Craft House Springs To Life

“Put the band up on a stage, have some more people taking drugs in the corner — now that’s a festival.”

Such was my advice to the Craft House committee on my departure. Craft House is not, ordinarily, my scene. My usual Saturday afternoon tends to involve going for a sea swim or playing a spot of croquet, not maypoles or watercolour stations. And yet, somewhere between sipping my complimentary Jarritos and listening to The Macaronis play their fourth Radiohead song, I found I was actually enjoying myself.

Craft House has been an evolving brand over the past three years, and their spring garden party Midsommar was their big debut. With 250 tickets sold — ranging in price from £9 to £20, this was their largest event yet. Proceeds went directly to their artists’ fund, which students can apply to. Craft House is charitable, artsy, and well-priced, three things which rarely appear in the same sentence on the St Andrews events circuit.

It is worth pausing to examine what Craft House actually is, and what it is trying to do, because the two are not always obvious from the outset. The society has not had the decades of experience that Welly or Oktoberfest have had to cleanly and coherently define its identity. Born as an art gallery squeezed into a spare bedroom, it has spent three years quietly becoming something more ambitious, without yet having the name recognition or legacy that its older competitors on the circuit take for granted. Midsommar felt like a deliberate step towards something bigger, closing that gap. The Botanical Gardens complemented the Midsommar theme, complete with maypole and the particular artsy-chinos energy of a spring afternoon. Craft House’s event exemplified the fact that the society was working out, with some confidence, what it actually wants to be. If the collective can hold onto that and scale it up, there is a version of this event in a few years’ time that will generate genuine envy among the older names on the circuit.  

Another chronic issue with the events circuit is, frankly, there's often not a lot to do. Midsommar did not suffer from this malaise. One could wander around the art gallery, take in the usual scenery of an afternoon in the Botanical Gardens, try and fail at spikeball, scarf down some pizza, re-enact Year Four art class messing around with watercolours, or simply sit back on the grass and listen, as Five Card Draw played their spring Lo-Fi beats. Craft House, by actually giving attendees multiple things to do, has brought novelty to the events scene.

The challenge for Craft House has never been the quality of what they produce, but exposure — getting their name into rooms and conversations it hasn't yet reached. There was a particular species of attendee on Saturday who seemed faintly surprised to discover that what they were at was, in fact, rather good; that Craft House was, in fact, rather serious about what it does. At £9 minimum entry, with proceeds going to the artists' fund, the only real question is why more people weren't there.

It tends to be a truism of the events scene that bad events are a lot easier to write about than good events — there's more to criticise and to condemn. With that in mind, this has been an excruciatingly difficult article to write.

Photo by Joss Wildgoose Bulloch