Poetry From the Depths: Five Days Underground at the Hold Space Poetry Festival
Most poetry events follow a familiar shape. There’s a room, a microphone, a row of chairs, and a polite round of applause between readers. It works, but it rarely surprises anyone. Every so often, though, an event comes along that rethinks the whole idea of what a poetry festival can be: not a showcase of finished work, but a place where the work actually gets made, out loud and in front of you. The Hold Space Poetry Festival, presented by The Crypt Gallery and Make Poetry Weird Again as part of Bloomsbury Festival’s 20th anniversary year, is one of those events. And it happens to take place underground, in a 200-year-old crypt, which helps.
The festival sets its tone before you’ve even reached the bottom of the stairs. The Crypt Gallery sits beneath St Pancras Parish Church, just off Euston Road, in a space that was used for coffin burials between 1822 and 1854. The organisers don’t gloss over this. Remains of hundreds of people still lie down there, the stone walls hold the cold even in early October, and visitors are asked plainly to treat the space with respect. That honesty shapes the mood. The festival grew out of an earlier gathering during Holy Week, when sixteen poets spent seven nights together in the crypt and came out with something they couldn’t quite name. This October edition brought the idea back for five days, with the stated aim of feeling alive again before winter. Standing in the half-light with a notebook in hand, you get it almost immediately.
What works best is how open the whole thing feels. Twelve resident poets had the run of the space all week. They wrote there by day, recorded there, and performed in the evening pieces that hadn’t existed that morning. Daily prompts kept things moving, and the organisers were clear that this was no quiet retreat. It was closer to an exposure. A day pass got you into the crypt from 10am to 6pm on any day, and it ran on a pay-what-you-can basis, so the money went towards paying the poets rather than keeping anyone out. Watching a poem take shape across a single day, then hearing it read aloud that same night, is a rare kind of access. Most of us only ever meet poetry once it’s polished. Here you saw the scaffolding.
The workshops were the festival’s smartest move. Each one was small, separately booked and mostly pay-what-you-can, and they ranged from the reflective (The Sacred Space Within, Rediscovering Joy in a Crypt) to the gloriously chaotic (Trash Fire Poetry: Writing From the Ashes, Disasterpieces). There was protest poetry on the Sunday, and a scary stories sharing circle to close things out on the Monday. They turned a festival you might have just attended into one you actually took part in. People walked into a stone vault as strangers and left having shared drafts with each other, which is a far more honest picture of what poetry is for than any reading list.
The evening open mics kept that spirit going. Two featured poets from the residency opened each night before the floor went to fourteen readers. Spots were capped deliberately, so every person who stood up got proper attention rather than being rushed through a sign-up sheet. The invitation was simple: come to listen, come to share, come as you are. In a city where open mics can feel like endurance tests, that kind of care stood out.
The centrepiece was the Hold Space Gathering, a midpoint ceremony held upstairs in St Pancras New Church. Neil Bartlett OBE premiered new work there, but not alone. The church is famous for its caryatids, stone figures holding up the roof with their own bodies, and the organisers mirrored that by surrounding him with sixteen queer poets and four musicians. An elder carried by the generation that came after him. It was billed as a ceremony of witness rather than a gig, and that framing suited it.
There were plenty of quieter moments too. A podcast recorded live in the crypt throughout the week, and a collective zine was built page by page, risograph printed in two colours and handed out free at the closing on Monday 5 October. Leaving with a small, physical record of something that a few days earlier didn’t exist felt like the right ending. The Hold Space Poetry Festival understood that people don’t only want to hear poetry. They want to be in the room where it happens, and maybe add a line of their own. It managed that with very little fuss, a lot of heart, and a sensible reminder to bring an extra layer.
