The Northern Devon Cultural Stratgey was formally launched yesterday at an event managed by North Devon District Council, Torridge District Council and supported by several local organisations and groups including North Devon Arts.

It was an overcast but dry morning as tents, stalls and gazebos where laid out on The Square outside Barnstaple Museum, attracting a high number of visitors and spectators. NDA had three sites displaying arts and crafts from our members, plus NDA member John Baldwin got busy creating street art with chalks, encouraging people passing by to get involved in his flower creation.

As well as NDA, other cultural, arts and local organisations involved included Barnstaple Guildhall, The Plough Arts centre, Studio Kind, Ilfracombe Museum, North Devon Biosphere and of course Barnstaple Museum themselves.

The event was opened with speeches by council representatives including the leader of North Devon Council, David Worden who spoke about his vision for evolving culture and arts in North Devon.

The theme for the project is ‘flourishing culture’ which was represented throughout the event with the use of flowers. This included a wonderful display in and around Bromleys cafe by NDA commissioned artist, Melanie O’Hanlon. Her flower creations which make use of used plastic milk bottles and teabags will be on display for the next two weeks if you would like to visit.

Our planned plein air session didn’t happen as very few members turned up for that, but we did have some examples of their plein air sketches on show on one of our NDA stalls.

All in all it was a great day and we would like to thank our new Team members, Howard Porter, Stella Levy, Penny Rowland-Hill and Alison Nicolson for organising NDA’s part in the event and to the NDA members for all their hard work erecting and manning the stalls.

Photographs kindly provided by Penny Rowland-Hill, Rob Sumner and North Devon District Council.