Pre-booking meals: To help us better plan and provide a wonderful eating experience, we are encouraging people to pre-book their meals for the 2025 Camp. You purchase meal credits via the Queer Spirit website and you can then also purchase a physical card or wristband to store and redeem your meal credits. If you purchase a card or wristband, it can be used at all main Queer Spirit events, both the 2025 community camp plus any additional future events such as the 2026 festival. 

Pre-booking will be available during all of July only and to say thank you, we are offering a discount on each item compared to buying direct at the camp, which could save you up to £9.50! 

View menus and booking options...

Breakfast: On Saturday & Sunday we will offer a self service breakfast bar. This will consist of granola, yoghurt, chia seed pudding (sweet) or overnight oats (savoury), boiled eggs. We have decided not to supply bread to avoid food wastage. Hot water, tea bags and instant coffee available for all attendees at no charge for the camp this year. We are operating an 'honesty box' at the camp, with a price of £4 but you can pre-pay on the website if you prefer.

Bring your own cutlery and crockery: We are trialing not having any plates, bowls cutlery etc. and instead ask that everyone bring their own. This will significantly reduce waste (no paper plates etc) and also reduce our costs. If you have spare ones to bring that you don't mind sharing with those that were unable to manage this, we would greatly appreciate it.

Other food options: As well as the community café the Bridwell Orangery will be open during the event. Also, Sunbeams Ice Cream van will be on site. Plus, of course, you are more than welcome to self cater, however we do ask you to  make sure you have read, understood and then follow the safety information in the camp terms and conditions.

Please do take a look at the Camp section of the website https://queerspirit.net/camp

To see all information you will need to be logged in first. We have added information about the programme along with some information on the various talking circles that will be happening. Feel free to ask questions, suggest ideas or just soak in the details ready for some great discussions at camp!

A large part of the camp is around talking and sharing circles, so there will be a lot of sitting. Please then do aim to bring something you feel comfortable sitting on, be that a cushion for the ground or a camping chair etc.

The gates will open for the camp at midday on Friday 15th. There will be stewards guiding you to parking spaces and also to offer assistance. Once parked you should head to the booking office caravan to register and to get your wristband. If you have pre-ordered either a card or wristband for food, that will also be given to you.

As well as camping we still have a few places in the stables and glamping if you fancy upgrading your accommodation:

Old Stables

Eight comfortable en-suite rooms with a shared kitchen, available for up to six nights (including pre- and post-camp setup/takedown).
Contribution £300 per person (flat rate, regardless of the number of nights).  Two-person and four-person rooms available – coordinate with friends or let us help match you with another attendee.

Glamping

Glamping structure sleeping 2 people (bell tent) available for hire for the duration of the camp, all fully furnished with 2 frame beds, winter tog duvets, 2 pillows, linen, throws, matting throughout, solar lighting, tables, mirrors, bins and bunting.  Price is £300 per tent.

Community is at the heart of our August camp - deepening, expanding, strengthening our relationships and connections. Finding ways to enable conversations about who we are, who we are becoming, what we need and what we bring as a living constellation of spiritual queer folk.
Of course we’ve been doing this at every QS festival and in between for the last 10 years, growing roots of shared vision, commitment and support. After every festival we receive a rich mix of feedback, positive and negative, which the core team devote many hours to digesting, doing our best to take on board. The vision for the camp is to go further - to put full focus on community building, how the festival and related activities can nurture and support this.

Getting everybody more involved won’t be easy. As any who have tried to live in community will quickly tell you, talking community is one thing, living it is a very different matter. In a mainstream where fragmentation, popularism, polarisation are the norms, it can feel hard to maintain belief in community, especially when being in community is messy, challenging work and there’s no app or AI to do it for us. I believe much turns on how we think of community. The invitation for the camp is to think of community as something we can all do more of, with practice. It's a bit like yoga, little by little, with patience and caring, humour and learning, we’ll find ways to grow our wonderful community. 

Underlying commitment to community of course is another whole set of personal questions and potential challenges. They boil down to two divergent approaches. Do we look for the differences between us and focus all our attention there, risking draining ourselves trying to meet more and more specific needs? Or do we look for the similarities we share and commit our energies to those, where they will bring forth the greatest good for the greatest number?  Mainstream deficit thinking will tell you it’s one or the other. It’s not! My strong feeling is that if we celebrate what we have in common, build from there, then we will bring forth the conditions and the capacity to be able to lean into differences, to better understand them, and be resourceful in meeting particular needs with compassion and creativity. How do we do all of this - put full focus on community building? I believe by devoting more time to enquiring into ourselves as a community, finding more ways, formal and informal, to be in dialogue with each other about the themes that matter. Which brings me to Talking Circles.

Talking Circles on a host of important topics are happening throughout the weekend of our camp. They are open to all, and all of us would love as many as feel called to participate. There will be facilitators to hold space, timekeep, and ensure equality of voices and focus. There will be a recorder taking summary written notes of topics, concerns and suggested actions. They will not record people’s names nor try to capture everything said.

