MORE than 60,000 visitors are expected to converge on Winchester for the Hat Fair, a melting pot of international street art, which gets under way today.

There will be 234 performances in 20 different outdoor sites around the city centre today and tomorrow. The free festival culminates on Sunday with the traditional picnic and entertainment at Oram’s Arbour.

An enormous range of performers are taking part in the festival from the primary schoolchildren who will open the festival with a parade themed around Roald Dahl to the 80-year-old performers of an installation called Bed.

Highlights include an Urban Astronaut ‘space-walking’ 20 feet in the air, children giving adults haircuts, a roaming Grassman wearing a suit grown from real grass and the UK première of a stunning dance performance by Collectif A/R from France.

Saturday concludes with two spectacular evening events. Renowned circus company Ockham’s Razor present Tipping Point in the Bus Station, a show in which performers balance on, cling to, and manipulate 5-metre long poles. Then six female dancers run and leap around on the roof of Chesil Street Multi-Storey car park in the breath-taking Of Riders & Running Horses by Still House & Mayk.

Once again the Children’s Area in Cathedral Inner Close will offer plenty of activities to interest and entertain younger festival attenders.

Ten-year-olds from Winnall Primary School will offer adults free Haircuts By Children in Regis hair salon on Colebrook Street.

As always, top street theatre performers from around the world will busk, or ‘hat’, in the High Street, The Square and Abbey Gardens, maintaining the long tradition that gives the festival its name. Hatters for 2016 include acrobats manoAmano from Argentina and Les Dudes from Canada.

Pictured is Lance Moi En L'Air, a brand new dance / circus show by festival favourites Joli Vyann about the sensitivity and connection between two people, full of compatible contradictions.

For further details, visit hatfair.co.uk.