Telegraph Hill Festival 2018

Feb 19, 2018 | News

Telegraph Hill Festival is a constant treasure trove of lovely surprises. The 2018 Telegraph Hill Festival takes place from 10-25 March.

How the Festival came about: Telegraph Hill Festival was set up 24 years ago as a collaboration between the governing body for St Catherine’s Church (the PCC or Parochial Church Council), Telegraph Hill Centre and representatives from the wider community.

The Festival today: Having already experienced growth in the five years prior to 2013, Telegraph Hill Festival’s audiences have doubled since then, with more than 2400 tickets and more than 6500 people going through the doors of the Centre during the Festival.

Every year the call goes out to the local community to share their ideas, and use the Festival’s infrastructure to present these as part of the annual Telegraph Hill Festival.

What goes into the Programme, is what the community generates and brings forward. And there are many interesting, stimulating, and vibrant things coming your way as a result. 120 events, of which at least 74 are free – workshops, classes, comedy, music, theatre – all present and correct.

In line with the Centre’s ethos of inclusion, the Festival team have invested a lot of time and effort in ensuring sustained engagement over the last three years to provide contributors and artists with a pathway into the Festival, and the footholds to keep them there, so that the Festival can truly reflect the community of which it is a part. They’ve also fine tuned their infrastructure in line with the latest advice on Health & Safety and Safeguarding.

What Church and Centre do: As every year, both St Catherine’s Church and Telegraph Hill Centre have hosted the Community Production rehearsals and the set and costume making workshops. We also host all the large scale events like Comedy Night, Classics Night, Telegraph Hill Sings, Sonic Imperfections and many more. The Cenbtre also foregoes income from letting the space, giving priority to the Festival.

More prosaically, we provide a significant amount of storage space for the Community Production and other Festival kit within the Centre throughout the year.

We do this because we believe that the sense of community the Festival fosters is a genuinely wonderful thing.

Telegraph Hill Festival is a beautiful thing arising each year from the efforts of volunteers within the community. The reciprocity, collaboration, community ethos and inclusive way in which it is done is a delight to behold, and reflects our values.