anything that holds personal significance.

About Sunday Assembly London

Sunday Assembly is your regular and reliable stop for a welcoming, accessible and inspiring Sunday community, where you can hear talks, poetry, live music and share your stories whilst making new friends. Please stay after for tea, biscuits, and engaging conversations with members of our community.

→ Our next assembly: Earth Day Special, Living Well in a Climate Crisis, 20 April
← Our previous assembly: Use Your Voice: How to Unlock Your Courage and Amplify Your Message, 16 March

Main EventsPast events

11:00 am, March 16 2025

Use Your Voice: How to Unlock Your Courage and Amplify Your Message

Sunday Assembly’s International Women’s Day 2025 Special was an inspirational, emotional hour. Read on to find out how…

Our guest speaker: Anna Herber

Previously a guest poet at Sunday Assembly, we were delighted to welcome back writer, poet and entrepreneur Anna Herber as our speaker.

[Photo credit: Anna Herber, LinkedIn]

Anna helps people move through resistance and fear so they can share powerful messages that question the status quo and grow their impact.

For this special IWD talk, Anna celebrated women who have used their voices to create change, as well as some of the most common ways that women are silenced, and how to overcome them.

Drawing from her own experience, she showed us how to liberate our outspoken inner activist, truth speaker and wisdom keeper – overcoming procrastination and perfectionism, unlocking our courage and amplifying our authentic voice.

Watch a clip from Anna’s previous Sunday Assembly visit on Instagram

Our guest poet: Kay Scorah

With Amy Anam Cara sadly unable to join us due to illness, community member Kay Scorah kindly stepped in.

We loved her Gender Stereowiped Nursery Rhymes, which included Jill giving Jack essential first aid and Mary profiting off organic wool sweaters!

Our songs

Our Sunday Assembly band had us singing along to four empowering songs from female artists: 

  • Hold On – Wilson Phillips
  • Unwritten – Natasha Bedingfield
  • You Gotta Be – Des’Ree
  • Brave – Sara Bareilles

Notices

Topics of our notices included:

  • Our Book Swap table (where swapping is not compulsory)
  • Our first ever comedy fundraiser, bringing four fantastic comedians to you on 10th April – details here
  • Our next Sunday Assembly Article Club on Thursday 3 April – details here
  • Sunday Assembly’s annual conference, which this year is in Glasgow from 25th-28th September. Details about Sunday Assembly Glasgow Gathering here
  • An invitation from Ann to help steward the Mile End Parkrun on Sunday 18 May – details here
  • An invitation from Tanya to come to the Enrich Festival in Watford on the weekend of 26th-27th April. Enrich Festival is an inclusive arts festival showcasing the immense talent of disabled and neurodivergent artists and performers. The Sunday Assembly are performing on the Sunday.

A bonus guest poet

Inspired by Anna’s talk, community member Steph read out a poem by her friend, whose experiences in Afghanistan had moved him to urge his fellow men to support women.

As always, we followed the assembly with tea, biscuits and chat at the Backyard Comedy Club, then lunch, drinks & games at The Three Colts pub.

Thanks to our host Emily, co-host Matt, all our wonderful volunteers and everyone who filled the room with singing, laughter and appreciation – especially our first-timers!

Thanks also to everyone who wore purple in support of International Women’s day.

International Women’s Day 2024 at Sunday Assembly

As part of last year’s Sunday Assembly IWD Special, we wrote personal pledges to Inspire Inclusion, that year’s theme. Here’s a selection of our pledges. Click or tap to enlarge:

→ Our next assembly: The Mindful Photo Lab, 6 April
← Our previous assembly: Everyday Jews, 2 March

Main EventsPast events

11:00 am, March 2 2025

Everyday Jews: cultural insights, comedy and a community story

To find out what we did at this Sunday Assembly, read on!

Our guest speaker: Keith Kahn-Harris

Following his hilarious 2022 Sunday Assembly talk on the multilingual warning messages inside Kinder Surprise Eggs(!), we welcomed back speaker and author Keith Kahn-Harris to discuss his new book, Everyday Jews: Why the Jewish People Are Not Who You Think They Are.

The book was inspired by Keith’s growing sense, as a Jew, that the Jewish people are now so public, so significant, so loved and so hated that the everyday stuff of Jewish life risks becoming ‘hollowed out’. In response, he aims to show that Jews can also be boring, mediocre and mundane, and that the ‘secular’ aspects of Jewish religious practice are often ignored but are the beating heart of Jewish religious life.

We learned how synagogues are as much about supper quizzes and social life as they are about communing with the divine, and the value in remembering that Jewish life can have its mundane and mediocre moments too.

Our guest performance: comedy from Rabbi Mendy Korer

We also welcomed jogger, chess player and stand-up comedian Rabbi Mendy Korer to this Assembly!

