Ware Next

Ware Next Helping Ware discover its potential. Connecting people, culture and community.

We're at the Tudor Square market today 10AM-2PM. Come and say hi and grab one of our exclusive Ware postcards!
12/07/2026

We're at the Tudor Square market today 10AM-2PM. Come and say hi and grab one of our exclusive Ware postcards!

We may be out of the race for UK Town of Culture, but we had some pretty postcards made!Come and see us at the Southern ...
10/07/2026

We may be out of the race for UK Town of Culture, but we had some pretty postcards made!

Come and see us at the Southern Maltings Market in Tudor Square this Sunday between 10AM and 2PM if you'd like one. Whilst you're there, we'd love to hear your thoughts about how we can improve access to culture in our town. UKToC may be dead (for now), but Ware Next lives on! 💪🏻

Yesterday evening we learned that Ware has not been shortlisted to become the UK's first Town of Culture in 2028.Natural...
10/07/2026

Yesterday evening we learned that Ware has not been shortlisted to become the UK's first Town of Culture in 2028.

Naturally, we are disappointed.

However, this journey has also reminded us of something incredibly important – Ware is home to an amazing range of cultural organisations, community groups, volunteers and creative people who make our town such a vibrant and welcoming place.

The support we have received over recent months has been fantastic, and we would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has supported the bid, shared ideas and championed Ware along the way.

Ware Next was never solely about a competition. We remain committed to supporting culture, creativity and community in Ware, and we look forward to sharing more about our future plans in due course.

If you'd like to stay involved and hear about what comes next, please sign up to our mailing list at www.warenext.org (link in bio also).

We will also be at the Southern Maltings market on Tudor Square this Sunday from 10am to 2pm. We'll be handing out copies of our Town of Culture postcards and would love to talk to residents about what they would like to see from Ware Next in the future.

Thank you again for your support. This may not be the outcome we had hoped for, but this is not the end of the story for Ware Next 💪🏻

Saturday was Ware Carnival, one of the highlights of Ware Festival and a great way to kick off a month long celebration ...
07/07/2026

Saturday was Ware Carnival, one of the highlights of Ware Festival and a great way to kick off a month long celebration of all things Ware! We've got music, art, food and beer festivals, comedy - you name it! Be sure to follow Ware Town Council for details of what's coming up and check out their website for the full programme.

The theme of this year's carnival was '100 Years of Television' - didn't everyone taking part do an amazing job with their costumes and floats?! Well done all!

This year's festival is raising money for Wodson Park Sports and Leisure Centre, Ware Museum, and the Mayor's charity for the year, SPACE Hertfordshire. Be sure to give generously if you attend any of the events!

06/07/2026

As promised, here is the wonderful poem by Nicky Parker of Ware Poets that accompanied our postcard to Department for Culture, Media and Sport:

Eight thousand years of greetings from Ware!
Prehistoric settlement on the shining Lea
forded by Romans road-building their empire,
breached by Viking oarsmen,
town of journeys, hubbub of humanity,
already ancient when England was born.
Town of liberty stirrers, Magna Carta makers,
inns hosting Chaucer’s pilgrims, Shakespeare’s Great Bed,
preachers, dissenters, martyrs, Cromwell’s troops,
maltsters and bargemen for England’s beer.
Birthplace of Clarkson’s anti-slavery vision,
where Suffragists marched down the medieval high street.
Today’s town vibrant with art, music, science, poetry
good food and drink, community spirit.
Swifts screech, children play, swans glide,
ghosts whisper on the wind:
Welcome

A huge thank you to Malcolm Maclean for the stunning drone footage, Joey Butcher for his lovely reading of the poem, and Sandy Butcher for putting it all together ❤️

The 2026 Ware Festival kicked off in style on Saturday with the annual boat parade on the Lea.The event, run by the Lea ...
06/07/2026

The 2026 Ware Festival kicked off in style on Saturday with the annual boat parade on the Lea.

The event, run by the Lea & Stort Inland Waterways Association, is always a sight to behold, with boat owners decorating their vessels and passing by the gathered crowds. The weather was perfect and there was even an ice cream boat! What a fantastic start to our festival month!

📷 credits: Cllr Barney Bryant

Ware joined nearly 400 other bidding towns when the Department for Culture, Media and Sport gave a surprise but fun call...
02/07/2026

Ware joined nearly 400 other bidding towns when the Department for Culture, Media and Sport gave a surprise but fun call for us to design a postcard to sum up our town and its bid to become the first .

Warites never shy away from a challenge, so we teamed up with Ware Poets and our local history buffs to create a new take on a retro postcard design which included an original 100-word poem as the 'message on the back', spanning our 8,000-year history and with a view toward the future. Stay tuned for us to share the poem with you in a separate post (we thought it was so good, we should give it its own moment in the spotlight).

DCMS has included all of the postcards submitted on an interactive digital map that you can access via the link in our bio. However, we hope you will agree that ours is the best (of course) 😉

If you haven’t yet signed up for updates from Ware Next, please visit www.warenext.org (link also in bio).

Be ready for a big announcement from us tomorrow about a special youth summer experience coming in early August, designed to connect 30 youth champions with our local creatives and leaders, to help develop the next part of our proposal should we be lucky enough to get through to the next round in the UK Town of Culture process. Shortlisted towns will find out by the end of July whether have been selected to receive £60,000 to develop a full bid over the summer and autumn. Wish us luck! 🤞🏻

We've been a little quiet on here lately whilst we wait to hear about how we've done in our bid for Ware to become the f...
30/06/2026

We've been a little quiet on here lately whilst we wait to hear about how we've done in our bid for Ware to become the first , but we've been keeping busy behind the scenes and have lots of exciting plans, regardless of our success in the competition.

We should be able to share some of these exciting plans with you soon, so be sure to sign up to our mailing list (link in bio) to be the first to hear them!

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