History of Stevenage Festival

In the 1950’s the Stevenage Arts Guild was founded to ‘encourage, to sustain and to co-ordinate the amateur artistic endeavours of the people of Stevenage’. Many local amateur groups belong to the Arts Guild and in the early 1990’s the Guild came up with the idea of a festival of arts events, every two years, to celebrate all the good things that were going on in the arts in Stevenage.

So the Stevenage Festival was born, and took place for the first time in 1994. The first Festival was one week of events at the Gordon Craig Theatre. The second Festival expanded into two weeks at the Gordon Craig, with some outside events as well and continued on this basis every other year until 2006. At this point it was evident that the Festival was competing with some major sporting events that took place in the ‘even’ years so a decision was made to switch to the ‘odd’ years with a mini-Festival in 2007, and the full version again in 2009 and every 2 years thereafter. The Festival has also expanded beyond its allotted two weeks with events now occurring throughout almost all of June.

The Festival fringe has grown from strength to strength. Over the years Stevenage has been treated to everything from art workshops to rock music.

For a flavour of previous Festivals see below

2009 Festival
2009 Fringe

 The Festival is organised by a small team of volunteers and is supported by Stevenage Borough Council, Stevenage Arts Guild, the Gordon Craig Theatre, Stevenage Community Trust, Archant Group and, of course, the people of Stevenage.

The Festival is grateful to the following patrons for their support:

The Lord Lieutenant of Hertfordshire
Lord David Cobbold
Professor Howard Burrell
Mr Ken Follett
Mr Barry Norman
Mrs Diana Norman

The Festival is a registered charity no 1084482. General meetings are held every 2 years to review the past Festival and start planning the next one. The minutes of the most recent general meetings can be found below:

Festival AGM 2009
Festival AGM 2006