They grow up so fast. Margate’s Turner Contemporary will celebrate its fifth birthday on Saturday, April 16.

The award-winning gallery, which has been providing art for free to thousands for the past five years, will be holding a series of free live performances, workshops and, of course, enjoying some birthday cake to mark the occasion.

The day starts at 10am and workshops run from 10.30am to 2pm in the Clore Learning Studio, with community groups ART 31, Studio Group and Blank Canvas.

At 11am and 12.30pm there will be Big Sing performances from the gallery’s resident choir, who will be presenting a work, Landscapes.

At 3pm, visitors can share in a birthday cake made by Great British Bake Off’s Chetna Makan, who lives in Thanet.

There will be a Tarantism flashmob, inspired by the current exhibition, Joachim Koester: The Other Side of the Sky, from 5pm, and from 6.30pm composer Helen Caddick’s work Bright Planet will be performed by CantiaQuorum.

The day will be rounded off with cocktails in the gallery café between 7pm and 8pm, with music from artist Jason Evans.

For details, visit turnercontemporary.org and you can tweet your comments and ideas using #TCmoments and #TCfuture.

Coming up at the Turner later this year

To mark the anniversary, later this year the gallery will stage an exhibition of the work of the celebrated landscape artist it was named after.

Turner and Colour will feature more than 70 works including paintings, drawings and engravings.

It will be the fullest survey of the artist’s watercolours of Margate yet to be shown there and explore his use of colour; it will run from Saturday, October 8, to Sunday, January 8, 2017.

Previously at the Turner

In September, managers announced that its exhibition featuring more than 50 works by Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry had attracted 192,177 people to the gallery.

It was the gallery's second most successful exhibition, beaten only by Revealed, its launch exhibition from April 2011, featuring work by Turner and six contemporary artists.

Over the past five years, other world-famous works that have gone on show have included pen and ink studies by Leonardo da Vinci and Rodin’s life-sized marble sculpture, The Kiss, loaned by the Tate.

Visitors have included the Queen in November 2011, David Cameron in July 2013 and the Duchess of Cambridge last year.