Wakey Wakey ARTS

Winchester Poetry Festival – a registered charity – is a local and national poetry community that inspires and excites everyone to read, write, perform, and enjoy poetry in all its forms. Our work ranges from our acclaimed biennial festival and our popular competitions, to our wider year-round engagement work with community organisations and schools. We share, showcase, celebrate, and champion great poetry because we believe in its power to bring us all together and make a positive, enriching difference to our lives and to our society. We collaborate with a wide range of partners and businesses – including with Hampshire Cultural Trust and the work of the Hampshire Poet – and and we act as a local. national & international hub for poetry.

We’re the Sustainable Conservation Trust (SCT) – a not-for-profit team of architects, artists, and placemakers reusing historic buildings through creative collaboration and technology. From forts and slaughterhouses to alleyways and pop-ups, we bring forgotten spaces back to life with community at the heart. Our base at the Old Pay Office in Historic Dockyard is a living lab for residencies, skills workshops, and test projects. We welcome creatives of all kinds to join us in reimagining heritage – as a platform, not a museum piece. If you’re a local maker, artist, designer, photographer, coder, or storyteller and think heritage is more than bricks and plaques – let’s talk.  

The Villagers are based in Gosport in Hampshire, and began life in 1986 with a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Little Woodham (‘The 17th Century Village’). Every year since we have put on an open air production of one of Shakespeare’s plays, in Little Woodham and – in recent years – elsewhere across Southern England. Our aim is to enjoy ourselves, and to share some of that enjoyment with our audiences.