Lynne About Loughborough: Bell Festival

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Sunday, 2 August 2026

Half a Century of Creativity: Charnwood Arts Turns 50

As this blog celebrates its 13th birthday in August, I'm hosting a few guest blogposts during the month...

Today's guest post has been contributed by the CEO of Charnwood Arts, Shirley Novak, and is a celebration of CA's 50 years! What an amazing thing it is that the organisation has been an integral part of Loughborough's creative scene for such a long time! During those 50 years, CA have been based in several different places, including an Edwardian building on Granby Street, and in Fearon Hall, but today they can be found on Steeple Row, where they have been in offices previously occupied by a firm of solicitors, since about 2022, not long after Shirley arrived. CA has a broad reach, and an ethos of inclusivity - even if, like me, you think you're hopeless at art and not a creative at all - and there are big, bold plans for its 50th year, and beyond. But, I'll let Shirley tell you about this ...

Half a Century of Creativity: Charnwood Arts Turns 50

Shirley Novak, CEO Charnwood Arts

June/July 2026

Charnwood Arts is based in the former Straw & Pearce offices

It was exactly fifty years ago that Charnwood Arts first opened its doors, and was born from a powerful vision, boundless passion, and a firm belief that creativity has the unique power to bring people together.

We all know that for so many of those years, Kevin Ryan was at the helm, guiding and shaping every step of the journey.

Kev Ryan at Picnic in the Park, 2016

Picnic in the Park 2017, organised by Charnwood Arts

Over these five decades, Charnwood Arts has become far more than just a place to make art; it has been the heartbeat of our community, a space where ideas grow, stories are told, and every single voice is welcomed and heard.

This month marks six years since I took the position of CEO during the COVID pandemic. Looking back, it was an immensely challenging time for everyone, not only within Charnwood Arts but across society as a whole. It was a turning point after which nothing would ever return to how it was before.

We needed to rethink everything. The Arts Council (who are our main funders) worked closely with us to ‘make ready’ the organisation for another successful application for the National Portfolio funding to keep Charnwood Arts doing and what it does best for another 4 years, despite the uncertainties through COVID. Those 4 years have turned into 6, and here we still are and will be for some time to come yet!

Back in the mid-1970s, a small group of passionate local people saw a gap: there was plenty of talent in Charnwood, but few opportunities for residents to access, enjoy, or take part in the arts. With determination and a shared vision, they founded what would become Charnwood Arts, an independent charity dedicated to making creativity accessible to all ages, backgrounds, and abilities. What started with simple workshops, exhibitions, and community events soon took root.

Word spread: here was an organisation that listened, adapted, and put people first. Whether you were a child picking up a pencil for the first time, an older adult looking for connection, or an emerging artist needing a platform, Charnwood Arts opened its doors, which pretty much remains our focus today. One of the most wonderful things about Charnwood Arts is how it evolves. It has moved to embrace film, creative crafts, music, digital art, and installations, and the emerging artist programme means we celebrate local talent employing local artists to deliver a wide variety of sessions, creating opportunities with support to many new artists. Charnwood Arts, always keeps pace with the times while staying true to its original mission.

When you look back at 50 years, you realise Charnwood Arts has never been only about making art. It’s about building community. It’s the friendships formed in a weekly session, the pride of seeing your work displayed in our little exhibition space, hearing yourself reading your own written podcast, making music from sounds found in the forest to help with anxiety, and attending the successful Breathe Create sessions set up to specifically to use creativity to improve wellbeing. Breathe Create is not a new concept, but a simple approach, such as take a deep breathe, take some time for yourself and be creative has literally saved lives, given space and feedback tells us that it makes a huge difference to how people use creativity in their own time away from Charnwood Arts as well. Basically, in moments of change, economic shifts, social challenges, or even times of separation, Charnwood Arts has remained a constant: a safe, welcoming space where creativity helps people connect, heal, and feel part of something bigger.

Pottery workshops at Charnwood Arts

Our recent Bells Bridges and Belonging heritage installation has been a highlight of the year so far and helps us kick off the start of the planned 50th celebrations across a 12-month period.

Bells, Bridges & Belonging is a creative heritage project led by Charnwood Arts in partnership with One to One Development Trust and hosted at Taylors Bell Foundry Museum, celebrating Loughborough and Charnwood’s unique history, culture, and community identity.

