Some of our favourite projects at Sundae are grassroots festivals happening in towns and cities across the country. We’ve looked after a good few of them now, helping grow audiences, drive attendance and make sure what they’re doing is seen beyond the places where they happen.
They’re not in competition with the big national festivals. They offer something completely different, rooted in the places and communities they serve, but that doesn’t mean the quality or ambition is any lower. They bring top class music, food, art and performance straight to local audiences, often for little or no cost, while playing an important role in the wider festival ecosystem.
These events also give emerging artists opportunities to perform and find new audiences, while creating jobs and experience for producers, technicians, crew and others behind the scenes who go on to work across the industry.
We think festivals like these deserve to be part of the national conversation, which is why we enjoy helping them make noise beyond their own postcode. Earlier this year, our work on Get In! To Eccles saw us work closely with the BBC 6 Music Festival publicity team, with a Manchester Evening News feature exploring the importance of grassroots venues as part of the wider festival story, and a Festival Insights feature looking at why hyper-local festivals matter and the role they play in the wider industry.
Last week, we caught up with our longstanding client and friend Martin Collins at another of his incredible events, King’s Cross Summer Sounds, and inevitably ended up talking about the recent success in St Osyth.
It’s now been a month since 10,000 people filled St Osyth Priory for St Osyth Summer Sounds, with around 5,000 coming through the gates on both Saturday and Sunday for two full-capacity days of live music, food, art and family activity, all completely free.
Martin is from St Osyth and is hugely passionate about the place he grew up in. We’ve known him and Arts Trust Productions for a long time and have massive belief in what they’re trying to do, bringing brilliant cultural experiences to the area, making them accessible to everyone and creating something the community can feel belongs to them.
More than 120 artists took part this year. Brass Rascals, who mix brass with drum and bass, garage, house and pop, Mista Trick Collective and singer-songwriter Aiden Grimshaw were among the names on the music line-up. The Chef Stage brought Great British Menu Champion of Champions Amber Francis together with Tony Alberti and stars of MasterChef and Bake Off, while elsewhere there was theatre, storytelling, circus, giant puppets, workshops and plenty for families and kids across the site.
Arborialis, a huge walk-through luminarium from internationally renowned Architects of Air, was also there across the weekend. It’s an enormous inflatable structure filled with colour, light and sound, where visitors make their way through winding pathways and soaring domes inspired by trees and the natural world. One person told the team afterwards that they had never seen anything like it in their life.
Traders sold out, 33 local volunteers supported the festival each day and the feedback was fantastic. Another comment that stuck with us came from someone who said it was the only festival they would be going to this year because it was local and free.
There are strong parallels with Get In! To Eccles, which we also looked after earlier this year with Salford City Council and From The Other. The two events are hundreds of miles apart, but the thinking behind them has a lot in common. Both are built around the places they happen in, bringing high-quality culture directly to communities for no cost.
At St Osyth you could watch live music, see some of the country’s best chefs cooking, explore the luminarium and keep the kids entertained for the day without paying to get in. In Eccles, audiences saw the BBC Philharmonic, new theatre and top-tier live music in spaces across the town. Both give people access to things they might not otherwise get to experience, which is a big part of why we enjoy working on them.
For St Osyth, we built the publicity campaign gradually, with separate pushes around the music, chefs and family programme before bringing everything together for the full announcement. It meant we always had something new to talk about and a range of contributors to put forward throughout the build-up.
BBC Radio Essex really got behind it, with five interviews featuring Martin, Amber Francis, Andy Ryan and Iqbal Hussain, alongside news bulletin mentions. There was repeated coverage across the Essex press, including the Clacton & Frinton Gazette and Colchester Gazette, alongside Essex Magazine, Essex TV and many more.
The story travelled beyond Essex too, appearing on MSN, with two pieces also running in respected national festival trade publication Festival Insights. It was particularly satisfying to see St Osyth getting the same national industry attention as Get In! To Eccles.
Martin had been clear from the start that what happened after the event was really important to its future too. Once 10,000 people had turned up, both days had reached capacity and traders had sold out, we had some beautiful photography and a strong success story to take back to the media.
The standout was a three-page spread in the Clacton & Frinton Gazette. Chatting to Martin a month later, it’s clear just how much that one meant to him. Across three pages in the local paper were thousands enjoying something created for the area, backed up by the numbers, feedback and everything that had happened across the two days.
Since then, Arts Trust Productions has received confirmation that it will become an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation from April 2027, securing further investment. That comes off the back of years of work by Martin and the team, but he believes the Gazette coverage was vital in showing the impact of St Osyth Summer Sounds and the support behind it. We’re very proud to have played a part in that.
In total, the campaign generated 41 pieces of coverage with a potential reach of more than 6.4 million. The media backed St Osyth throughout the build-up and, importantly, continued talking about it once the gates had closed.
Roll on St Osyth Summer Sounds 2027, we can’t wait!
Sundae x
