Can an arts festival transform the fortunes of an overlooked Yorkshire town?

David Edmunds doesn’t know the precise number of times he overheard people in Selby saying, “Nothing good ever happens here”, but it was once too often. The North Yorkshire town, nestled between York and Leeds, and often overlooked as a result, was suffering from an inferiority complex, but Edmunds reckoned he might just be able to boost its confidence.

As founder and artistic director of Dep Arts, a company which over the last 12 years has staged impressive cultural events at home and abroad, he was already convinced of the power of the arts to transform places and this time it would be personal.

“We live in a village just outside Selby, but it’s the town where my kids go to school and where I coach rugby. A couple of years ago, I had decided that in terms of work I no longer wanted world domination. I wanted to slow down a little and I wanted to do something closer to home.

“That’s when it struck me. If you live in Selby and want to go see a concert or a play you either have to go to York or Leeds, and to me that didn’t seem right.”

Edmunds decided that he would stage his own week-long festival, but when he first mooted the idea the response was less than positive.

“There were two things that kept being repeated. They said ‘there isn’t an audience’ and ‘you’ll never get any funding’. I didn’t buy that.

“We did some research and found that almost 100,000 people within a 30 minute drive time of Selby already engage in the arts, just not very much in Selby itself, with a further 25,000 in the same catchment who don’t engage at all. Both of those statistics seemed a good reason to launch a festival.”

Edmunds also had a chat with the Arts Council who confirmed that the reason it gives so few grants to Selby organisations is because no one ever asks for one. That was the final push he needed and the inaugural Selby Arts Festival opened with a performance by Seth Lakeman in Selby Abbey and, over the course of nine days, it will welcome the likes of comedian Ed Byrne and an open air performance of the Slung Low production Rugby Songs, which Edmunds first produced when the World Cup came to England two years ago.

“The one thing we were very clear on was that this had to be a professional event with quality acts. I think it’s important that we set the bar high from the off and it helped that through Dep Arts I already had a pretty decent contacts book.

“We wanted acts that people would be surprised we had manage to lure to Selby and for the headliners we wanted household names, people who were instantly recognisable.”

By March, Lakeman and Byrne were on board and, while they are far the biggest names at the festival, Edmund hopes they will act like beacons for the next programme and the one after that.

“This isn’t something we are going to do once and walk away. You only see the real impact of a festival like this if you build on it year on year and at the moment I see this at least a five-year project.

“I know that if Selby was the first event I had ever put on, we would never had got Seth Lakeman and Ed Byrne, but people trust Dep Arts and it’s great to be able to use that trust to do something which I really believe can be a bit of game-changer for Selby.

“This town has got so much going for it. It’s got a beautiful Abbey, great architecture and a real willingness of spirit.

“The problem is that people have been hit over the head with the ‘deprived’ tagline so many times that they ended up believing it was a place which didn’t deserve good stuff happening to it. Hopefully over the next nine days we can start changing the tide.”

In all there will be 37 different sessions, with many of them having a family friendly emphasis and while an arts festival may be an untested formula in Selby, the response so far suggests Edmund’s initial hunch was right.

“We thought we had put together a good programme but, as ever, you only know whether you have go the right balance once the tickets go on sale.

“I thought it might be a bit of a slow burner, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Ed Byrne, who will be using it as one of his warm-up gigs before the Edinburgh Festival, sold out within 48 hours and with a month to go we had about five tickets left for Seth’s concert.

“The response has been incredible and not just in terms of ticket sales. You can’t run a festival like this without the help of volunteers but as soon as we put out a call out 30 people had signed up to help and they are now running everything from the stewarding to the marketing. Getting that level of engagement right from the off is incredible, but to me it proves that if you give a town like Selby something good to buy into they will.”

Whatever doubts existed before Edmunds launched the programme on an unsuspecting public have all but been silenced and he says that since pushing ahead with the plans he has had nothing put support.

“The council have been great and so have the Abbey. That has made a real difference because then it’s not just me saying this will be great for the town. Alongside the main events there will be various pop-up elements happening around the town, because we want everyone to feel part of this event whether they have bought tickets or not.

“One really lovely thing has been securing Matthew Warchus as the festival’s first patron. He took over from Kevin Spacey as the artistic director of the Old Vic in London, he directed the musical version of Matilda and more recently he has been out in New York working on the premiere of Groundhog.

“His artistic credentials speak for themselves, but he was also a former pupil at Selby High and Selby College and he was really keen to lend his support to the festival.”

When we speak, there are still a couple of weeks to go before tonight’s opening event, but while Edmunds is up to his neck in licensing agreements, sorting out the volunteer rotas and organising last minute stock checks, he still has one eye on the bigger picture.

“I was lucky enough to be part of the team that staged work during Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008. That event transformed the city and was a living, breathing demonstration of how the arts can not only bring hope to a place, but can deliver an economic boost.

“Our festival might be on a much smaller scale, but the aims are exactly the same.”

Selby Arts Festival, to July 30. For the full programme of events go to selbyartsfestival.co.uk.