Before they sled off for the holidays, our very own Daily Info staff give you the lowdown on their cultural highlights of 2024, from theatre to comedy, to poetry open mic nights, a film festival and even a fashion show!
Russ on Anniversaries
The Covered Market turns 250
2024 was a year packed with anniversaries, with many Oxford institutions celebrating big birthdays. The Covered Market celebrated 250 years with a whole heap of events, to celebrate both the venue’s history and where it is now. I particular love how the market has transformed into an evening venue, with live music, comedy and other events. It has been great to see what the team have done to enhance the space and I’m excited to see where they go next.
St Giles Fair turns 400
Another fixture of Oxford, the St Giles Fair, reached its 400th anniversary, which meant that since the 17th century Oxford has been holding a fair on the first Monday and Tuesday post-St Giles’ Day (1st September). The Museum of Oxford marked this with a terrific exhibition and you can read more on the fair’s history on their website.
The Museum also helped celebrate the 90th anniversary of Florence Park and you can take in their latest exhibition covering this, Park Life, until the start of January.
Our own 60th Birthday!:
Finally, we joined in the fun with our own special birthday, as Daily Info turned 60. MOX helped us celebrate with an online exhibition showcasing some sheets from our archive. You can check this out on their website. As well as this we hosted several events, including my personal highlight in a screening of Dr Strangelove at the Ultimate Picture Palace. A packed audience joined us for a film that has lost none of its potency, equal parts hilarious and terrifying.
Sophia on the Oxford Poetry Library and the Offbeat Festival
This is Just to Say: A Monthly Poetry Open Mic Night
The Oxford Poetry Library is a haven for Oxford's poets, bookworms and anyone who feels an affinity with words. Besides maintaining an operational library of poetry books out of the Community Works building in Frideswide Square every Saturday, they also host a range of free workshops and events. My favourite of these is This is Just to Say, a spoken word open mic night on the first Tuesday of every month. Warm and playful, the atmosphere draws out astonishing performances in a range of styles and tones, from the highly humourous to the utterly gut-wrenching, and almost always sells out on the evening. I've never left a session feeling less than euphoric. You can read our interview with the OPL from earlier this year here.
Offbeat Festival
Offbeat festival was just as bold and brilliant as ever, with swathes of powerful theatre in the Burton Taylor Studio and Old Fire Station. But it was the Late Night sessions that caught my eye: free events in each night at 9pm in the OFS cafe, from a listening party curated by Oxford Contemporary Music, to a poetry slam hosted by local legend Tina Sederholm and a comedy scratch night MC'ed by Nathan Peter De Grassi. The atmosphere captured the overwhelming creativity and enthusiasm infused in Oxford's creative scene, and served as a potent reminder about how needed festivals like Offbeat are. We managed to interview almost every act at the festival (all available to read in our blog archive) but for an overview, read our preview post here.
Niamh on the Oxford Comedy Festival, Cherwell Collective’s Sustainable Fashion Show, and SHOCKTOBER
Oxford Comedy Festival
There’s always much to love about the Oxford Comedy Festival whenever it rolls around. Of course, there’s the stellar lineup of acts making their way to the Dreaming Spires; I was able to catch surreal musical comedy from Huge Davies, the continued rise and rise of stand-up superstar Sophie Duker, and a beautifully crafted hour on dissatisfaction from Alexander Bennett, to name a few. But this year was particularly special for me because it gave me the chance to appreciate the venues and performers right on my doorstep - or in my case, literally in my house, as my good friend and housemate Chloe Jacobs of Undercover Comedy debuted her stand-up hour Twilight - Breaking Down to much fanfare. Becoming more ingratiated into Oxford’s comedy scene over the past year (and even performing a little stand-up myself), it’s incredibly fulfilling not just to enjoy fan-favourite acts, but to watch those you’ve come to know and love locally achieve new heights.
Cherwell Collective’s Sustainable Fashion Show, Blenheim Palace
During Sustainable Fashion Week, local community initiative Cherwell Collective hosted a lavish fashion show with none other than the Blenheim Palace Orangerie as its runway. I actually walked in this show and the creativity and ingenuity on display was a joy to witness - every piece walking the runway had been upcycled, thrifted or constructed from sustainable materials, and the night was a wonderful mixture of independent designers, organisations like Iraqi Women, Art and War and Multaka, and Oxford vintage or secondhand staples like Ballroom Emporium and Oxfam. Highlighting Cherwell Collective’s Carbon Cost of Fashion exhibition at the Palace, it was a chic and stylish celebration of what the fashion industry should look like, from its environmentally friendly garments to the diversity and inclusivity of the models wearing them.
SHOCKTOBER
Life’s no fun without a good scare, and no one understands that better than Cinema Under The Stairs, who hosted their annual Shocktober Halloween film festival across Oxford’s indie cinemas and theatres during spooky season. This year was a roaring success, with near total sold-out shows across the board and a seriously killer lineup featuring Clive Barker’s body-horror classic Hellraiser, pagan folk-horror favourite The Wicker Man (the first one, thankfully, no bees here) and Wes Craven’s suburban cannibal caper The People Under the Stairs. We also got some fantastic special guests into the bargain, from Adam Z. Robinson’s spine-tingling live performance to insightful commentary by Don’t Point That Horror At Me’s Becky Darke. A particular highlight was watching first-time viewers of infamous BBC shockumentary Ghostwatch shift from chuckles to bone-chilling fear, or the whoop of joy that went up from the crowd as Day of the Dead’s all-round bastard Henry Rhodes falls to the zombie hordes and tells them exactly what to do with his guts. We can’t wait to see what’s in store for next year’s fright fest.
Jen on Wood Festival, Axiom of Choice and Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett with Tom de Freston at Blackwells
Wood Festival at Brazier’s Park
It's a perennial favourite, a fixture on the Oxford calendar, and this year we were lucky with the weather too. We’ve been going for so long we seem to know most of the festivalgoers, and we mark the passing of the years with how independent our children have got (this year, racing back to us when hungry, a passing blur the rest of the time). Nominally a music festival, Wood is mainly sought after for the atmosphere, workshops, and community. Though of course Nick Cope is a nostalgic draw for ironic teens, who heckle for his classics. If you haven’t discovered it yet, make 2025 the year.
Axiom of Choice at the Oxford Playhouse
Part biopic, part maths education, this was a poignant, funny and delicate play that came with a sheet of maths notes afterwards. Marcus du Sautoy blends serious maths, public entertainment and a love of boardgames, into one highly enviable day job, and I was thoroughly charmed with this play based on a true story, fusing pacifism, suspicion of spying, Hindu legends, 20th century history, and some almost-Dadaist maths students.
Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett with Tom de Freston, Blackwells Bookshop
A very recent but utterly wonderful entry into this year’s highlights! Blackwell’s do a great job of getting interesting people along and I found this talk especially great because a) I’m a massive Jon Klassen fan and b) picture books are an underestimated medium. Klassen and Barnett were there to discuss their latest, timely book How Does Santa Go Down The Chimney?. But Klassen is probably better known as the author of the I Want My Hat Back trilogy. (And yes, he wore a hat for this talk.) They were great fun, and some of the audience was under 12, but this was also a thoughtful, philosophical, important discussion about how the best picture books are crafted, the thought process that goes into writing, drawing style, colours, the infinite possibilities of what happens in the turn of the page, why it’s vital to acknowledge darkness but not be cynical. Safe to say I’m no less of a fan now.