How the Festival of Arts Brixham Is Using Mapzest to Bring Twelve Days of Culture Together

Create! Participate! Celebrate!

From Monday 19 to Friday 30 October 2026, F.A.B. - the Festival of Arts Brixham - fills the town with music, art, poetry, crafts, theatre, talks and dance. It is a collaboration between Brixham Heritage Museum, Brixham Theatre, Brixham Library, A Kick Up The Arts (AKUTA) and The Music Factory CIC, supported by Brixham Town Council, and it has one simple aim: to celebrate and strengthen the town's arts and cultural sector, and give residents and visitors of every age the chance to discover, try and enjoy creative activity right on their doorstep.

The first F.A.B. ran for a week in October 2025 and was so well supported that many sessions sold out, with around 350 people at the Saturday celebration in the Scala. For 2026 it has grown to almost two weeks - more than 40 different activities and nearly 70 sessions, spread across seven venues around Bolton Cross, the heart of Brixham's Cultural Quarter. And this year, the whole programme is on Mapzest.

Twelve days, seven venues, something for everyone

F.A.B. is a genuinely broad programme. There's Diane Highfield's photography exhibition at the library and the F.A.B. art exhibition at the Heritage Museum, both running through the festival, plus the Brixham Art Society exhibition at the Con Club. Comic poet Robert Garnham runs a poetry workshop and an open mic; Brixham artist Mark Bell leads dynamic life drawing and detailed figure drawing sessions; bestselling historical novelist Kate Furnivall gives an author talk; and there's an evening talk on the folklore of Dartmoor.

Makers can try stained glass, fused glass and felt landscape workshops at AKUTA, or join a Bitch & Stitch social sewing evening at The Workroom on Fore Street. Families have kids' art sessions, a junk-music workshop, a Museum Makes craft session and a kids' collage morning, while teenagers get their own Teen Takeovers, a murder mystery word collage and the FAB Big Teen Read. Brixham Theatre adds evening shows including a Tina Turner tribute, The Upbeat Beatles and The Music Factory's live concert.

The centrepiece is the F.A.B. Saturday Social on 24 October - free art, music and dancing at the Scala from 10am, with pop-up makers, dance taster sessions, a fashion catwalk and a family ceilidh, plus a Music Factory rehearsal drop-in at the theatre. Sunday brings a free Community Art Day and a Songwriting Day at AKUTA. Better still, around two thirds of all the sessions are free.

That's a lot for a visitor to take in - and a lot for an organiser to communicate. Which is exactly where a printed programme starts to struggle.

From printed programme to interactive map

Like most community festivals, F.A.B. started with a printed programme - five pages of dates, times, venues and prices, with asterisks for drop-ins and notes about booking. It's a great piece of design, and printed programmes still have an important place. But on paper it's hard to answer the questions visitors actually ask. What's on this afternoon? What can I take the kids to on Wednesday? Where exactly is The Workroom? Is the library open on Saturday?

So every one of the festival's sessions was taken from that programme and turned into its own listing on Mapzest - with its own description, its date and times, its price, whether it's drop-in or booking essential, and its venue on the map. Sessions that repeat across the fortnight, like the kids' art mornings or the photography exhibition, appear on each day they run, so 'what's on today?' always has a complete answer. Even the clocks going back on Sunday 25 October, right in the middle of the festival, is taken care of - every time shows correctly whichever side of the change it falls.

Every venue on the map, every session in its place

Open Brixham in Mapzest and the festival is part of the town map itself. Every session sits at its venue - AKUTA on Bolton Street, the Heritage Museum and Brixham Theatre on New Road, the library on Market Street, the Scala at the Town Hall, The Workroom on Fore Street and the Con Club. Tap a venue and you see everything happening there during the festival; tap the festival and you see the whole programme.

Some of these venues weren't on Mapzest before F.A.B., so the festival has also put the library, The Workroom and the Con Club on the map - with their addresses, contact details and opening hours - where they'll stay long after the last workshop has finished.

A personal festival itinerary, built as you browse

With nearly seventy sessions across twelve days, no one is going to do everything - and that's the point. Every session in Mapzest has a heart. Tap it on the poetry open mic, the Saturday Social and the Thursday life drawing class, and they collect together in your Favourites, ready for the day. Families can plan a half-term week around the free kids' sessions; a visitor staying in town for a weekend can see exactly what fits around their plans. Nobody has to download a PDF, cross-reference a venue list or fill in a form.

And because the same listing shows whether a session is free, drop-in or booking essential, visitors know before they set off whether they can just turn up. For sessions that need booking, the festival's booking email is right there on the page - one tap, and the request is on its way to the organisers.

Raising awareness beyond the people who already know

The hardest audience for any local festival is the people who don't know it's happening - visitors in town for half-term, people from the next town over, someone who'd love a fused glass workshop but has never been into AKUTA. Mapzest helps reach them in a few different ways.

In the app, F.A.B. sessions show up alongside everything else that's happening in Brixham, so someone browsing What's On for the week, or looking at the map for somewhere to eat, finds the festival too. On the web, every session also gets its own page on Mapzest Discover, written to be found by Google and by AI search tools, so someone searching for 'poetry workshop Brixham' or 'things to do in Brixham at half-term' has a real chance of landing on a F.A.B. event.

Engagement that lasts the whole fortnight

A one-day event only has to win attention once. A two-week festival has to keep it - and keep people coming back for the second week after the excitement of the first weekend has passed. A printed programme picked up on day one is usually lost by day four. A festival in the app people already have on their phone is still there on day twelve.

Because Mapzest is live, the programme can change as the festival does. A session that sells out, a new pop-up added for the Saturday Social, a change of room or time - it's updated once and it's right for everyone immediately, with no reprints and no out-of-date copies doing the rounds. The 'What's New & Updated' list on the home screen shows visitors what has changed, so there's always a reason to take another look.

Good for the whole creative community, not just the festival

F.A.B. is a partnership, and Mapzest reflects that. Each partner venue gets the festival's events listed against its own page as well as the festival's, so the museum, the theatre, the library, AKUTA and The Workroom all benefit from the attention F.A.B. brings. The theatre's own F.A.B. shows - the Tina Turner tribute, The Upbeat Beatles, The Music Factory concert and more - sit alongside the rest of the programme, so a visitor who comes for a workshop finds out about the evening's show, and vice versa.

And when the festival ends on 30 October, nothing is lost. The venues stay on the map, their own events keep appearing in What's On, and next year's F.A.B. starts with a head start rather than a blank page.

Running a festival of your own?

Whether it's a fortnight of arts across a town, a weekend of pirates around a harbour like the Brixham Pirate Festival, or a one-day show in an exhibition hall, the challenge is the same - lots of things happening in lots of places, and visitors who need to find the ones that are right for them. Mapzest takes the programme you already have, puts it on a map your visitors already know how to use, and keeps it working for you from the first announcement to the final day and beyond.

If you organise a festival, arts trail, open studios weekend or community event and you'd like to see what it could look like on Mapzest, get in touch. We can usually show you a working version of your own programme far quicker than you'd expect.