The Talking Circles are the beginning of a community-wide dialogue and it’s hoped many informal conversations will bubble up after the circles. As soon as possible, the summary notes will be available in the Village Hall for anyone to read there and add further comments. All this material will be shared on the community section of the website so that everyone who wishes to can contribute and carry ideas forward following the camp. Qweaver, for the core team.

Our 10 talking circles

Care, Welfare and Healing

From mutual aid networks to chosen families, the queer community has a long history of creating systems of caring and support. We’ve carried each other through grief, discrimination, joy and recovery. We know that healing is not only personal, it’s also political, collective, and ongoing. Among other topics this talking circle looks at what caring and healing look like, how we build structures that hold and protect us all, and how we can reimagine healing both as a goal and as a shared and sustaining practice.

Children and Young People

Calling parents, parents-to-be, and anyone who believes that Queer Spirit has more to offer for children and young people. We need help to make QS an inclusive, exciting and safer place for kids, teenagers and guardians. Help us to envision projects like a self-guided play area, with volunteers on hand, and a tent for all-ages workshops and activities. As we don’t have the resources to meet all possible legal requirements we need to think about how we replace traditional childcare, but we know we can thrive on input from our community about how to make this space very special. Come and join us!

Community Building

Queer Spirit has always been more than a festival – it’s a community, a movement celebrating, resourcing and manifesting queer spirituality. The festival is what it is because of the kinship of volunteers who create it and those who come to it. This circle asks what other elements of community are important to us, and how we enable them alongside the festival? These elements include developmental group activities, networking, skills-sharing, creative collaborations, support, activism, online resources, and relationships with allied organisations and festivals.

Global Majority

Black, Indigenous and People of Colour are an integral part of the fabric of each of our communities and that of Queer Spirit. Historically overlooked, misunderstood and under-represented, this talking circle is an opportunity to centre the perspectives, wisdom and future visions of the global majority. We will be building on foundations for a queer spirit that can hold people's diverse cultures, heritages, histories, experiences, ancestry and identities.

History, Aims and Ethos

Queer Spirit was created to be a space for celebrating the diversity, creativity, intersectionality and spirituality of all LGBTQIA+ people, and respect is at the core of our QS ethos. The first QS Festival in 2016 grew from roots connecting back to decades of ecological, political and spiritual activism. In this circle the founders of QS will tell the story of the birth of the festival, its nine-year journey, and the aims and the ethos that guides the team producing it. Then we invite your comments and questions, suggestions and observations. How will the aims and ethos of the festival evolve in its second decade?

Inclusion and Access

Inclusion is a vital part of the Queer Spirit ethos, which at its most basic means including everybody. But including everybody can be harder than we might think. It can mean we need to look at our unconscious biases, and challenge the ways we have been taught things should work. It means listening to people when they tell us what they need, and inviting them to be part of finding flexible solutions when it seems that needs may conflict with each other. This circle will look at what have we done well in the past, and what needs improving in the future.

Performance

Over the last ten years performance at Queer Spirit Festival has blossomed and bloomed into the huge and diverse programme we now host, which spans multiple spaces and genres. This circle is an open invitation to all to help shape how we can sustainably hold, encourage and support the creativity of our performers in the future. What do audiences want to see on our stages? How can we continue to encourage new expression and creative experimentation in a safe and supportive environment? What can we do to expand beyond the festival and encourage connection with queerness and spirituality through the arts and performance?

QS Future Visions

From four hundred attendees at Thoulstone Park in 2016, Queer Spirit had almost doubled in size by the fifth festival at Bridwell Park in 2024, an incredible site where there's room for the festival to continue to grow. How will that look in future years? What does the future hold? How do you see the festival developing? Is there something you would like to contribute? As we set out together to co-create the second decade of QS, here is your chance to share dreams and visions, and to acknowledge concerns and fears.

Risk and Safety

We come to Queer Spirit for sharing and exploration, finding out about ourselves, who we are and what we might be. Throwing ourselves into the experience can be freeing, but also scary, so it’s important to know where our boundaries are, what we dare to risk and what doesn’t feel safe. This circle explores how we can encourage the exploration of risk-taking and the provision of appropriate safety measures at Queer Spirit. It looks at issues around boundaries, consent, vulnerability and support, so that each of us can get as much as possible of what we need and desire from future gatherings.

Temple

This circle is an opportunity to bring feedback and ideas for the future of the Sacred Sexuality Temple at Queer Spirit. We invite those who have facilitated or held space, have stewarded or acted as PriestX, and have participated, prayed, played and connected in the space, to help co-create a collaboratively-imagined evolution of sacred sexuality as it is held and delivered at QS. We are interested in input from those who have experienced temple spaces at other events focused on sacred sexuality, particularly the experience of AFAB people, minoritised genders and the global majority. Bring your offerings of imagination and positive growth to this sacred community sharing.