Bury Free Press BID Column August 2025
The August Bank Holiday weekend is a real highlight for our town as residents and visitors alike enjoy the Our Bury St Edmunds Food & Drink Festival. Although Bury St Edmunds is known as the foodie capital of Suffolk, the number of towns in the county holding food and drink events like this has grown since our festival was first held in 2012. Healthy competition like this means standards remain high and we continue to offer new and different attractions at this event. Our ever changing food and drink offering in the town centre is testament to that, as this year we saw new restaurant Bellota taking to the stage alongside a number of festival favourites too.
We also had several BID member businesses using a stall over the two days to engage with visitors and others opening over the weekend to welcome festival-goers.
The annual Beer Festival also takes place over the same weekend at the Cathedral, bringing more people into the town and complements the Food & Drink Festival very well. We hope that some of the visitors at that event will also take the opportunity to find out about the Our Bury St Edmunds Ale Trail and perhaps return to visit some of the establishments that are part of the trail. Next month Hopsters will be opening in the town offering craft beers and it’s good to see the premises formerly housing Secret Distillery didn’t stand empty for too long.
The momentum of new businesses opening continues as the beauty and wellbeing store Rituals is advertising for a manager and assistant manager for their new branch in the town. Meanwhile other recent arrivals Sugartown Toys and PrimaVista are both now accepting the Our Bury St Edmunds Gift Card. If your business is yet to sign up to accepting the card, but you’d like to know more, please do get in touch with the BID team.
Gift cards are the prizes in our current and second history trail of the year, which has been proving popular during the summer holidays. It marks the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, and the town was honoured to welcome the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester to a special service commemorating VJ Day earlier this month. In America VJ Day is recognised on September 2 so we will be running the trail until September 7 to ensure that the trail is also relevant for families from our local US Air Force bases.
Finally, our Business Support Manager at the BID, Mike Kirkham, has reached new heights in his career this month. He was one of dozens of brave fundraisers to abseil down the Cathedral Tower to raise money for children’s hospice charity EACH. A unique fundraising initiative and well done to all who took part.
