FOUR DAYS DEEP IN FOLK

Bromyard Folk Festival takes over the town this weekend with music, stories, ceilidhs, sessions and the kind of communal joy that folk does better than almost anything

Bromyard Folk Festival is back this weekend, bringing four days of concerts, ceilidhs, workshops, storytelling, dance and impromptu sessions to the town.

It’s one of those festivals where the big names matter, of course, but they’re only part of the appeal. The real magic is in everything happening around them. Music spilling out of pubs. Someone starting a tune and someone else joining in. Harmonies appearing from nowhere. Strange instruments, old stories, lilting voices and that lovely sense that the audience is never completely separate from what’s happening.

That’s what I’ve always loved about folk.

Before Covid, I played ukulele with Moselele in Birmingham, where nearly 50 of us would pile into a pub and play everything from folk and rock to drum & bass. Since moving to the Marches seven years ago, I’ve gradually found my way back into that world again.

I play with the ukulele group in Clun now. I go to Clun Folk Club. I’ve spent evenings singing folk songs with my nan as a chhild. And being around it again has reminded me how much I love the whole strange, generous ecosystem of folk music.

You can turn up and listen. You can join in. You can know every word or none of them. People keep adding layers to songs and stories that have already travelled through hundreds of other hands, voices, pubs and generations.

It’s music as something shared, rather than simply performed at you.

Bromyard has been doing exactly that since 1968, and this year’s festival brings another packed weekend of music across the town, with headline performances alongside smaller sessions, workshops and all the bits where you accidentally lose an hour because someone has started playing in the corner.

That, for me, is where folk gets you.

Thursday 10–Sunday 13 September | Bromyard, Herefordshire

​Tickets here​

THAT ISN’T ACTUALLY HER

Bella Brindle’s new photography exhibition at Swan Hill Studios takes on deepfake AI, consent and what happens when technology gives misogyny a shiny new toy

This weekend, Swan Hill Studios in Shrewsbury opens a new photography exhibition by Bella Brindle exploring deepfake AI, women’s rights and the loss of control over your own image.

Brindle, a photography student at Birmingham City University and Swan Hill’s final Artist in Residence of the year, uses contemporary portrait photography to look at what happens when a woman’s face, body and identity can be digitally placed into something she never made, chose or consented to.

Women being humiliated, sexualised or discredited to push them out of public life is hardly a Silicon Valley invention. AI has simply made the machinery faster, cheaper and frighteningly accessible.

Brindle’s work explores deepfake pornography, blackmail, shame and the increasingly slippery line between an authentic image and a fabricated one. She is interested in the emotional fallout too, and in what happens when technology moves faster than consent.

The law is beginning to catch up. Creating or requesting a non-consensual intimate deepfake of an adult is now a criminal offence in England and Wales, with further legislation aimed at the tools used to make them.

But Bella’s work asks the harder question: what happens once the fake exists and people have seen it?

You can criminalise the image. You can’t always put someone’s reputation, confidence or sense of ownership over their own face back where it was.

A small Shrewsbury exhibition taking on one of the ugliest questions surrounding AI right now.

Private view Friday 11 September, 4–7pm | Open Saturday 12 & Sunday 13 September, 10am–4pm | Swan Hill Studios, Shrewsbury

Ellen Lou has landed in Ludlow, with a new collection and a Saturday opening party

NEW JEWELS IN TOWN - Opening Party

There’s a new jeweller in Ludlow, and she's worth knowing about.

Ellen Lou has moved from Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter into a new Ludlow studio and shop, bringing her handmade jewellery with her.

It’s a working space too, so you can actually see where the pieces are made, talk through bespoke ideas and get a little closer to the craft behind everything in the cabinets.

She’s also just launched Cadence, a new collection of hand-engraved, stone-set rings made in the Ludlow workshop. The pieces are built around rhythm, movement and repetition, with tiny stones punctuating the engraved patterns almost like beats.

Which makes the soundtrack for Saturday’s opening feel pretty perfect.

The doors are open from 12–6pm, with live music from 2pm before the decks take over with funk, soul and house for the rest of the afternoon. There’ll be prosecco, canapés from Nook (across the road), a buffet and a little corner with activities for kids, so this is very much a bring-your-mates, bring-the-family, stay-for-a-drink kind of opening.

A new independent shop, good jewellery, good music and an excuse to spend Saturday afternoon in town. Ludlow could do with more of this.

Saturday 12 September | 12–6pm | Ellen Lou | Live music from 2pm, DJs afterwards. Find her at Parkway in Ludlow just off Corve Street. Shop her jewels here. ​

INTO THE FAERIE REALM

DANCE THROUGH THE VEIL

Berwick House is hosting an immersive fantasy dance party with folk music, fire, storytelling and a Goblin Market

This Saturday, Berwick House near Shrewsbury is turning itself into a full-blown fantasy world for one night only.

