Goosfest 2025 – A huge welcome to this year’s Goosfest.
Goosfest 2025 promises a wide-ranging schedule of events, exhibitions, workshops and all-round good fun. Whilst it’s all organised by a happy band of volunteers, the festival itself is stuffed full of professional and high-quality entertainment.
As always, our mantra is to bring music, art and arts to the village community. Over a three-week period, you can forget about the time and cost of travelling to nearby cities for high standards in music and arts. Goosfest provides all this – on your doorstep in the early autumn.
We open with a relatively new part of the festival, but something that is now much loved and appreciated. Goosfest Art Weekend over the last weekend in September provides a wonderful display of art by more than 20 professional artists, on show in the beautiful Victorian barn at Orchards Farm opposite Bidlea Dairy, Twemlow. We also have a range of workshops, including a cheese-making demonstration, clay workshop at Lowe’s Farm, bookbinding and others.
Goostrey Archives are organising a fascinating display on Saturday September 27th about Goostrey’s two wonderful pubs, with a display about each pub in The Crown and The Space Invader respectively. Why not wander further on after the pub exhibitions to Goostrey Station to add to your historical knowledge of Goostrey and enjoy the exhibition curated by Friends of Goostrey, about the 200 hundred years’ anniversary of rail travel locally. And the Art Weekend also sees the first of our musical concerts – a 4pm performance in St Luke’s Church, Goostrey, by Biddulph Male Voice Choir.
The following weekend, our festival of music and arts begins, and spans 10 days from the Friday October 3rd concert by musical group Fine Lines to a welcome return by Bridgewater Hall organist Jonathan Scott to give our final concert on Sunday afternoon October 12th.
In between, we have a smorgasbord of entertainment to choose from, ranging from annual favourites such as Comedy Night and the classical music recital and afternoon buffet at The Swettenham Arms, to a play, lectures and other musical performances.
Goostrey Flower Club is again decorating St Luke’s Church for the duration of the music and arts festival, with gorgeous autumnal displays from Friday October 3rd to Sunday October 12th .
There will be high demand for a return visit by the Not Quite Big Band on Saturday October 4th, just as there will for the climax of our festival, a professional show called ‘Disco Inferno’ at Clonter Opera Theatre. And of course, everyone has been wondering where ‘Goostrey will go to’ for this year’s tribute act and buffet supper. Try to contain your excitement. We’re going to Stoke on Friday October 10th ! We’ve got one of the UK’s best ‘Robbie Williams’ tribute acts – so let us entertain you this autumn, with Goosfest 2025.
Goosfest 2025 Events
Your Goosfest needs you!
In the meantime, if you’d like to be involved in any way, please get in touch. There are only a few of us on the Goosfest Committee and we need more help if we’re to continue in the years ahead. If you don’t fancy joining the Committee itself, there are other ways in which you can support the festival. We’re looking for:
- Practical help for events – helping to set up staging, chairs, tables etc for events in the Village Hall and at other venues
- Someone with experience in stage lighting, or a willingness and interest to learn, to assist our current lighting director
- Home cooks who might be willing to prepare a hot meal or buffet item, to be delivered to the venue for the artiste(s) on the night.
- Volunteers to help staff the bar (there’s a rota so even if you can support one event, it would be appreciated. The larger the team of volunteers, the fewer times we’ll need to ask for help)
- Accommodation for a performer. If you have a spare bedroom that a weary artiste could retire to, rather than a long journey back home after a performance, let us know. We appreciate that accommodating artistes depends on personal willingness to host, according to any local health-protection requirements at the time. Hopefully, the environment will be more conducive to hosting guests next year.
