Voices From Leicester Riverside Festival – Community Reporting With Soar Sound
On Saturday 6th June 2026, Soar Sound was at Leicester Riverside Festival, gathering voices, stories and reflections from across Castle Gardens and the wider festival site.
The podcast brings together reports from Helen (editor of the Evington Echo), Jen and Mister Ginger, who spent the day speaking with stallholders, artists, volunteers, students, performers and community organisations. Rather than presenting the festival from a distance, the programme offers a set of close-up conversations with people who were there, sharing what they were doing, why it mattered, and how their work connects with Leicester’s wider civic, cultural and creative life.
The reports give a strong sense of the variety of activity at Riverside. Serendipity Institute for Black Arts and Heritage spoke about its publications, living archive, dance work and Leicester-based programme of events. Enter Edem brought humour and theatrical invention to its Time Travel Treatment Room, using performance to open up questions about Victorian approaches to mental health. Leicester College students and tutors shared their art and design work, including face painting, live painting and creative responses to the theme “What makes you bloom?”
Health, heritage and wellbeing were recurring themes throughout the day. Leicester Hospitals’ Creative Health and Heritage Centre introduced visitors to objects from the hospital museum, including historic medical instruments and nursing uniforms. Volunteers also spoke about the value of creativity for wellbeing, especially in spaces connected with care, memory and public health. Bright Sparks Arts contributed workshops, poetry, sensory wellbeing activities and community-made crafts, showing how creative participation can support confidence, expression and connection.
The podcast also captures the festival as a place for learning. Leicester Libraries’ electric Book Bus offered access to books, stories and information about library services across the city. The University of Leicester Heritage Hub invited families to explore archaeology through dig pits, bones, pottery and hands-on activities. Gather Create Bro spoke about the Cosby Yarn Bomb and the use of textiles to bring people together. A Different Human Design and Fashion Technology Academy demonstrated how upcycling, repair and practical fashion skills can connect creativity with sustainability and employment.
There are also moments of performance and informal encounter. Jen spoke with Phil from Comedy Asylum Presents, who reflected on the value of free, family-friendly events and the diversity of people who come together at Riverside. Across the programme, the tone remains conversational, local and immediate. The value lies not only in the organisations represented, but in the act of listening to people describe their own work in their own words.
For Soar Sound, the day was also an exercise in community reporting. The aim was not to produce a polished outside broadcast or claim to be live from the festival, but to gather recorded material that could be reviewed, shaped and shared afterwards. This approach supports accountable community media practice. It gives volunteers a practical opportunity to develop interviewing, listening and reporting skills, while creating a record of the people and projects that make local events meaningful.
The resulting podcast is a snapshot of Riverside on one day in June. It captures creative organisations, public services, heritage groups, students, volunteers and performers working alongside one another in a shared civic space. It also shows why community media matters. When people are given the chance to speak directly about what they do, local culture becomes easier to hear, understand and value.
Listen to the podcast to hear the full set of reports from Leicester Riverside Festival, recorded by Soar Sound on Saturday 6th June 2026.
