Upton Cressett Literary and History Festival

Following the success of our history/literary talks and concerts in the Norman church, we are now expanding our talks programme to celebrate the very best of heritage, books, artisan life, architecture and music - combined with delicious local Shropshire food -  for a festival with an illustrious array of speakers and artists. The festival will also celebrate the creative spirit of the Upton Cressett Literary Foundation, our unique writers' retreat, which is now in its ninth year, with guest fellows having included several award winning writers and playwrights.

For over forty years, Upton Cressett has played host to a wide variety of writers, historians, politicians, artists, musicians and public figures, as the photos on these pages show.  All have visited Upton Cressett.

Our visitor book includes playwright John Osborne, Anthony Sampson (whom Biddy Cash was researcher for in the 1960s), novelists Sebastian Faulks, Philip Kerr, Nicholas Coleridge and Rachel Cusk; historians Andrew Roberts, Hugh Thomas, Colin Lucas and Anthony Howard; politicians Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson; authors Judy Corbett (Castles in the Air) and Dr Katherine Swift (Upton Cressett is featured in The Morville Year), art detective Philip Mould, O.B.E, Shakespeare scholar Clare Asquith, Sunday Times columnist Dominic Lawson, mental health bestselling author Rachel Kelly, biographer Nicholas Wapshott and Gillian Clarke as the National Poet of Wales.

Others include actors Elizabeth Hurley and John Challis (aka Boyce in Only Fools & Horses), artists John Piper and Adam Dant, food writer William Sitwell, broadcaster and musician Mike Read,  classical musician and conductor Christopher Hogwood, musician Marty Pellow (lead singer of Wet, Wet, Wet, who wrote a number of songs in The Moat House), chick-lit author Sophia Money-Coutts, film director John Irvin, and many others including cricketer Shane Warne, Sunday Times columnist Dominic Lawson and Nicholas Wapshott and jazz singer/author Christopher Silvester.

Most leading architectural historians and heritage campaigners of the 20th century have visited Upton Cressett. These include Nikolaus Pevsner, Lord Euston, James Lees-Milne, John Betjeman, Loyd Grossman, Simon Jenkins ( we are described as an 'Elizabethan gem' in The Best Thousand Houses of England), Jeremy Musson, John Goodall and Harry Mount.  At our festival, we will be celebrating this very English tradition of architectural writing and our national love of old buildings and churches.

The festival is curated in association with the Upton Cressett Literary Foundation. Our guest fellows over the last nine years have included Adam Dant,  Dr Lara Feigel, who wrote part of her acclaimed The Love Charm of Bombs at Upton Cressett, broadcaster and social historian Juliet Gardiner (former editor of History Today and author of The Thirties: An Intimate History),  British archaeologist Professor Roger White, and the award winning Royal Court playwright Ella Hickson who wrote part of her Almeida Theatre epic play, Oil, in the Gatehouse.

From 2019, one of the stays awarded will be the Philip Kerr Fellowship named after the bestselling novelist (and creator of 1930s Berlin detective Bernie Gunther) who died in 2018, aged 61. This fellowship will be for commercial or crime fiction. Philip stayed at Upton Cressett and his wife and novelist Jane Thynne will be on the committee awarding the annual award.

Our speaker and talks programme for the festival will be announced in the Spring. There will be talks in the Norman church, Elizabethan costume dancing, falconry, live music and a speaker's dinner in the Saturday evening.