Bells, Bridges and Belonging installation is a visually stunning interactive experience featuring a transformational 3D bell as its centrepiece. The installation incorporates film, photography, audio interviews, graphics and soundtrack and One to One has curated existing materials from Charnwood Arts previous Bell Festivals, as well as drawing on the extensive archive of Loughborough Bell foundry Museum Trust. The installation will live at the Foundry museum, but plans to tour the piece with large projections and used as school presentations are being planned as I write. https://onetoonedevelopment.org/portfolio/bells-bridges-and-belonging/

It centres on three powerful symbols:

*Bells: Honours Loughborough’s world-famous bell-founding heritage, how bells mark time, events, memory, and community life.

*Bridges: Represents connection between people, places, past & present, different cultures and generations.

*Belonging: Explores what it means to be part of this area, sharing stories, voices, and experiences of all communities here.

Banner from the Bell Festival 2024

Preparing for 'Bells, Bridges & Belonging' down at the bellfoundry

Other 50th celebrations include a brand-new edition of ‘Coffee House’.

The ’Coffee House’ was, originally, a literary journal, produced by Charnwood Arts featuring poetry, prose, and visual art. It was edited by Charnwood-based poet and fiction writer, Deborah Tyler-Bennett, and included creative writing and artwork by contributors from Charnwood’s writing communities, and beyond, including poets from Europe, Ireland, France, and America.

The journal appeared in print twice a year and was renowned for its high-quality artistic content. It remained well reviewed and featured in the Poetry Society’s ‘Poetry Map of Britain’. Part of the magazine’s legacy was past issues being digitally stored by the South Bank Poetry Library.

As part of the 50th Birthday Celebrations Charnwood Arts is creating a special edition of the ‘Coffee House’, which will include poems, short stories, flash fiction, and artworks. There will also be Coffee House Podcasts for this special anniversary year.

We are also planning a community weave for the railings outside our building, a 50 pieces of artwork exhibition a short film and much, much more so keep your eyes peeled.

In closing, let’s just absorb that figure again, fifty years! Over those years, Charnwood Arts has touched so many lives, inspired generations, and become a thread in our community’s cultural fabric. We continue to evolve, holding fast to the idea that art belongs to everyone. You get to decide what art looks like to you. Personally, I don’t care about skill level, background, or anything else that might feel like a barrier because our mission is simple: to ‘make things possible’ where others might see only limits.”

Here’s to 50 years of imagination, inspiration, and community and to many more years of creativity ahead!

Join the Celebration

Throughout 2026, Charnwood Arts will be hosting special events, exhibitions, and celebrations across the borough. It’s a chance to revisit favourite memories, meet the people behind the work, and see what the next chapter holds. Whether you have been involved since the very beginning, joined along the way, or are discovering Charnwood Arts for the first time this is your celebration too.

Happy 50th Anniversary, Charnwood Arts!

Shirley Novak CEO Charnwood Arts

www.charnwoodarts.com

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About Shirley Novak

In the mid 80's to mid 90's Shirley was a professional singer-songwriter touring nationally and throughout Europe. She wrote and recorded four albums of original material in her own brand of acoustic-based music. Following her father’s death in 1993, Shirley lost her soul and decided to stop touring and change her purpose.

Shirley then spent many years sharing her passion for learning to communicate through music, using music technology delivering music/media centred workshops providing opportunities to enable anyone with an interest, or a range of skills to access music/media at all levels.

Shirley worked with people with disabilities, children on the autistic spectrum, people in rehabilitation through injury, disadvantaged groups people struggling with their mental health, and children with SEN.

In 2012, she began working part-time at Newark MIND, a support service for people with mental health struggles as CEO alongside her interactive music work. After 7 great years, Shirley went back to music full-time for a year, but when the CEO role at Charnwood Arts appeared in 2020, it seemed a fantastic opportunity to combine skills along with the passion of enabling people to do something they never dreamed they could, alongside creativity for wellbeing.

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Notes

Charnwood Arts is based on Steeple Row, opposite the Old Rectory, and Chesterton House. Address: 27 Rectory Place, Loughborough, LE11 1UW. The front door can be found at whatthreewords: commented.clock.models

You can follow events hosted by Charnwood Arts, and get involved in some of their activities. Checkout their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/people/Charnwood-Arts/100070695557908/

More about the Poetry Society project

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Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

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Tuesday, 29 October 2024

Wells or bells?

Last year I was most disappointed to not be able to attend the very first Bell Festival that was held across town. It was September 2023, and I always seem to have a lot on in September, but luckily, I had someone who attended on my behalf, and took some wonderful photographs which I shared on a blog post.

This year, the event was held in the latter half of October, and I was able to turn up at the events taking place, mostly in the older part of Loughborough, near the parish church and the Old Rectory. True, the Bellfoundry was open, but I was unable to make it to the factory.