Founder of Chabad Islington, the only Jewish community centre in Islington, he loves to find ways to connect with people from diverse backgrounds, particularly through the human, spiritual and comedic relatability of Chassidic ultra-orthodox Jews.

Our songs

Our Sunday Assembly band performed three songs written and/or sung by Jewish artists:

  • The Life of Riley – The Lightning Seeds
  • Eternal Flame – The Bangles
  • Valerie – as sung by Amy Winehouse

This Much I Know

Today we reintroduced This Much I Know: a segment where we hear from a member of the Sunday Assembly community on a topic close to their heart.

This time, David Goldstein explained why he started coming to Sunday Assembly 10 years after hearing about us… and shared some big news about a grant application he’s been involved with. Find out more here

Notices

Topics of our notices included:

As always, we followed the assembly with tea, biscuits and chat (and a sip of Palwin Jewish wine from Keith) at the Backyard Comedy Club, Lunch Club (at Hulya’s Cafe) and drinks & games at The Three Colts pub.

Thanks to our host Hanna, co-host Shane, all our wonderful volunteers and everyone who filled the room with singing, laughter and appreciation – especially our first-timers!


Our next assembly: Use Your Voice: How to Unlock Your Courage and Amplify Your Message, 16 March
Our previous assembly: Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want!, 16 February

Main EventsPast events

11:00 am, February 16 2025

Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want!

If you really, really want to know what we did at this Sunday Assembly, read on!

Our guest speaker: Adam Taffler

Desires often get a bad press. From religion to popular culture, they’re painted as dangerous and uncontrollable forces to be suppressed or ignored.

Yet our desires are really messengers of what matters most. A healthy relationship with our needs and wants is vital – it’s the foundation of personal autonomy, authentic relationships, and our own sacred unfolding.

For our Valentine’s Special, we were thrilled to welcome Adam Taffler, a facilitator and authentic communication coach, to help us all understand how to better articulate what we need and want in our relationships. Adam’s mission is making human connection a higher priority in culture. Known for founding the Togetherness movement and creating Shhh Dating (a silent speed dating experience), he designs spaces where genuine connection flourishes.

Adam Taffler’s website

Our guest poet: Michael McKimm

We were also excited to have some spoken word from Michael McKimm, an East London-based poet, originally from Ireland. His most recent book Because We Could Not Dance At The Wedding is about love in a long-term gay relationship and finding joy in an uncertain world.

Michael McKimm’s website

Our four songs

Courtesy of the Sunday Assembly band, we sang four songs with the theme of wanting:

You’re The One That I Want – John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John
Don’t You Want Me – Human League
We Can Work It Out – The Beatles
Wannabe – Spice Girls (cunningly disguised as Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana)

Notices

Topics of our notices included:

– Our Book Swap table (where swapping is not compulsory)
– An invitation to volunteer at the Mile End parkrun on 16 March
– Our sister assembly in Reading, The Sunday Alternative
– Our next Article Club on 20th February – details here
– Our first ever comedy fundraiser, bringing four fantastic comedians to you on 10th April – details here

As always, we followed the assembly with tea, biscuits and chat at the Backyard Comedy Club, Lunch Club (at Nando’s) and drinks & games at The Three Colts.

Thanks to our host Stuart, co-host Alan, all our wonderful volunteers and everyone who filled the room with singing, laughter and appreciation – especially our first-timers!

Our next assembly: Everyday Jews, 2 March
Our previous assembly: Men’s Sheds: Craft, Connection and Community, 2 February

Main EventsPast events

11:00 am, February 2 2025

Men’s Sheds: Craft, Connection and Community

In 1999, in a rural area of Australia, a woman noticed that many of the retired, local miners and veterans were suffering from a sense of isolation and purposelessness; missing working with their fellow men. Coinciding with a developing awareness of a crisis within men’s mental health, a pilot workshop was put together, inviting men to come and restore furniture and fix appliances, allowing them to connect with the people around them, and learn new skills.

‘Men’s Sheds’, as they came to be known, are now a global phenomenon, with nearly 3,000 sheds operating in 12 countries, including Ireland, UK, New Zealand, Canada, US, Kenya, and South Africa.

In 2014, Professor Barry Golding coined the term “”shedagogy”” to describe “a distinctive, new way of acknowledging, describing and addressing the way some men prefer to learn informally in shed-like spaces mainly with other men”

We are joined by Founder and Life President of the UK’s branch of MSA, Mike Jenn, who has worked in practical social innovations for 50 years across community education and relieving deprivation. He shared with us how the charities’ “shedagogy” continues to grow and change lives; fostering community, creativity and tackling life-shortening isolation for many.

We were also treated to some ‘Shedding your inhibitions!’ games by our resident Games Master, Matt!

Men’s Sheds UK

Main EventsPast events

11:00 am, January 19 2025

The Art of Healing: Transforming Mental Health Hospitals

Our guest speaker: Tim Shaw

It was a recognition of this grim state of affairs that led to the foundation of Hospital Rooms, the UK arts and mental health charity, which aims to bring creativity, colour, and kindness to mental health hospitals and transform them into places of hope, dignity, and recovery for all.

Co-founder Tim Shaw was with us to talk about the charity’s collaborations with artists, service users, and the NHS, to craft innovative artwork and creative programmes while dispelling stigmas and advocating for culture and creativity in mental health as a universal human right. Hospital Rooms has worked with artists such as Richard Wentworth, Anish Kapoor and Sonia Boyce and were awarded Quality Improvement Project of the Year 2018 by NAPICU.

Hospital Rooms

Our guest poet: Rachel Lewis

Rachel Lewis’s website

Main EventsPast events

11:00 am, January 5 2025

Joy To The World! Sumptuous Resolutions for the New Year

Happy 12th birthday Sunday Assembly! And Happy New Yeeaaarr!

Along with the requisite fireworks, bubbles and the dash for snogs at midnight, the idea of New Year also brings forth the pressure of New Year’s Resolutions.

Whether it’s to lose that last ten pounds, quit smoking or finally take up the Cha Cha, more and more people are realising that the conventional idea of New Year’s Resolutions, are all based on external measures, and can actually be harmful to our wellbeing. Even when they are about health and fitness, the underlying purpose tends to be for something outside of ourselves, putting us under pressure to be ‘better’.

Following a 16 year career in social work, Tamu Thomas is now a leading somatic specialist, leadership coach, author and workshop facilitator with a specialism in combating ‘toxic productivity’. In this talk she invited us all to consider resolutions that make us feel vibrant and alive rather than as a covert means to fix ourselves.

Living more sumptuously is about feeling full, satiated, satisfied, and Tamu believes that when we each do this individual work, we collectively benefit from a more positive, productive, and purposeful culture.

Tamu Thomas’s website: Live Three Sixty

Main EventsPast events

11:00 am, December 15 2024

Nature Needs Us: How to Be a Guardian of the Natural World

Our guest speaker: Paul Powlesland

In August 2024, environmentalist and barrister, Paul Powlesland made history, by becoming the first member of a UK jury to swear an oath on a river: his beloved River Roding, where he both lives and spends time restoring. A co-founder of the River Roding Trust, Paul has also worked with locals to plant hundreds of trees, remove over a thousand bags of rubbish and hoist precisely 75 shopping trolleys from the Roding’s clay-thick riverbed.

We were thrilled to welcome Paul to Sunday Assembly today to share his journey and his wisdom on the things that we can all do to be better stewards to the natural world. Paul is also co-founder of Lawyers for Nature, an advocacy group calling for the UK to grant rivers a legal right of protection.

Guest poet: Esme May Finch

We were also excited to have some spoken word from Esme Fay Finch, a poet, children’s author and forest school teacher, whose project Ways of the Wild inspires and educates children about environmental matters through storytelling, art workshops and dance.

Main EventsPast events

11:00 am, December 1 2024

Greek Wisdom for the Modern Age

Our guest speaker: John Graves

In our post-capitalist society it is easy to wonder why so many of us are still struggling with a feeling of meaninglessness.

More than 2000 years ago, Aristotle, Epicurus and the Stoics were pondering the same things and providing potential solutions to this dilemma.

John Graves is a teacher of Psychotherapeutic Studies, Life Coach, and life-long philosophy student sparked by the early teachings of his Greek mother.

He introduced us to some of the wisdom from our Ancient Agony Uncles – showing us how relevant these ideas still are and how closely they matched Sunday Assembly’s own three-part philosophy of living better, helping often and wondering more.

Our guest poet: Anna Herber

Watch one of Anna’s Sunday Assembly poetry readings on Instagram

Main EventsPast events

11:00 am, November 17 2024

Keep Taking The Tablets – The Story of Antibiotics

Our guest speaker: Dr. Peter Altman

Sniff sniff, dribble dribble, cough cough. As we creep ever more into the cold and darkness of winter, we may all be feeling more under the weather than usual, with an increase in ill health rising significantly over the winter months, when the body is less effective in fighting off infections.

Antibiotics have been a central part of our society’s approach to managing infectious diseases for nearly a century. But how were they discovered, and when and by whom? And does it really involve a 3,500 year old mouldy sandwich from Ancient Egypt?

Dr. Peter Altman is a biochemist, medical researcher and publisher and a veteran magician, having been a member of the Magic Circle since 1984. He shared some of his latest research from his third book, currently in production, Amazing Discoveries in Science.

Our guest poet: Kay Scorah

We were also thrilled to have some poetry from former biochemist herself, Kay Scorah, who brought 70 years’ worth of experiment and creativity to her writing.

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