Messy Harvest, 2-4pm, Saturday 8th October 2022
St Andrew’s Church, London Road, WickfordMess! Fun! Food! FREE Kids crafts, activities, games, stories, & songs! plus FREE tea for each child. Kids must bring an adult.
Messy Church is a way of being church for families and others. It is Christ-centred, for all ages, based on creativity, hospitality and celebration.
Unveiled
A new, regular Friday night arts and performance event at St Andrew’s Church, 7.00 – 9.00 pm, 11 London Road, Wickford, Essex SS12 0ANExhibitions, open mic nights, performances, talks and more!
- Unveiled – a wide range of artist and performers from Essex and wider, including Open Mic nights (come and have a go!).
- Unveiled – view our hidden painting by acclaimed artist David Folley, plus a range of other exhibitions.
Initial Autumn ProgrammeUnveiled’s Autumn Programme will continue to 25 November.
Advance notice: 18 November – Rev Simpkins in concert. Sinner songster, guttural gospeller & pop-poet-priest, Rev Simpkins’s music is an unholy brew of bruising freak blues, string-snapping finger-twanged folk, and sanctified psychedelia.
Unveiled on Friday 7 October, 7.00 - 9.00 pm, at St Andrew's Wickford features composer Ho Wai-On in conversation with Jonathan Evens.
The evening will include audio and video clips from her work. Wai-On will speak about her compositions and cross-cultural combined arts work.
Ho Wai-On (surname: Ho, aka Ann-Kay Lin) is from Hong Kong but has lived most of her life in or near London. She is best known as a composer, and creator/director of cross-cultural combined arts projects. She has written more than one hundred compositions for various combinations − vocal, choral, instrumental, ensemble, orchestral, electro-acoustic, music theatre, dance, music for the stage, multi-media, and the scores for three short films. Her works reflect different cultures including Western, Chinese, Japanese and Indian; and span various art forms including music, dance, theatre, design, multi-slide projection and music videos. She has lectured and received numerous commissions.
Unveiled: Exhibition viewing evening with Runwell Art ClubFriday 14 October 2022, 7.00 – 9.00 pm
St Andrew’s Church, 11 London Road, Wickford, Essex SS12 0AN
View the exhibition by members of Runwell Art Club featuring animals, children and nature, a heritage display on Wickford’s children from Basildon Heritage, Nicola Ravenscroft’s mudcub sculptures of children intimately connected to the earth – reminding us of our duty of care to life, to love, to planet Earth – and St Andrew’s hidden painting, ‘The descent from the Cross’ by David Folley.
The evening includes presentations on Runwell Art Club, Nicola Ravenscroft’s mudcubs and the hidden painting at St Andrew’s.
Wickford Famous, Friday 21 October, 7.00 pm, St Andrew’s Church, 11 London Road, Wickford, Essex SS12 0ANA talk by Ken Porter of Basildon Heritage on famous people from Wickford.
Rev Simpkins performs Saltings
Friday 18 November, 7.00 pm
St Andrew’s Church, 11 London Road, Wickford SS12 0ANPart of ‘Unveiled’, the new Friday night arts and performance event at St Andrew’s Church
No ticket required – donations requested on the night
Rev Simpkins & the Phantom Folk
Rev Simpkins’ music mixes the colourful folk tradition of Appalachians Mountains with the melodiousness and carefully-observed lyrics of the Kinks. Close harmonies intertwine with banjo, French horn, and bass.
At this concert the band will perform the Rev’s acclaimed fourth album and book, Saltings in its entirety.
Created with the Illustrator, Tom Knight, Saltings is a loving portrait of the mystery and beauty of Essex's salt marsh wilderness, and a meditation on the real human cost of the wilderness time of the pandemic.
Found within 50 miles of London, the saltings are one of England’s last natural wild spaces. Working as a parish priest a few miles away, Matt came to the saltings to retreat and compose these compelling and compassionate songs about his community’s real-life experiences during the pandemic. Saltings portrays hope found amid wilderness.
The Reverend Matt Simpkins is the fourth generation of his family to be ordained priest in the Church of England. Prior to ordination, Matt was a professional musician having been a choral scholar at Oxford University and a Lecturer in Music. He collaborated with Kenney Jones of the Small Faces to reconstruct the orchestral parts of their 1968 psychedelic masterpiece Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake. In 2019 a diagnosis of cancer and a period of illness brought an opportunity to make new music and the Rev released the hope-filled album Big Sea in 2020, which was selected as one of Louder than War’s albums of 2020.
‘a triumph…hypnotic and compulsive listening’ Fatea on Saltings
‘tender...magnificent...outstanding’ Vive le Rock on Saltings
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