Seasonal News Round-up: our activities during summer 2025
Dear reader, welcome to our news round-up for summer 2025 – a very busy one!
The registration deadline for the Buxton Flowerpot Trail arrived on 22 June. The maps were produced and distributed to the vendors, The Pump Room and Poole’s Cavern Visitor Centre, for the beginning of July. We’ve had some lovely comments about all The Billerette creations this summer, they really brightened up the town. See some of the creations on our project page here.
Members of our team and High Peak Youth Robotics group went down to London at the end of June for the FIRST Tech Challenge UK national championships! Read about their experience on our news post here.
We continued the creativity at our after-school Changing Faces workshops with collaging, spray-painting, imagining what dinosaurs may have actually looked like, making dream-catchers and practising for the Buxton Carnival parade.
We planned something very special for carnival this year, to parade our gigante flowerpotman dancing along the The Billerettes, as part of their 50th anniversary and to promote the Buxton Flowerpot Trail. We ran two workshops to transform the gigante into a Billerette and joined them for the parade. See more pictures on our project page here. We won first prize in our category.
The flowerpot trail, part of the Buxton Festival Fringe, was nominated for the Visual Arts Fringe Award and we also took part in the Buxton Film Shorts competition in the Fringe, with the film which our Changing Faces group made last autumn, ‘The House Upon The Hill’ being one of the 11 films shortlisted. Some of our team and participants attended the screening in the Pavilion Arts Centre on 27 July. I think it’s the biggest we’ve ever seen our logo!!! Sadly our film didn’t win a prize, but one of our Directors, Sarah, (and our project posters FYI!) starred in the film which won both the judges’ and audience’s first prize award! Congratulations Sarah!
During July, we also moved our kit out of The Green Man Gallery to a new storage facility in Higher Buxton and started to down-size what we have.
August always brings evaluation reports, funding applications and team recruitment, and this year was no different. However, something new was to arrange for one of our puppets to travel to London to feature in a film! We’ll hopefully bring you some more information about this in the autumn.
And the beginning of September brings the end of the flowerpot trail and the launch of our new projects for the new academic year. Both our Changing Faces project, with its after-school art club, and High Peak Youth Robotics, restarted on 16 September. Spaces are still available at the after-school club if you would like to book a place for a young person.
We’re very grateful to all the funding bodies and local businesses and groups who support our long-term projects and enable us to support young people in our local community.
