What’s On

11:00 am, September 3 2023

Grief Without God

Coping with the subjects of death and grief remain some of life’s greatest challenges. For those who are not part of a religious framework or community – and do not wish to be – what can be offered as a substitute for the emotional comfort that religious faith offers those in facing their own death or the death of their loved ones? How can we find ways to adapt ritual technology to support ourselves and our communities on the long and challenging path of loss and bereavement?

Guest speaker: Rachel Rose Reid

Rachel is a spoken word artist, writer & storyteller grappling directly with these questions. Raised on a hotchpotch of immigrant heritage, English folk and concrete jungle, Rachel plays with storytelling through the creation and adaptation of folk rituals and practices for meeting real and pressing needs in contemporary life.

Rachel aims to show that the art of reclaiming, renewing, and restoring ritual practice in everyday life is for everyone, and is most often made by people making do with what they have available to them, which can be enough.

Watch the recording

Not just Sunday Assemblies Past events

12:00 pm, August 20 2023

Summer 2023 picnics

It’s time for us to gather outdoors! This year we’re going to have four picnics on 2 July, 16 July, 6 August, and 20 August. Bring picnic blankets, food, board games, and acoustic musical instruments. We’ll sing a few songs and have a few laughs.

All four picnics are planned to be held at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. If the weather looks less than ideal, we’ll meet under the bandstand

Main Events Past events

11:00 am, June 18 2023

We’ve got Pride

From Shame to Pride, Fear to Joy – We are all our own master Alchemists.

Chris Fitchew is part jester, part comedian, full joy alchemist and space holder who has travelled the world to hone his crafts, including working with plant medicines in Peru, vortex energy healing and working with many great teachers and Wisdom Sharers. He believes that one of the greatest access points in finding our purpose and self-healing is through laughter, joy, and play; for ourselves and our communities.

Chris brings his life story to this Sunday Assembly London Pride special, as he shares how he managed to pivot and transmute a childhood of shame to a life of pride, and fears a plenty into Joy in abundance.

Tom Ana will be the guest poet for this Assembly. They are a nonbinary writer and facilitator from the North of England, and run the Queer Poetry Circle, a space that aims to create a new oral tradition through exploring poetry; Queer Spiritual Explorers, a group for interfaith exploration for LGBTQ+ people, and are a co-facilitator at the Queer Death Café.

Watch the recording

Main Events Past events

11:00 am, June 4 2023

Guessed List: Predicting In Real Life

Sometimes life is a coin toss. Sometimes it’s a foregone conclusion. The problem is telling the difference, but this is a skill you can improve. Whether you want to know how your next date will go or who will win the US election, you can learn when to be confident and when to be uncertain. Nathan Young, a forecaster at the Swift Centre, has a few tips for adding predictions into your toolkit. You’ll enjoy it. Probably.

Nathan predicts events in geopolitics, AI and pandemics, and builds forecasting tools online. He also founded the Coronavirus Tech Handbook. Beyond that, he likes singing and hosting community dinners. If you have an idea for a forecasting question, he’d love to hear it at @nathanpmyoung on twitter.

We’re also very much looking forward to Hannah Deasy in our poetry slot! Hannah offers hard -hitting, vulnerable and often hilarious spoken word. Unpredictable, raw, warm and not afraid to dish the dirt on the state of her mental health, she holds crowds gripped with her personal true stories, skilfully intertwined with supremely well observed jokes.

Watch the recording

Main Events Past events

11:00 am, May 21 2023

Dance is Radical

Dance occupies a funny place in the English psyche; can you think of an activity we engage with so enthusiastically and regularly, but also so badly. Why was it banned by Oliver Cromwell and the priest in Footloose? Why was the government so threatened by “music wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”? When society wants us to be cerebral observers of culture, dance allows us to be visceral participants.

We’re delighted to have our very own Alan Gregan deliver a talk on how we in England live, how we dance and how we can use dance to explore and practise different ways of living. Alan is a dancer, a teacher and a Sunday Assembly community member. He has been learning styles under the swing umbrella for 12 years and teaching since 2015.

We will also have Emma Fisher deliver a movement workshop that explores what it might be like to tune into the language of our bodies, developing internal connectivity to allow for greater outer expressivity, and beginning to re-choreograph narratives about self, other and community. Emma is a professional dancer and registered Dance Movement Psychotherapist. Her performance career has taken her across 5 continents, collaborating with artists and choreographers.

Your host for the assembly is Anj Cairns.

Watch the recording

Main Events Past events

11:00 am, January 8 2023

Sunday Assembly London is 10!

We turned 10!