The whole event opened in the early evening. You may be familiar with well-dressing – an occasion in many Derbyshire and Peak District villages when the wells that supplied water are adorned with handcrafted artworks, often created from natural materials like petals and seeds, or possibly with clay decorations. The events seem to run between May and September, but there seem to be several different theories as to the origin of well-dressing. Perhaps it started as a pagan celebration to thank the gods for the supply of water; or perhaps it originated around the time of the Black Death (c.1348), when people were very thankful for a clean water supply; or perhaps people were celebrating their constant water supply following a long period of drought (c.1615). Whatever the reason, well-dressing is now well-established, and draws many visitors to the area.

So, imagine my surprise when I turned up at the opening of our second Bell Festival to be greeted by a “bell-dressing” event! I'm supposing that this originated as a way of celebrating Loughborough's industrial heritage of bellfounding (and, of course, our current bellfounders) and our cultural, artistic and crafting heritage.

For the bell-dressing, lengths of cloth had been prepared and cut into long strips, and people were invited to ‘dress’ the willow bell that currently sits in the grounds of the Old Rectory. The bell was created for last year’s festival by local artist Nita Rao, and some of her other work can be seen permanently (in as much as untreated willow sculptures can be permanent!) in the Rectory Wildlife Garden, and during the summer period at various local woodlands, like The Outwoods, or Beacon Hill Park. The ‘dressing’ of the bell entailed weaving the strips of cloth through the stems of the willow, which, by the time it had been completed, looked rather effective!

The dressed bell in the grounds of the Old Rectory

The following morning I popped along to the Old Rectory, where they were giving a tour of the building and grounds to visitors, before moving over to the parish church where Taylors Bellfounders had set up a mobile ringing tower outside the church. This was really popular, and lots of people were keen to have a go at bellringing!! Meanwhile, inside the church a group of bellringers performed some music on handbells – quite fascinating to watch, and a lovely sound to hear!

There were a few other things going on in the Charnwood Arts building, but unfortunately I was rather limited for time, so only managed to get in and briefly see the bell-related exhibitions. I couldn’t miss the decorated railings along Rectory Place though!

Here’s hoping I can make it to next year’s Bell Festival!

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Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

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Thank you for reading this blog.

Copyright:

Dyer, Lynne (2024). Wells or bells?. Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2024/10/wells-or-bells.html [Accessed 29 October 2024]

Take down policy:

External Links:

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Searching the blog:

site: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/ “Radmoor House”

NOTE – the words you’re actually looking for must be in “” and the first of these must be preceded by a space

Thank you for reading this blog.

Lynne

Sunday, 1 October 2023

Loughborough Bell Festival 2023

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you might remember that during my 10th birthday month, August 2023, I hosted a number of guest posts from a variety of people who were kind enough to write for me? Well, this month – oh, hang on, it’s the 1st of October today, so I mean last month – I enlisted the help of a young photojournalist to take some photos of an event taking place in Loughborough which I was unable to attend myself, due to a previous appointment.

On Sunday 10th September, Loughborough held its first-ever bell festival publicised by Charnwood Arts! And what a festival it was!! I’m sure many of you were there to witness the willow bell, made by local artist Nita Rao, who was also responsible for many of the sculptures on the Beacon Hill, and Outwoods trails, whilst it was in the grounds of the parish church (All Saints with Holy Trinity). From here, it made its way through town to Queen’s Park, where there were celebrations all round!

This willow bell was made to represent the Big Paul Bell, which was made by the local bellfoundry, Taylors, for St Paul’s Cathedral in London. While this bell may have been made of willow, the original bell was made of bell metal (a combination of copper and tin) and weighed in at in excess of an impressive 20 imperial tons according to the St Paul’s Cathedral website. It’s apparently the second largest bell to have been cast in the UK – or maybe the biggest in England, depending on what sources you read - and is still the biggest bell cast by our local foundry.

While the journey from the parish church to the park might have only been a short distance, taking only about 30 minutes, Loughborough to St Paul’s in London was a voyage of about 100 miles, and took 11 days! The mode of transport for the two journeys was practically the same though! In both cases, the bell was loaded onto a trailer, and the whole pulled by a steam traction engine!

At the Loughborough Bell Festival – an event that is likely to be repeated in some form a couple more times – the procession from the church to the park, was accompanied by groups like Morris dancers (I spotted Bare Bones and Way of the Wyrd, with loads of members of the public lining the route and even joining in with the procession. Once in the park, there was more entertainment put on, including a concert in the bandstand from the Hathern Band (the subject of many of my previous blogposts, like this one!), and a marquee in which people could have a go at things like handbell ringing!

Here's some photos that give a flavour of the event: