Korean street food, taekwondo and a festive parade all took over Kingston’s market place for a celebration of one of the Asian nation’s biggest holidays.

Residents of all nationalities met at the Ancient Market Place on Saturday for the Chuseok festival, a traditional three day Korean holiday celebrating the beginning of the autumn harvest.

Korean residents put on taekwondo demonstrations and cooking lessons for traditional deserts such as Songpyeon and Daesik.

The event was organised by the Korean British Cultural Exchange, a newly founded charity set up to promote Korean culture in the UK, especially Kingston.

Sonhae Sohn, chairwoman of the group, said: “I’ve lived half my life in this county but not many know about Korea. We’ve a long history of beautiful culture and we are different.

“When we started this we wanted to introduce our culture to society -that is why I wanted to show [people] the culture little by little.

“They really, really enjoyed it.”

In Korea the holiday is celebrated when residents visit their ancestral hometown and share a feast of Korean traditional food and rice wines.

New Malden has a 20,000 strong South Korean population and is also home to more North Korean refugees than anywhere else in Europe.

Ms Sohn added; “Recently a lot of North Koreans escaped from the north.

“We are working very hard to embrace them because we lived apart for over 60 years. We have to have some time to understand each other.”