New Mills Festival is happening in 2021!

The dates are 10th to 26th September 2021 and the theme is “Home”.

“Home” Theme

We’ll be working (with your help) to reveal and explore some out-of-the-ordinary from the ordinary homes of New Mills. The 2021 New Mills Festival aims to celebrate, question, experience every element of life from tradition of the Home Farm tracking the rhythm of the seasons to anywhere your imagination might take you within your four walls. We’d like everyone to come with us on our journey “Home”.

Home Farm

Guiding us through a year as farmers, the Home Farm project with Transition New Mills and grants from Bounce Forward and Foundation Derbyshire has kept us busy through the sowing season. We’re all going to be occupied with the watering and weeding as spring gathers pace. We’re hoping for a great harvest! Find out more about how you can get involved on the New Mills Festival website which has tonnes more information.

Responding to change

There’s been a lot happening behind scenes over the last few months. Normally we’d have been focussing hard on bringing two weeks of community fun to town for one block of time in September. But we’d have also been staging some carefully selected events in the run up to the Festival, for the purpose of fundraising and getting the word out. Those haven’t been possible this year or last.

We have had the town on board in all sorts of ways though. There’s been a sense of camaraderie from a social distance, as we’ve lit up for Christmas and shared our love at Valentine’s day.

The more the merrier!

In the last year we’ve had a wonderful experience of enthusiastic involvement from more of the New Mills community than we could ever have dreamt of. We had a lovely thank you letter from the residents of Parkway who responded to the Light Up New Mills with a huge street effort. It was brilliant that they described their endeavours as delighting both young and old. We’re really pretty proud of having been a part of their achievement.

Going largely online in 2020 meant we were able to share events with people we’d never reached before, as well as adding a different dimension to the normal physical events from previous years. Finding ways to be inclusive of more and more New Mills people continues to be high on our agenda for 2021. We’ll be finding ways to blend our physical activities with some online events.

2021 New Mills Festival – Take Part News Coming Soon!

• Art Trail Call For Entries,
• Visual Arts Commissions,
• Poetry Trail Call For Submissions,
• Call For Events