After twelve years of the Chelsea Fringe Festival, it has been announced that founder-director Tim Richardson and the team of current volunteers are stepping down, and the festival will be suspended until further notice, with no event planned for May 2024. The fate of the alternative gardening festival is uncertain.
A future for the Fringe will rely on a new prospective director and volunteer group coming forwards with a vision for the festival, which typically runs alongside the RHS Chelsea Flower Show each year. The website will remain live and the email address will be monitored to field any enquiries.
Just before the announcement, Tim Richardson told Gardens Illustrated why he felt it was time to step back. "It was just a general feeling within the team that we all had other projects to pursue, other ways to direct our energies. The Fringe is quite solvent and does not require sponsorship, so it wasn’t to do with funding or anything like that. I can’t really explain it rationally – it just feels like the right moment. The Fringe didn’t exactly start on a rational basis, so maybe it shouldn’t end on one!"
The Fringe was launched in 2010 as an alternative to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show as a way to showcase community and guerrilla gardening, arts, crafts, performance, history and therapeutic practice.
"The idea of the Fringe came to me while lying in bed early one morning during Chelsea week in 2010," says Tim. "I was doing events at the Garden Museum at the time and I suddenly felt that there was a real need for a ‘Salon des Refuses’ for all the people doing the kinds of things you couldn’t get at the flower show. From there the idea just snowballed and rapidly developed as a no-limits forum for self-expression."
Since then, the Chelsea Fringe has hosted over 2200 events in London and all over the UK and the world. Contributors in dozens of countries, as far-flung as Japan and Australia, have taken part, and the Fringe team has made friends all over the globe as a result.
Those that have worked with the Fringe, put on or attended the events over the years have many treasured memories. "I have been amazed and surprised by the friendships and camaraderie most of all," explains Tim. "There have been so many standout moments." Tim's own favourite recollections include an incident from the second year of the festival. "This one was a street gardening event down in New Cross and, as is often the way with the Fringe, I had no real idea what to expect. I turned the corner to find hundreds of people enjoying a kind of mini festival on a closed-off street with a music stage, food stalls and loads of events. It had all been set up by a guy running a local nursery (which also sold vinyl records). I was on my own and incognito - but just so delighted and elated."
The Chelsea Fringe is a Community Interest Company (CIC) and everything it has achieved has been done so by a dedicated group of volunteers without corporate or civic sponsorship or funding.
"We have put it out there that we are interested in hearing from groups of people who might be willing to take the Fringe forward on a purely voluntary basis, as it has been to now," says Tim. "The website will remain up and the email live, so that we can field any enquiries."
If anyone thinks they could take the helm of the Chelsea Fringe Festival, they should reach out to info@chelseafringe.com.