Through The Veil is an immersive dance party inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with live folk music, roaming performers, fire, storytelling, painting workshops, an interactive mystery and a Goblin Market tucked into the grounds.

And, inconveniently for my dignity, this has arrived at exactly the point where I am far too deep into ACOTAR and the Throne of Glass series.

I am now firmly a Nesta fan, mentally training to become a Valkyrie and only occasionally considering whether I might be better suited to life as an assassin.

So yes, an evening involving fae, fire, folklore, strange markets and a country house is currently very much speaking my current booktok language.

There’s an abridged performance of Shakespeare in the mix too, but this is a move-around, get-involved, follow-the-weirdness kind of night rather than a sit-down theatre affair.

Costume is encouraged, which feels correct when you’re spending six hours wandering around a country house full of high fae, musicians and people selling mysterious things from a Goblin Market.

Quite honestly, more Saturday nights should involve this much commitment to the bit.

Saturday 12 September | 6pm–midnight | Berwick House, Shrewsbury | 18+

​Tickets HERE​

LUDLOW IS ABOUT TO SMELL INCREDIBLE

Ludlow Food Festival takes over the castle this weekend, and this year feels like an important one

Last year, I celebrated my 40th there with my mates. We went to the Hungry Guys Slow Food feast, then rolled straight into the fire-food evening for an unreasonable amount of slow-roasted deliciousness.

It was one of those brilliant Ludlow nights where the castle, the food, the people and the slightly ridiculous quantity of things you’ve eaten all blur into one very happy memory.

So I’m firmly in the camp that wants this festival to thrive.

But there’s been plenty of conversation about what its future looks like, and whether the festival in its current form can keep going. I think that makes this exactly the moment to be ambitious about what it becomes next.

Because Ludlow has absolutely no excuse for a cookie-cutter food festival.

Look at what we have around us: brilliant farms, producers, chefs, growers, brewers, makers and food brands. Centuries of food and agricultural heritage. A castle in the middle of town. A landscape people already travel here specifically to eat their way through.

Then look at some of the wild, inventive food festivals happening elsewhere in the UK and beyond, where food gets mixed with music, art, fire, farming, design, storytelling and big communal experiences.

There is so much more this event could keep becoming.

And this year’s programme already has some of that energy.

Nathan Outlaw is talking fish, Pasta Grannies creator Vicky Bennison is on the Castle Garden Stage, School of Wok’s Jeremy Pang hits the Fire Stage on Saturday and food writer and barbecue chef Melissa Thompson is cooking over flame later that afternoon. DJ BBQ is basically moving in for the weekend to host the whole live-fire operation.

There are pleasingly specific rabbit holes too. Food historians are recording a live A is for Apple podcast about how you would actually put on a medieval castle feast. You can learn butchery and fire cooking, go foraging, improve your food photography or spend Friday or Saturday night eating a six-course Slow Food feast inside the castle.

This year also brings a Little Foodies Zone, with cookery, crafts and dancing for smaller festival-goers, which may buy parents approximately seven glorious minutes to eat something with both hands.

And, as ever, the festival spills out into Ludlow itself, with brewery tours, events around town and the Pub Trail, which involves visiting enough pubs to make completing the accompanying quiz increasingly ambitious.

I love that this festival belongs so firmly to Ludlow.

I’ve celebrated big birthdays there. I’ve eaten extremely well there. I’ve made some very good memories there.

I just want it to keep surprising us too.

Friday 11–Sunday 13 September | Ludlow Castle and around town

THE NICE PILE

World Coracle Championships, Shrewsbury Four-person teams attempt to race tiny round boats across the Severn using one paddle, with practice from noon and racing after 2pm. Elite sporting endeavour, obviously. Friday 11 September | Pengwern Boat Club.More info​

Sound Bath at Attingham Lie down inside Attingham Park’s Picture Gallery while crystal bowls and chimes reverberate around the mansion, then emerge 75 minutes later either spiritually transformed or in need of coffee. Saturday 12 September | 9.15am | £35 More info​

Hay Music Festival This year’s theme is The Healing Power of Music, with jazz inside Hay Castle, chamber music around town and a Sunday screening of Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy inside Richard Booth’s Bookshop Cinema. 11–13 September | Hay-on-Wye More info​

Medieval house, meet alpacas Rare 15th-century Llwyn Celyn opens its doors for the weekend, with owls, giant tortoises and lizards on Saturday before the alpacas take over on Sunday. Frankly impeccable programming. 12–13 September | More info​

Supper at the Flaxmill Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings keeps the café open after hours for a two or three-course supper inside one of the most extraordinary industrial buildings in the Marches. Friday 11 September | 6.30–8.30pm More info​

The Lie of the Land, Shrewsbury Five Shropshire artists take on landscape through painting, drawing, print, collage and sculpture at Gateway Gallery, with a meet-the-artists evening on Thursday. Opens 15 September | Artists evening Thursday 17, 5–7pm. More info​

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