Hello!

Hope everyone is keeping warm and finding lots of creative things to do this Winter!

We have been making some great plans for 2017 and looking forward to working with everyone in our Eltham Arts network to make this a lovely year.

The Eltham Arts Winter Festival was a huge success due to everyone who joined in by staging events and all those people from near and far who came to the over 150 events.  We put photos and videos online during the Festival and we are making a Festival Film which will be available on our YouTube channel for everyone to re-live the great moments!

We use social media a lot to let everyone know what’s going on in Eltham and highlight interesting arty issues. We have a good Facebook following and an amazing over 2500 twitter followers. We reached over twelve thousand twitter page impressions a day during the Festival. I think we can be proud of how we are spreading the word about and celebrating the arts in Eltham. 

Do follow @ElthamArts on twitter and engage with our Eltham Arts facebook page or any events pages we create.

Hope you are all reading the Life in Eltham column in Greenwich Visitor! I write that monthly and try to reflect what is going on in Eltham.  There are free copies of Greenwich Visitor in many supermarkets over Royal Greenwich. In Eltham, they are in Sainsbury’s and Eltham Library.

Do collect any for your local groups. Matt Clarke at Greenwich Visitor is a great supporter of Eltham Arts and the newspaper has a wide distribution, so if you have a budget for advertising, please do think about advertising in the paper.

We have been involved with planning the music in Passey Place, Eltham High Street in July for four years now. This year we are planning to expand this to create an Eltham Summer Music Festival, with a range of music events throughout July in different venues. We are already discussing jazz, classical and folk events in addition to the range of music and dance events in Passey Place.  More information as time goes on.

The Winter Festival Song Challenge produced some great original songs ‘of a culinary nature’ from our local singer/songwriters, as those of you who came to the Festival Finale at the White Hart in November can testify. We are recording fifteen of these songs and will be producing another Eltham Arts CD.  ‘Aspects of Winter – The Eltham Collection’ was very popular last year (did you know it was featured on BBC Radio Kent before Xmas?) and we are sure that this one will be equally as good and be a fun addition to our Creative Eltham collection.

With all the new projects, we have decided that we will not be organising an Eltham Arts Winter Festival this year. We are innovative and hope to spread events over the year and we only have limited capacity and resources.

Do keep in touch. We are a network and exist by everyone working together and being positive about Eltham and creating an artistic place to live in and enjoy.

Have fun! Join in! Be creative!
 
All good wishes
Gaynor and the Eltham Arts Team