BUILTH’S ARTS CENTRE TURNS 50, AND IT’S THROWING THE WHOLE BUILDING OPEN

Wyeside Arts Centre celebrates with three days of films, live music, poetry, local history and a new commission inspired by the River Wye.

I have a huge soft spot for local arts centres. I spent a big chunk of my own childhood performing in one, which in retrospect probably kept me busy enough to avoid at least a reasonable amount of low-level misbehaviour. I also think places like this matter far beyond whatever happens to be on stage that night. They give children somewhere to discover they like performing, teenagers somewhere to become obsessed with music or film, and adults a cultural life that doesn’t require driving to a city every time they want to see something interesting.

So Wyeside Arts Centre reaching its 50th birthday feels genuinely worth celebrating.

The centre sits beside the River Wye in Builth Wells, but the story of arts on the site goes back much further than 1976. Wyeside’s own anniversary programme traces the idea back 150 years, when people in Builth decided the town needed a building specifically for live music. Fifty years ago that evolved into the arts centre people know now.

The birthday programme from Friday to Sunday feels deliberately rooted in that history rather than parachuting in a couple of famous names and calling it an anniversary. There are 1970s films including Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Jaws, Robin Hood and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, alongside a photographic history of Wyeside and a screening of A Little Below Heaven, a Builth Wells Community Arts Society film involving more than 80 local people which hasn’t been shown since 2002.

Then the programme moves very firmly into the present. Owen Sheers is reading on Saturday afternoon. South Wales alt-country band Cardinal Sin play Friday night, Bryde plays Saturday, and Sunday sees the premiere of Cymuned Gwy, a new piece commissioned especially for the anniversary from Nia Lynn, Toby Hay and Aidan Thorne. It draws on the Wye, the local landscape, community stories and the bilingual heritage of Brycheiniog.

I particularly like that the River Wye is threaded through the weekend rather than being treated as a nice bit of scenery outside the window. The gallery exhibition What Does The River Wye Mean To You? brings together artists responding to its wildlife, folklore, communities and landscape, while artist Beverley Thornley talks about making inks from materials including old red sandstone, oak galls and alder cones gathered around the Afon Llynfi, a tributary of the Wye.

This is exactly why local arts centres deserve protecting. They become repositories for all sorts of things a town might otherwise lose: photographs, performances, memories, weird amateur productions, children’s first trips to the cinema, somebody’s first gig, somebody else’s first time on stage.

Fifty years of that is quite something.

Friday 9 to Sunday 11 October | Wyeside Arts Centre, Builth Wells

​See Wyeside’s full 50th birthday programme​

LLANGOLLEN IS EATING ITS WAY THROUGH THE WEEKEND

Llangollen Food Festival takes over seven town-centre locations on Saturday and Sunday, while the railway turns Saturday night into its final Ales from Wales beer train of the year.

I like a food festival that understands its location. Rather than putting up a ring of gazebos in a field and charging everyone to enter, Llangollen Food Festival has been spread through the town itself. This weekend there are more than 100 producers, seven walkable festival stops, chef demonstrations, free tastings, family activity and live music running between the station and Riverside Park. Entry is free and everything runs from 10am to 5pm on Saturday and Sunday. Llangollen Food Festival​

The food trail takes in Gales Wine Bar, Memorial Square, the railway, Town Hall, Market Street, Blas Cookery School, the Silver Band Hut and Riverside Park, so you can move through Llangollen rather than spending the whole day inside a fenced event site. There are 22 music acts across the weekend, while the cookery programme includes Dylan Owens, Executive Head Chef Director at Manchester City FC and a MasterChef: The Professionals quarter-finalist, alongside 2026 Welsh National Chef of the Year Dion Jones. There is even a free Bordeaux tasting at Blas Wine School for anyone who likes their Saturday afternoon education to involve Merlot. Llangollen Food Festival​

And then the railway gets involved.

Saturday evening is the final Ales from Wales train of the 2026 season, which is effectively a beer festival threaded through a heritage railway journey along the Dee Valley.

The evening starts at Llangollen Station from 5pm with food, live music and Welsh beer before the train leaves at 7pm. The October edition is serving ales from the likes of Purple Moose, Hafod and Magic Dragon, with wines from Blas, before heading out behind steam locomotive 3802, The Carthorse. There is time at Corwen, then a 45-minute stop at Glyndyfrdwy where Porter’s Bar provides the deeply unnecessary but very welcome opportunity for another pint, before everybody heads back to Llangollen. Tickets are £20 and include a souvenir glass and the first drink.

