Peterborough Women’s Festival 2017 Saturday 4 March

Peterborough Women’s Festival 2017 – A weekend celebrating womenPeterborough Women’s Festival 2017 will take place on Saturday 4 March and will involve a whole weekend of exciting events for Peterborough residents to get involved in. The weekend will kick off with an event at Peterborough Town Hall from 11:00 – 15:00 with speakers and stalls. It is a community event and will feature information and stalls on the subject of Women’s health and well-being issues run by local groups such as Peterborough Pensioners, PCVS, Women’s Aid and ASPIRE health and fitness as well as various trade unions. There will be craft stalls, artists and people can get involved in writing poetry for the spoken word fringe event taking place the following day. Peterborough Archives Service will be exhibiting and speaking on the difficulties of tracing women’s history in the morning. In the afternoon, Andrea Needham will speak on her book The Hammer Blow – How 10 Women Disarmed a War Plane. In the middle of the day there will be four speakers with 15 minute speeches on the theme of women and education. People will be invited to bring items for a food-bank collection. There will also be a community collage taking place and people are invited to bring along photos or pictures of women who have inspired them to add to the collection.

Co-organiser, Hazel Perry, Secretary of Peterborough Trades Union Council said, ‘this is the second year that we have organised such an event in the Town Hall to coincide with the week of International Women’s Day. PTUC wanted to show that despite what some people think, Trade Unions don’t just go on strike, we are active members of our communities who want to bring people together and build networks with the aim of making our workplaces and the areas we live in better for everyone. This year organisation has developed into a great community effort from the music night at the Ostrich Inn to the Paper Rhino design for the posters for the Town Hall event. We wanted to organise a day to bring people together, meet new people, to learn something about our different issues and to have a bit of fun along the way.’

Two Peterborough Women’s Festival 2017 fringe events have also been organised for the weekend. The Women Take Over the Ostrich Inn music night featuring The Stringlers, The Baby Seals, and Beverley Kills will take place at the Ostrich Inn on North Street from 7.30pm on Saturday 4 March. This will be followed by the Women’s Spoken Word event at the Stoneworks on Church Street, Cathedral Square, on Sunday 5 March. This will feature Maria Ferguson with extracts from her Edinburgh Fringe Festival show Fat Women Don’t Dance, local poet Charley Genever and an open mic slot for spoken word and poetry. We also hope to be reading out some of the poems written at the Town Hall event poetry workshop. It will take place from 3.30pm. All events are free to attend but donations welcomed.

Bookings for the Town Hall stalls are open until 19 February. If you would like one then please contact the organisers at peterboroughtuc@gmail.com or via the Peterborough Women’s Festival 2017 event page on Facebook.