Bloomsbury Festival 2022 - Festival Review

Bloomsbury Festival 2022 was held from 14-23 October with additional preview and post festival events. Inspired by the theme of Breathe partners offered outdoor galleries, indoor exhibitions, theatre, dance, performance and music events. The festival hosted talks, university outreach teams, workshops and discussions.

The Festival included around 130 events across 10 days, ranging from hard-hitting creative reflections on the environment and the air we breathe, to quiet moments of mindfulness, and exploration of freedom of speech and selfexpression. Many events were presented by emerging artists, writers and academics, others by established professionals, and some by the local community.

Bloomsbury Festival

The Festival’s ‘Platform’ for emerging talent has been supported by Arts Council England, and during the 2022 festival we launched The New Bloomsbury Set, with grant support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. This year-long project offers a re-invention of the literary and cultural heritage of Bloomsbury by the young people, global majority communities and residents of the area.

All photographs: Bloomsbury Festival 2022 by Stuart Keegan, Briana Quintanilla and Lakruwan Rajapaksha.

Below: Daytimers Mehfil at Conway Hall

HIGHLIGHTS: Store Street Global Garden Party

We celebrated the start of the festival on Friday 14 October with outdoor arts including a Zen Zone, Air Giants’ ‘Vines’ inflatables, Jason Singh’s ‘The Hidden Music of Trees’, Impact Dance, Arunima Kumar Dance, the Trans-Siberian March Band and a street food market.

Across Gower Street, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine presented a projection event and lecture ‘The Language of Shapes, with support from Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

During the festival opening reception at The Building Centre ‘The New Bloomsbury Set’ project was formally launched by the Deputy Mayor of Camden and members of the festival team.

The festival’s launch event included an afternoon and evening street food market with buskers and spread into an evening event staged on Store Street, South Crescent, Alfred Place Gardens and Keppel Street.

Four outdoor galleries of artwork brought a high-profile presence for visual art across the area.

Dryden Goodwin’s Breathe:2022 was part of a wider project created as part of Lewisham Borough of Culture. The festival hosted 72 of his drawings at giant scale along the Euston Rd.

Other outdoor exhibitions were displayed at Greater London Properties in north east Bloomsbury and in Bedford Square.

Photographer Kois Miah presented a series of nature-based artworks at Brunswick Square Gardens reflecting on personal loss.

HIGHLIGHTS: New Wave Art Prize 2022

Each year our festival Art Prize searches out some of the latest talent to emerge from arts courses in London and provides a stepping stone into the artists’ future career. In 2022 the first prize was shared by three winners who displayed their work at the Spaghetti House gallery.

A wider selection of the artwork entries were displayed outdoors in Bedford Square (with thanks to Bedford Estates), including the winners Jan Pimblett, Glenda Frieder and Emma Todd.

HIGHLIGHTS: New Wave Theatre & Music

In 2021 a professional theatre panel selected the work of five emerging playwrights for development and production in the 2022 festival.

Yifan Wu, Frankie Regalia, and India Harrison Peppe had productions presented at Dr Williams’s Library. With a rehearsed reading of a new play by Edie Walwyn and a radio play by Katherine White.

Additionally Bloomsbury Radio presented OILS by Jessica Rachid.

Music programme highlights included lunchtime concerts from classical and folk musicians and, with partners, we presented a wide range of musical events including a full day programme from SOAS’s Concert Series themed on Partition.

HIGHLIGHTS: Discovery Hub - Breathe

Our annual Discovery Hub invited academics and institutions from across Bloomsbury and beyond to showcase interactive exhibits about air quality and the environment to schools and family audiences and demonstrated some of the latest environmentally-friendly systems and technology.

The Clean Air Community from UCL and Great Ormond St Hospital demonstrated micro-gardens with Tik-Tok content creator and RHS Chelsea Flower Show Gold Medallist 2022, Ben Newell.

HIGHLIGHTS: Freedom of Speech

As part of our exploration of Breathe we had a focus on themes relating to self-expression and freedom of speech which included some of the following highlights:

Daytimers

Mehfil - An Evening of South Asian Poetry

“This has been an outstanding year for Bloomsbury Festival both in terms of the scale of activity and the audience numbers. The easing of the pandemic restrictions has enabled us to bring the streets and venues of Bloomsbury back to life in 2022. The support from all our partners, sponsors and grant funders has allowed us to work more closely with the local community and explore new partnerships and emerging artists”.

Maurice Biriotti Chair of Bloomsbury Festival

Writers of Colour: JawdanceApples and Snakes

The festival’s one completely digital event in 2022 was a presentation by Angela Charles, Criminology Lecturer from the University of Law.

“Having many friends who have served time in prison I gained a better perspective on stories I have been told”

“Hearing how black women have to adapt themselves to survive, not just the sentence, but also being imprisoned”

Bloomsbury’s Links to Slavery

Black Women in PrisonAngela Charles

Of the total audience 5,000 booked tickets for events and a further 5,000 enjoyed digital events and content, and radio broadcasts from the festival

Presenting work as a professional artist

a community event

Audiences for ticketed events were invited to feed back their thoughtsand from those that responded:

60% of the audience attended the festival for the first time 63% came to see a specific event 91% rated their visit high or very high

25% of the audience were local and 75% came from outside Bloomsbury 92% said their visit would encourage them to return to Bloomsbury 65% of the audience found the festival through online communications and the rest through word of mouth and the festival brochure

The festival website had over 91,000 unique users in the year to Nov 2022 and over 2 million hits.

Newsletters remain a very important method of communication with the audience and this year we introduced a new feature online –Guest Blogs from our partners.

The festival was very active on social media including twitter, facebook and Instagram.

With support from Arts Council England for our Platform project this enabled us to focus social media attention on our emerging theatre writers, Writers of Colour, artists and musicians.

MAJOR