Sunday Assembly London has grown from a tiny egg of an idea from comedians Pippa Evans and Sanderson Jones into a totally rad double-digits ten-year-old. And like all the cool kids, we had a birthday party to celebrate!

Like all the best parties, there was cake, games, candles to blow out and a magician. Yes, we partied and have a good time with a real-life maker of magic.

We also sang along to some much-loved classic pop tunes, as voted for by members of the community.

Watch the recording

Main Events Past events

11:00 am, January 23 2022

It’s My Party and I’ll Dry if I Want To

Happy New Year, and happy 9th birthday to Sunday Assembly!

We’ve got a lot to celebrate, but we want to make sure we’re celebrating in a way that is completely by choice, not hindered by social pressure or habit. That’s why we invited Laura Willoughby, co-founder of Club Soda, to be our main speaker at this assembly.

Laura taught us all about ‘mindful drinking’, and how we can empower ourselves to make conscious decisions about our alcohol consumption.

This assembly was hosted by street art blogger at Inspiring City, Stu Holdsworth. We got the party started with some rockin’ tunes performed by the Sunday Assembly band as well as our returning guest performer, Gecko! And Emmy Broomfield gave a talk about their own mindful drinking journey.

Later in the afternoon we had lunch at Nando’s and took a group trip to Club Soda’s pop-up storefront to taste some delicious alcohol-free beverages.

Watch the recording

Main Events Past events

11:00 am, January 10 2021

Improv Your Year

Happy New Year, and happy 8th birthday to Sunday Assembly!

In honour of this special occasion, we invited Olivier award-winning comedian and Sunday Assembly co-founder Pippa Evans to be our main speaker! Pippa has been very productive during the pandemic, performing with the Showstoppers and translating her acclaimed self-improvement course “Improv Your Life” into book form. She realised that life is one big improvisation and all of our interactions with the world are made of quick decisions based on what’s available to us.

Pippa taught us some of the skills she has learned as an improv comedian and how they can be applied to every ‘scene’ in our lives.

Hosted by co-founder of Sunday Assembly and founder of The Lifefulness Project Sanderson Jones, this assembly also had poetry by Dan Simpson (@dansimpsonpoet), a member of the community talking about how they’re “Trying Their Best”, and fun sing-along songs by the Sunday Assembly Band.

Because of the current government restrictions, we cannot meet at Conway Hall in Holborn, so our meeting was held on Zoom instead and livestreamed to YouTube.

Watch the recording

Main Events Past events

11:00 am, January 5 2020

Change of Heart

Happy 7th Birthday, Sunday Assembly! For our first assembly of the year, we will gather to learn how we can make changes for the better, both in our personal lives and in the world around us.

Our main speaker, Margot Raggett, lived the corporate lifestyle in London for 20 years before undertaking a total change of direction at the age of 40. Seeing a poached elephant changed her life forever and set her off on a path to become one of the world’s most successful conservation book publishers. Margot will share that journey during her talk and why having a purpose has given her more satisfaction than climbing the career ladder ever did.

We welcome the return of comedic singer/songwriter Gecko! His album, Volcano, is available on Spotify.

We’ll sing some epic pop tunes together with our live band and hear from the chair of our board, Sarah Morgan, about Sunday Assembly’s plans for 2020 and beyond. And we’ll end by drinking a vat of tea, eating birthday cake, and talking with friends new and old.

Main Events Past events

11:00 am, January 6 2019

6th Birthday Celebrations

Our first assembly for 2019 AND our 6th ‘golden’ Birthday! What a date!

Join us in kicking 2019 off with a bombastic BANG and celebrate the past 6 years of Sunday Assembly with 6 of our favourite people from the past year on the 6th of Jan!

It’s a total treat and call us greedy, but, to celebrate this momentous date we will be having not one but TWO speakers, TWO poets and TWO Trying My Best speakers from yesteryear! Don’t say we don’t spoil you!

We are so excited to have Tiu de Haan back to talk to us about the importance of rituals and lead us in a Sunday Assembly ritual. Tiu is a ritual designer, creative facilitator, inspirational speaker, voiceover artist and musician. She creates experiences designed to connect us to our creativity, to each other, to ourselves and to the possibility of wonder.

Our second speaker is Shamash Alidina, co-founder of the Museum of Happiness, author of Mindfulness for Dummies and all round expert on Kindfulness! Shamash will be leading us on an extra special mediation to get our heads in the right space for the year ahead!

This Sunday Assembly will be hosted by our co-founder Sanderson Jones and we will have two of our favourite poets from 2018 performing.

We’ll also be doing our usual: mass singalongs to some of our favourite power ballads, an awesome spoken word artist, hearing stories from a number of our community and drinking a vat of tea afterwards.

What’s On

Stay up to date