There are also railway afternoon teas during the festival and a Sunday steam journey to Corwen for lunch at the community-run Owain Glyndŵr Hotel, because apparently Llangollen Railway looked at the concept of “food festival transport” and decided merely getting people there wasn’t ambitious enough.

More than 10,000 people are expected in town across the weekend, so the railway is also encouraging people to park further out and travel in from Corwen, Glyndyfrdwy, Carrog or Berwyn. That actually makes the whole thing rather appealing. Arriving at a food festival by steam train is a considerably stronger start to the day than circling a temporary car park while somebody in hi-vis waves vaguely at a hedge.

Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 October, 10am–5pm | Across Llangollen | Free entry

​Explore Llangollen Food Festival​

​See the railway’s Food Festival weekend plans​

TOM McRAE BRINGS 25 YEARS OF SONGS TO LUDLOW

The Mercury-nominated songwriter plays a stripped-back solo show at Ludlow Assembly Rooms on Friday night.

There is a particular sort of career I find more interesting with age: the artist who never became so famous that the machinery swallowed the actual work, but quietly built a catalogue and an audience that stuck around.

Tom McRae is a pretty good example of this.

His debut album brought Mercury Prize, Q Award and BRIT nominations, but rather than following the obvious pop-star trajectory he has spent the following quarter century putting out records, touring and accumulating the sort of audience who know considerably more than the three songs a casual listener might recognise. He is now ten albums in, with the catalogue stretching through Just Like Blood, The Alphabet of Hurricanes and most recently Étrange Hiver.

Friday’s show at Ludlow Assembly Rooms follows the full-band tour celebrating 25 years since that debut, but this version strips everything back to McRae alone with a guitar. The Assembly Rooms describes it as a career-spanning evening built around both the well-loved songs and the ones people may have half forgotten, with the storytelling between them forming as much a part of the night as the music.

That feels like the right scale for him. There are artists I want to see with screens, lights and a small army of people firing smoke cannons. There are others where putting them in a relatively intimate room and letting the songs breathe is much more interesting.

Ludlow Assembly Rooms is a good room for exactly that sort of night.

Friday 9 October, 7.30pm | Ludlow Assembly Rooms | 90 minutes

​Tom McRae at Ludlow Assembly Rooms​

MANCHESTER HAS FOLLOWED ME TO SHREWSBURY

New Dawn Fades, Brian Gorman’s play about Joy Division and Manchester, runs at Theatre Severn on Friday and Saturday.

Last week I was banging on about the free screening of 24 Hour Party People in Ludlow, partly because I went to university in Manchester and once wrote an essay arguing that the film was a better university prospectus than the actual university prospectus.

I still think I had a point.

So the arrival of New Dawn Fades: A Play About Joy Division and Manchester at Theatre Severn feels like an accidental second week of the syllabus.

The play has been around since its debut at the Greater Manchester Fringe in 2013, but the interesting thing about it is the scale of what writer Brian Gorman tries to fit around the band. Joy Division’s story is there, of course, from the punk explosion through Ian Curtis’s death and the emergence of New Order, but Manchester itself is treated as part of the story. Gorman, who also plays Factory Records boss Tony Wilson, brings in figures ranging from Friedrich Engels and Dr John Dee to Paul Morley and Pete Shelley.

That sounds slightly bonkers written down, but it makes sense. Joy Division did not appear from nowhere. They came out of a particular city at a particular moment, shaped by post-industrial Manchester, punk, Factory, Wilson, the clubs and rehearsal spaces around them.

There is a neat connection in the 2026 production. Co-producer Tony Davidson owned T.J. Davidson’s rehearsal studios in Manchester, used by bands including Joy Division, Buzzcocks and The Fall, and the location used for the Love Will Tear Us Apart video. His fellow producer Nigel Carr is part of Louder Than War. This is clearly a production made by people who have spent an unreasonable amount of time inside this particular corner of musical history.

Theatre Severn originally had Friday and Saturday evening performances and has added a Saturday 2.30pm show, presumably because enough other people also fancy spending two hours in 1970s Manchester. Tickets are £30.25.

If last week’s 24 Hour Party People sent you back down a Factory Records rabbit hole, consider this your next module.

Friday 9 October, 7.30pm and Saturday 10 October, 2.30pm & 7.30pm | Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury | £30.25

​New Dawn Fades at Theatre Severn​

SEVEN SEASONS OF BUFFY. ONE SPIKE. 70 MINUTES.

Award-winning Edinburgh Fringe parody Buffy Revamped comes to The Blake Theatre in Monmouth on Tuesday night.

