OUAB working in partnership with
Maidenhead’s Big Read
A Brief Analysis and Report

Festival: Maidenhead’s Big Read (MBR)  

Location: Maidenhead, Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, Berkshire  

Organiser: Maidenhead Community Book Festival CIC (volunteer-led; chair Helal Stephan)  

Focus: Children’s literacy, ages roughly 3–13 (Reception to Year 7)  

Latest edition: 8th year, March 2026, weekend theme *Get Moving*

Maidenhead’s Big Read is a compact, community-run literacy festival timed to World Book Day. It is not a large commercial book festival. Its purpose is narrower and more practical: get local children reading, especially reluctant readers and those who do not already have books, library habits, or enthusiasm for stories, and make that experience free, social, and fun.

How it works

The festival has two linked parts:

1. School programme (weekdays, early–mid March) - Authors, illustrators, poets and storytellers visit Maidenhead schools. Sessions are free to schools. In recent years this has been the main engine of reach.

2. Public family weekend (Maidenhead Library and nearby sites) - Drop-in, no booking. Author presentations, storytelling, crafts, treasure hunts, open-mic poetry, illustration workshops, and the recurring Once Upon a Bus sessions (interactive tellings of titles such as The Gruffalo, Stick Man and Room on the Broom). All sessions are free, funded by local sponsors and through grants.

Often, the festival is given a single hook theme (not every year!); previous examples include *Oceans Alive*, *Outer Space* and *Wings* (2025), so activities can pull in children via sport, nature, flight or movement rather than “come and read.” Chair Helal Stephan has described the theme as a way to “encourage children of different interests [and] enthuse them to start reading.”

Patrons have been Baroness Katherine Grainger and, from autumn 2025, local children’s poet Simon Mole (National Poetry Day ambassador and former National Literacy Trust poet in residence). Simon already had a long festival history as a performer in schools and at the library weekend.

The 2026 edition

School window: around 2–13 March 2026  

Public weekend: Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 March 2026 at Maidenhead Library  

Theme: *Get Moving*

The weekend line-up mixed local regulars with visiting creators:

The football partnership was the clearest expression of the theme: first-team players visited the library before a home match, read poems with Mole, and took part in word games with junior players. Organisers used that to argue that a passion such as football can be a route into books, not a rival to them.

Other weekend fixtures included crafts, a treasure hunt, a Story Corner, Heritage Centre drop-ins, and children’s open-mic. Local estate agent Oakwood Estates was among the 2026 sponsors and supplied promotional boards around town. Mayor Cllr Sian Martin and Maidenhead MP Josh Reynolds visited.

Reach and impact

Reported figures are organiser and local-press estimates, not independently audited, but they are consistent year to year:

For a town-scale volunteer festival this is substantial. The model is high-volume and low-barrier: schools get professional visitors they could not easily book themselves; families get a free weekend in the library rather than a ticketed literary event. That is a good fit for the stated aim of reaching children “currently missing out on all that a love of books can provide.”

Qualitative strengths reported locally include parent enthusiasm matching children’s, return visitors plus newcomers, and programming that works for reluctant readers (sport, performance poetry, drawing, props). Poetry has become a house style: Mole, Rumble, children’s open-mic, and in 2026 - footballers in verse!

Analysis: what works

1. A clear, modest brief
MBR does not try to be Hay or Oxford Literary Festival. It is a reading (literacy) intervention dressed as a festival in support of local schools. That keeps costs down and purpose sharp.

2. Theme as a recruitment tool
“Get Moving,” “Wings,” “Oceans” and “Outer Space” give teachers, sponsors and children a reason to turn up that is not just “literacy.” The 2026 Magpies session is the best recent example: sport as bait, poetry as the activity.

3. Place-based partnerships
Library + Once Upon a Bus + Heritage Centre + The Nicholsons Centre + The Town Hall + Maidenhead United + Local sponsors is a tight civic network. The festival uses Maidenhead’s existing institutions and community groups such as the Maidenhead Astronomical Society, Archeology & History Society, etc. rather than importing a big production.

4. Free at the point of use
No booking for the weekend removes a common barrier for disadvantaged and less engaged families. School visits being free and inclusive is equally important; the festival is, in effect, a subsidy to local primary literacy.

5. Local authorship as continuity
Simon Mole’s appointment as patron institutionalises a relationship that already existed. A resident poet who is also a National Poetry Day ambassador is a stronger long-term asset than a one-off visiting celebrity.

Analysis: constraints and risks

The main risk is structural, not artistic. In May 2025, after a “tremendous success” seventh year, Stephan publicly warned that the festival might have to stop unless more volunteers and a treasurer joined the organising group for succession planning, and more funding sources are sought and secured. The committee had shrunk; funding was tight; planning, author booking and promotion sat on too few people. Meetings are typically evening Zooms every four to six weeks; a small-CIC pattern that works until it doesn’t.

That the eighth year still ran in March 2026 shows the warning was not immediately fatal. It does not show the capacity problem has gone away. Volunteer festivals of this type often fail between editions, not during them.

Other limits

Outlook

Maidenhead’s Big Read is a well-designed local reading festival: free, often themed, school-plus-weekend, and unusually good at using non-book institutions (a football club, a heritage centre, a storytelling bus etc.) to sell reading. On available figures it now reaches on the order of  5,000 schoolchildren and a few thousand weekend visitors in a Berkshire town; a serious community contribution for a volunteer "not for profit" CIC.

The 2026 “Get Moving” weekend confirmed the formula still works and that civic partners will still turn up. The live question is governance and funding. If the organising group can recruit a broader support for its long term viability, MBR is a repeatable annual asset for the Maidenhead community and a useful small-scale model for other UK towns. If it cannot, the festival’s own chair has already said what happens next: it stops.

 

Useful links: maidenheads-big-read.org.uk

Sources: MBR website; Maidenhead Advertiser / Slough Observer / Slough Express coverage 2022–2026; Maidenhead United; Oakwood Estates.


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