Announcing One Roof Festival, January 2026!

We were Chuffed To Bits around this time last year when our founder, Nell, was asked to give the One Roof Festival at Old Diorama Arts Centre a touch of the RAT-a-tat-tat by co-producing it with ODAC's in-house staff. Having attended and facilitated at the festival in previous years, it had a special place in Nell's heart.

It has since been our Almighty Chuff to see One Roof through its first year as a year-round programme - meeting weekly, and building on our ambitions, skills and connections to each other and our crafts.

We are now well and truly Stuffed With Chuff that ODAC is letting us loose on the One Roof Festival 2026 next month, with a new RATty approach!

Ten years after the very first One Roof Festival in 2016 (then titled One Fest), next year's festival will run Monday to Friday for two weeks from 19-30th January.

One Roof's first year of operating weekly was titled Laying Foundations, and was devoted to skills building, exploration and trying things out. This year, titled Bricks and Mortar, is about putting our skill sets, perspectives and ideas together to make work collaboratively.

Image by Alice Horsley

We’ll still have everything we all know and love about the festival: the open studio, the food, the space and time to connect with each other, the wide range of creative workshops delivered by artists with lived experience of homelessness, the exhibition in ODAC’s foyer at the end of it all.

But this time, we will also have a dedicated ‘project’ space each week, overseen by an artist who will support participants to shape their ideas, collaborate and elevate their work through combining art forms, perspectives and insights.

Image by Alice Horsley

Our project space in the first week will explore art as activism, starting with the stimulus word “UNSPOKEN”; while in the second week we will explore art as expression/aesthetics, starting with the stimulus “UNKNOWN”. There will be a chance to share the work begun in these weeks in an evening sharing event on 30th January, and then to put wherever they get to in front of a public audience at the exhibition launch on 6th February.

The other change we’re making, as requested by the community, is that, alongside arts workshops, every day will contain at least one workshop focussed on supporting wellbeing and mental health. Think relaxation, yoga, aromatherapy, and other practices to balance us as we navigate our lives and practise our creativity.

So whether you’ve been coming to the festival for years or this will be your first time; whether you’re currently experiencing homelessness in any form, or have done in the past; whether you’re a painter or a writer or an actor or a musician or just want to find out what works for you, we’ll have something for you.

Watch this space for the full programme announcement early in the new year - and have a happy festive season in the meantime!