Gloucester History Festival launches loaf packed with local ingredients

Gloucester History Festival turned its Spring Weekend into something you can slice and eat: a new Festival Loaf built from Gloucestershire ingredients, sold for the first time at Blackfriars Priory and designed to feel, in the festival’s own words, “Gloucestershire through and through.”

The loaf was baked by Forest Bakehouse in Longhope, a small cooperative artisan bakery on the edge of the Forest of Dean, and it leaned hard into local identity. The dough used organic flour from Shipton Mill near Tetbury, Double Gloucester cheese from Smart’s Farm in Birdwood, and red onions as a nod to the Newent Onion Fayre. That mix gave the loaf a clear point of view: this was not just a special bake for a festival weekend, but edible local history, with each ingredient pointing back to a different part of the county’s food memory.

The references were strong enough to make the bread read like a county map. Shipton Mill says a miller paid rent there in 1339, and its history describes the mill as a social center where farmers and villagers gathered while waiting for their corn to be ground. Smart’s Farm says the family helped protect Gloucester cattle and save Single Gloucester cheese, and notes that the cheese’s PDO was established in 1994. The farm also supplies the Double Gloucester that goes over Cooper’s Hill each year in the cheese-rolling race, which gives the loaf another recognisable link to Gloucestershire’s food folklore.

The setting mattered too. Blackfriars Priory, founded in Gloucester in 1239, gave the launch a suitably weighty backdrop, while the festival’s 2026 Spring Weekend ran April 17 to 19 with a theme of “Power and Protest.” The programme included 28 events in total, with 18 main hall events on the pass, so the loaf landed inside a serious cultural line-up rather than as a novelty side project.

Forest Bakehouse says it focuses on highly nutritious real bread made with locally milled organic flour, and its fermentation takes three days. That slow process suits a loaf with this much story packed into it. In sourdough terms, it offered a neat model for how a bakery can make place legible: not through branding alone, but through ingredients with names, dates and family histories attached.