Shop Front Festival is coming!
Just a hop, skip and a jump from The Weaver’s House is the UK’s only Shop Front Theatre. Prior to becoming a theatre its most recent incarnation was a fish and chip shop, and it stands at the top of Coventry’s post-war City Arcade development.
This March the very first Shop Front Festival on Friday 23 and Saturday 24 will see theatre, performances and invitations to play in shops and spaces, precincts and places across the city centre bringing the city to life. From the central hub of the UK’s only Shop Front Theatre in the City Arcade expect theatre, dance, circus, exhibitions and pop-up performances from the High Street to Broadgate to the former Coventry Evening Telegraph building from breakfast time through until bedtime!
Photo courtesy of Shop Front Theatre
As well as theatre performances and talks, there will be a heritage focus at the Artspace Arcadia Gallery and Photo Archive Miners Precinct Shopping exhibition. This exhibition of renowned Coventry photographer Richard Sadler’s work and the City Archives shows how the city centre and our shopping experience has changed. Supported by BBC Coventry & Warwickshire, there is also an opportunity to bring your own photographs of city centre shop fronts and contribute to the exhibition with your own stories.
There’s much more including dance, comedy, and theatre for a range of ages, and pop into Coventry’s beautiful medieval Old Grammar School for Edible Irish Stories – a lunchtime experience combining Coventry’s Irish History and food heritage that will see audiences kneading as well as dancing! The Shop Front Festival is presented by Chris O’Connell and Julia Negus, the writer and producer who run the award-winning Coventry based Theatre Absolute, working with independent artistic director Orit Azaz and outdoor producer Lou Lomas.
Find the full Shop Front Festival listings here and start planning your Festival. We’ll be having our house and garden clean up that weekend, ready for our first Open Day in April, and will be rewarding ourselves with some theatre afterwards!
