Motherhood and miscarriage: Crystal Palace filmmaker leading South London Wine Fair through it all
Peering from the open door of a van packed with boxes, filmmaker Lizzie Brown greeted us with the smile of someone putting on a yearly event not pregnant for the first time ever.
South London Wine Fair was being set up as we chatted in the pale mid-morning Crystal Palace sun, but Lizzie has been fully set up for years, and it’s been hard-earned.
Lizzie runs Bird Flight Films and her husband owns their wine bar in Crystal Palace, Crystal Palace Wine Club, making up a good part of the family’s financial stability.
Having established a wine club in Crystal Palace, the yummy mummy capital of one of south London’s most diverse boroughs, Croydon, it wasn’t too long before the South London Wine Fair emerged.
But the first few years were accompanied by pregnancy after pregnancy, with one miscarriage inhibiting what could have been a euphoric rise to success.
Not that Lizzie and her husband let it stand in their way, this being South London Wine Fair’s fourth year, presented proudly on the Crystal Palace Park ‘laptop stage.’
Lizzie said: “This event is quite unique to us because the first year that we put it on, I was very pregnant with my son, we were 36 weeks pregnant, and I still did it on my feet all day, 12 hours a day.”
“The event has continued to evolve. The second year that we did it, we had actually really recently found out that we had lost a pregnancy.”
Lizzie and her husband now have two small children, a one-year-old and a three-year-old, and she said that running their own business gave them the flexibility to be fully present as parents.
She said: “It’s just the nature of business and in particular, of running your own business, where you don’t have the opportunity to pass it off to somebody else, so we just had to chin up and get on with it.”
In the third year of the wine fair, Lizzie was 37 weeks pregnant with her daughter, and had to move the event earlier in case the baby came early.
This year, as with others, Lizzie relies on her family to look after the kids while she manages the wine fair.
Through it all, Lizzie’s fourth wine fair is a testament to entrepreneurship helping fund a creative passion, juggled with motherhood.
She said: “This year is the first time that we’ve done it without any pregnancies or losses. And that feels nice.”