Bloomsbury Festival Celebrates 20 Years With Over 150 Events

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Rosemary Richards reflects on her final year leading the festival of theatre, music, art, literature, science and family events.

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The 20th Anniversary year of Bloomsbury Festival will begin in two week's time, marked for the first time with an extended month-long celebration of local community and culture. The annual festival of theatre, music, art, literature, science and family events will take place across Bloomsbury and Camden's streets, parks, museums and galleries with the anniversary theme of Create and Celebrate. This will be the final year for Festival Director Rosemary Richards, having led the creative team for six years, with the incoming Festival Director to be announced at the end of the festival.

Festival Director Rosemary Richards said, “Since 2020 I have had the great privilege of working with the community and artists of Bloomsbury to bring together the annual Autumn festival. As the weeks of September roll by theatre groups and musicians are rehearsing, talks being planned, walks mapped out, discovery events for schools and families are being organised, artworks created. In a city area where so many people live, and even more come and go, the participants are hard at work and the energy is tangible. This year is the festival's twentieth anniversary, and we are celebrating by looking back through the lens of the festival photographs taken by Stuart Keegan stretching back across two decades, showcasing hundreds of organisations and thousands of participants, and sharing unique images of events as street galleries across Bloomsbury. In this my last year with the festival I am hoping that with events across the month of October I will have time myself to explore and enjoy even more of the festival activity and I look forward to meeting festival audiences, friends and newcomers at our venues and events.”

An exciting mix of science and creative activities for schools and families, the Discovery Hub (22 – 24, Holborn Library) features interactive exhibitions and workshops spanning astronomy, robotics, solar power and space origami. Join astronomers from UCL on the rooftop of the Imperial London Hotel for The Imperial Night Sky (14, 18 & 21, The Imperial), an evening of stargazing above the city, with specialist telescopes and equipment and drinks from Arcus Rooftop Bar.

For art and literature lovers, an exhibition of unseen memorabilia and memories of novelist EM Forster and paintings by Jim Buckingham, EM Forster's Legacy of Connection: Unseen Memorabilia (1 – 31, Holborn Library) offers new insights into Forster's legacy of connection, as well as into Bloomsbury working class history. An exhibition by award-winning photographer Jonathan Banks , Enrich Me With Your Difference (1 – 13, St Pancras Church) celebrates diversity and difference, showcasing the work of the humanitarian organisations he has worked with. Moments of Grace (2 – 31, Holy Cross Church) is an immersive sound and light installation project distilling a century of nursing and midwifery stories into one time-bending 24-hour shift. First-time directors from the Sahrawi Refugee camps explore how their culture has changed after 50 years of enforced displacement in a world premiere screening of documentary film collection, What We Were and What We Are (21, Bertha Dochouse).

From the theatre and performance programme, a new reimagining the Greek myth of the Minotaur, From the Labyrinth (23, Holy Cross Church) uses choral work to reinterpret the myth and celebrate the beauty of the living creature. From The Aphasia New Music Group, Listen (7, UCL Bloomsbury Theatre) unites people with aphasia, musicians and speech and language therapists to celebrate the creativity of people with the life-changing condition affecting the use of language, with original music, made in weekly sessions throughout the year. A play where the audience votes to shape the plot, What If? (18, City Lit) is a two-man-show set in WWI, combining live classical music with a branching narrative in a choose-your-own-adventure performance.

With a blend of academic institutions, businesses, cultural organisations and diverse communities, Bloomsbury has been a catalyst for ideas that have had impact across the world for hundreds of years. The Festival celebrates a hotbed of creativity and pioneering development which has one of the youngest and most diverse populations in the country. Bloomsbury Festival is a Registered charity.

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/uk-regional/article/BLOOMSBURY-FESTIVAL-Marks-20th-Anniversary-With-150-Events-20260916)._