Event Focus – #1 – Pudsey Scarecrow Festival

Something a bit different this month, with the rise in numbers of events in our town we decided it’s time we shine the spotlight on one. For our first in the series, we caught up with Caroline Draper to find out more about this year’s Pudsey Scarecrow Festival. The Scarecrow Festival made its debut in 2019, with massive success. The festival saw Pudsey come to life with some of our most well known and beloved characters. If you had walked around Pudsey that day you will have been met by characters such as Wallace & Gromit, Willy Wonka, David Bowie and even the old scarecrow himself, Worzel Gummidge. After a temporary hiatus in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Scarecrow Festival is set to return this year with a bang and we personally cannot wait! Find out more about the day below.

Tell us a little bit more about your event, where is it held and when?

Pudsey Scarecrow Festival is an all inclusive family fun event. The festival sees people make Scarecrows to display in their gardens, or they can bring them to display in Pudsey Park. For this year’s event, the theme is Children’s Stories. There are prizes for the best Scarecrows, donated by local businesses. Everyone can get involved, the public, businesses, organisations, charities, schools, society’s and groups – the competition is open to everyone.

The main event takes place in Pudsey Park from 11am on Sunday 5th September until 4pm.

Pudsey Park is the central hub of the festival, however you will find Scarecrows dotted all over the town. Why not head down to Pudsey Park and buy yourself a trail map to help you find the best scarecrows? From 11am we have live music in the park playing from the wonderful band stand, we also have a lovely selection of food stalls with vegetarian and vegan options available. We will also host craft stalls, children’s toy stalls, Italian ice cream and cheesecakes.

New for this year we are so excited to book Frolicked, an outdoor theatre company specialising in unique and visually striking experiences captivating people of all ages. It’s going to be so magical… There will also be a Fairy’s grotto to visit too brought to the park by Fairies Wardrobe.

How would you describe your event in one sentence?

A magical and all inclusive family festival taking place in and around the beautiful Pudsey Park.

What activities/entertainment will there be on the day?

The main highlight of the day will be the Scarecrows, however as mentioned above we also have Live Music, a Puppet Theatre, Stalls and Food & Drink.

Tell us about you, where the event/idea began and your ties to Pudsey

Pudsey Scarecrow Festival was founded in 2019. I’ve lived in Pudsey with my husband and son for the last 14 years and I’ve never done anything like this before except organise my own 2 day wedding. I had always wanted to organise a family festival after attending plenty of festivals in the past. I wanted to bring all those magical and unexpected elements we see at larger family festivals to Pudsey. We are blessed to have such a lovely park and we have a great creative community so it was the ideal setting for a Scarecrow Festival.

It was very stressful but fun to begin the process in 2019, but with the help from volunteers and a whole load of support from Trish & Simon our local Councillors, my lovely friend Kate who organises all the music plus my husband, friends and family I was able to put on a really successful event that was visited by approximately 4,000 people. The feedback from the day was phenomenal, everyone loved it and we all had a wonderful day despite a few hiccups… The generator powering the musicians broke down but fortunately Airedale Care Home came to the rescue and allowed us to use their electricity supply, which is further proof of the tremendous community spirit that resides in this wonderful town. It also wouldn’t have been a day out in a Yorkshire town without the heavens opening up, so we had that too! But the public still came in their hundreds and we were able to donate £750.00 to Pudsey in Bloom from the profits raised on the day by public donations and trail map sales.

I personally am a keen gardener and I’m also the Secretary for Pudsey Gardeners and Allotments Association so I wanted to choose Pudsey In Bloom as a charity to raise funds to help improve our town by adding more green spaces, trees, and flowers especially now due to climate change and bees and butterflies being so in decline. We all need to do our bit.

How can people get involved?

The primary way to get involved is by building your own Scarecrow! You can display it either in the park, or in your garden, or outside your business… Simple!

Businesses, groups, charities, and organisations can use this opportunity to promote their business, for example a local hairdresser is making Rapunzel, you’ll have to look out for her on Lidget Hill.

Entry forms are available to pick up from Pudsey Library, or you can email me pudseyscarecrowfestival@outlook.com and i’ll send you a form. There are also entry forms to fill out right here on the MyPudsey website too.

We also really need more volunteers on the day to help set up and to sell trail maps and to help us steward the event – if you can spare just a few hours or more to help this community event please email me pudseyscarecrowfestival@outlook.com

If you are a local business and you would like to donate prizes then we would love to hear from you too just send me an email !

With the tremendous success of 2019, here at MyPudsey we cannot wait to see the entries this year and you will find us out and about on the big day photographing and chatting with people and taking in the atmosphere. We hope to see you there!

In the meantime, why not join in the discussion over on the Pudsey Scarecrow Festival Facebook group?