Creative Director, James Holland
James Holland: A Letter from the Creative Director
Dear All,
Furious plotting and planning is underway for the 2025 Chalke History Festival to bring you a more exciting, relevant and varied programme than ever before.
The biggest change we’re introducing for this year is a new ticket system, which will make life much, much simpler for you all from now on and be significantly more straightforward to use. For the 2025 festival, all entrance tickets will get you access to ALL talks without having to book any additional tickets.
If you are a Chalke History Club member (including Friends and Plantagenets), a Patron or a Benefactor, you will have the opportunity to reserve your seat in advance for free. For other festival goers, you will simply select which entry ticket you want, including one- three- and seven-day tickets, and then at the festival you will be able to attend any of the talks on offer. We may limit entrance to a tent if capacity is reached, but additional outdoor seating and screens will be provided at our main speaker venues. As part of these changes, entry for under 16’s will be free.
All the usual festival activities – living history, performances, music and the children’s tent – will be included in your ticket as in past years. We’re expanding the size of our talk tents to allow for larger audiences and hope that by including all talks within the ticket price, you’ll be encouraged to enjoy and experience the very wide range of speakers and subjects we are providing in the festival line-up. Early bird tickets are available from Tuesday 12 November, when you can buy a three- or seven-day ticket at a reduced rate, before the full programme is announced in April. Click here for more ticket information.
The festival will run from Monday, 23 June to Sunday, 29 June, with our usual two-day Schools Festival on 23 and 24 June. We are really thrilled to offer a more rounded line-up of events for each day, with a wide choice of talks and discussions, historical performances, inter-active living history demonstrations and displays provided by the very best historical interpreters around. Each day the festival will provide a wonderful opportunity to try your hand at various historical activities, meet and chat to our array of historians, presenters and contributors and enjoy our after-dark entertainment, featuring live music, story-telling and more. There will also be, of course, a large array of food, drink and stalls, as well as expanded camping facilities. We want you all to have a brilliant, exciting, intellectually stimulating and visually thrilling time every day you come to Chalke.
We will send you regular updates of additions to next year’s line-up, but in the meantime, we hope you are enjoying the monthly live Chalke History Club events. Next up on 14 November is a special evening to mark the 150 anniversary of Sir Winston Churchill’s birth with the incomparable Andrew Roberts and Peter Caddick-Adams. On 2 December we are hosting a talk with Anne Applebaum, who will be speaking about the rise of autocracy.
All very best to you all,
James.
Visit chalkefestival.com for all the latest updates and announcements.
