What’s on Yorkshire: Family fun, food and drink at Wakefield’s free Rhubarb Festival this February

And it’s not just the emerging shoots of the county’s most celebrated products, but preparations for a fabulous free festival!

Wakefield’s Rhubarb Festival runs from Friday, February 16, to Sunday, 18, and promises a feast of food and drink, chef demonstrations, fun family activities and more.

It’s part of ‘Our Year 2024’ – a 366-day programme of cultural and heritage activity across the district.

What’s on

The food and drink market will boast over 50 chalets set out in the precinct outside Wakefield’s magnificent Cathedral where you can try and buy local and regional products.

These will include unique cheeses, crafted gins and rhucello – a rhubarb liquor – pies and pasties, delicatessen delights, home-made cakes and bakes, speciality meats and game, preserves and chutneys, curries, sweets, handmade chocolates, toffees and fudges and all kinds of rhubarb-related products from cupcakes to candles.

There will be a range of workshops and family craft activities, as well as lively street entertainment – including Dame Ruby Rhubarb and Madame Zucchini and Morris Dancers – and live music from the Wakefield Music Collective.

Hone your culinary skills with chef demos including Wakefield’s own Great British Bake-off contestant and author Karen Wright ; double BAFTA award-winning TV presenter and home chef Sam Nixon and award-winning chef and passionate ambassador of local produce Rachel Green.

The whole festival is free but there are a couple of bookable events including comedy nights at the Rhu-bar on Friday 16 and Saturday 17 where hosts will introduce comics including Alex Boardman, Don Biswas and Angelos Epithemiou, Nina Gilligan, Masai Graham and headline act Lee Ridley, Britain's Got Talent's Lost Voice Guy!

And Karen Wright will give a talk taking us through her life growing up in Featherstone and Pontefract to moving to Wakefield, her Great British Bake Off Experience and becoming an author, with all the many twists of fate in between.

And the festival extends into bars and restaurants through the city, so you can extend your visit and enjoy rhubarb-themed food and drink throughout the weekend.

Fun facts

All rhubarbarians know that the best rhubarb grows in the rhubarb triangle – nine square miles of West Yorkshire between Wakefield, Morley and famous for producing early ‘forced’ rhubarb. These slender pink stems are cultivated in the dark and come up so fast you can hear them growing!

Its roots have long been used in ancient Chinese medicine – as an aid to digestion. But its leaves can be poisonous. They contain high levels of oxalic acid, used in ink, stain remover and metal polish – but if you eat large doses it could close your throat, so stick to the stems.

Despite its notoriety for puddings – rhubarb crumble anyone? – it’s a vegetable, not a fruit.

Rhubarb comes from Siberia – no wonder it thrives in the wet cold winters of Yorkshire! West Yorkshire once produced 90 per cent of the world's winter forced rhubarb from the forcing sheds that were common across the fields there – the combination of the soil, available manure (‘night soil’ from the toilets of urban areas) and woollen waste from mungo and shoddy production were the perfect ingredients for the perfect rhubarb.

Festival details

Find out more, or book for an event, by visiting the website https://expwake.co/RhubarbFest