There are concepts that require several paragraphs of explanation and then there is Buffy Revamped. All 144 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Seventy minutes. Told entirely from Spike’s point of view.

You already know whether you are the audience for this. I AM FOR SURE.

The show was created by comedian Brendan Murphy, whose previous show FRIEND (The One with Gunther) won Best Play at the World Wide Comedy Awards. Buffy Revamped premiered at Edinburgh Fringe in 2022, won Best One Person Show and Best Comedy Performance at the Dark Chat Awards, then went on to seasons in Ireland, Australia, Canada and the US alongside several sold-out UK tours.

There is something quite pleasing about Buffy continuing to generate this level of devotion nearly three decades after it first appeared.

For a particular generation (mine), Sunnydale was less a TV setting and more a weekly appointment. Buffy, Willow, Xander, Giles, Angel, The Bronze, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s leather trousers, several deeply formative supernatural relationships and eventually Spike arriving with that hair and causing yet more trouble.

The show promises plenty of 90s pop-culture references, but what makes the idea funny is the perspective. Spike is exactly the wrong person to give an objective account of seven seasons of Buffy, which is precisely why he should be the one doing it.

It is happening on a Tuesday night in Monmouth. Worth the school night outing.

Tuesday 13 October | Doors 6.45pm, show 7.30pm | The Blake Theatre, Monmouth | £25 plus booking fees

​Book Buffy Revamped​

THE NICE PILE

BIG APPLE HARVESTIME, MUCH MARCLE

If you want the most Herefordshire event imaginable this weekend, Big Apple Harvestime is probably it. Seven venues around Much Marcle open across Saturday and Sunday to celebrate apples, pears, orchards, cider and perry, including Westons Cider, Hellens, Gregg’s Pit and local farms. The Big Apple Association exists specifically to protect and celebrate the orchard heritage of the Marcle Ridge, so this has considerably more substance than a few hay bales and a cider tent. There is even a family Golden Apple scavenger hunt on Saturday for £3 per entry or £5 per family. Big Apple Harvestime programme​

MAKE YOUR OWN MISO, CRICK

The Crafty Pickle Co. is running its Introduction to Miso & Koji workshop on Sunday afternoon at Bentley Green Farm near Chepstow. You make your own jar of miso, learn what koji actually does and taste a selection of ferments along the way. What makes this one more interesting to me is that founders Madi and Arthur both studied nutrition and are unusually keen to separate the actual evidence around fermented food from the more excitable claims made in the name of “gut health”. They started the company as a side hustle in 2019, moved it to South East Wales in 2021 and also use surplus produce as part of their wider food-waste mission. Sunday 11 October, 1–3pm | Crick, near Caldicot | £55 Book the miso and koji workshop​

BIG PANTS PARTY, MONMOUTH

The Blake Theatre’s Big Pants Party on Saturday is essentially a live-band night built around songs associated with friendships, heartbreak, enormous choruses and the period of an evening when everybody stops pretending they are going home early. It starts at 7.30pm and tickets are £28. More info and tickets

WHEN SOFT WAS THE SUN, PEMBRIDGE

If your weekend could use something quieter, Old Chapel Gallery’s autumn exhibition When Soft was the Sun runs through October in Pembridge. The show brings together painting, ceramics, stained glass, textiles and jewellery from British artists and makers, including work by Monmouth-based painter Lynda Jones, whose landscapes begin with places she knows but become increasingly driven by memory rather than literal representation. The gallery is one of those places where the building and the work feel particularly good together at this time of year. No ticket/payment required.

CÉZANNE ON A WEDNESDAY, LUDLOW

Ludlow Assembly Rooms currently has Exhibition on Screen: CÉZANNE: Portraits of a Life listed for Wednesday 14 October. The film draws on the National Portrait Gallery exhibition and uses Cézanne’s correspondence alongside material from collections including MoMA, the Musée d’Orsay and National Gallery of Art to get closer to the man behind the paintings. A very respectable way to spend a Wednesday evening without having to get anywhere near London. See Ludlow Assembly Rooms listings​

That's your lot!

That’s your lot for this week. I’m off to work out which of these I can realistically squeeze into my week ahead without completely wrecking myself and to enjoy the fact that autumn has finally made the Marches look exactly how I want it to.

If you’re heading to something, or there’s something you’re particularly excited about, hit reply to this email or comment on the instagram and tell me. I’m always nosy about what people are actually doing, and half the best MAM leads start that way.

See you next Thursday.

Sarah x

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