WOW Leeds Barn Festival

WOW Leeds Barn Festival followed an extraordinary feat: a 24-hour barn build by 300 women and non-binary people on Cinder Moor, transforming a raw public space into a vibrant pop-up venue for celebration, skills-sharing and bold conversation.

The WOW Barn Festival in May 2023 was a unique blend of DIY culture, feminist architecture, public art and joyful activism. It honoured WOW’s legacy of amplifying unheard voices, but did so through literal structure-building and radical imagination.

The festival celebrated women, girls and non-binary people with a day of talks, culture, rallies and events. The programme included speakers such as Corrine Bailey Rae, Mina Smallman and Akeela Din Mohammed. Packed with chances to learn how to build your own spaces, there were workshops on plumbing, drilling and building your own bird box in the shape of The WOW Barn.

Throughout the week before there were events in the Barn with highlights including live sessions from spoken word poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, comedy from Bridget Christie and Shazia Mirza, an evening with chef and broadcaster Andi Oliver, “rock star classicist” Natalie Haynes and a new commission from Bradford poet Kirsty Taylor.

WOW Leeds Barn was part of Leeds Year of Culture 2023. It reimagined what festivals can be: temporary, community-built, and inclusive. The barn itself became a symbol of feminist solidarity – built by many hands, open to all, and filled to the rafters with hopes for a more inclusive future.