Hello everyone,

Dorit here with the weekly news from Loaf.

It’s a busy week in Stirchley, including the reopening of the local library on Thursdays and the Stirchley Community Market on Saturday - and guess what? We will be back with a stall on Saturday! More information below!

👉 Support the loaf crowdfunder here

Opening Times This Week:

🟢 Wednesday 23rd September, 12pm to 3pm at Deadbeat, Stirchley

🟢 Thursday 24th September, 12pm to 3pm at Deadbeat, Stirchley

🟢 Friday 25th September, 12pm to 3pm at Deadbeat, Stirchley

🟡 Saturday 26th September:

• Bread and Buns from 10am at the Stirchley Community Market in the Stirchley Baths - we highly recommend to be there earlier rather than later!

• 11am to 3pm at Deadbeat, Stirchley - only sweets and muffins today (and drinks from Anosh!!!) - for bread go and see us at the Stirchley Community Market

This Saturday Bread and Buns from Loaf only at the Stirchley Community Market!

We will be with a stall this Saturday 26th September 2026 from 10am in the car park area of the Stirchley Baths joining other local traders, artists and community groups on which is destined to be a beautiful market day.

Because of our more limited capacities that we can make at the moment, we have decided to focus on the market stall this time, which means that we will serve all buns and bread at the stall only and that you will be able to buy a nice slice of cake or a muffin at Deadbeat while getting your fresh coffee from Anosh.

There won’t be any pre-orders possible this Saturday, so we highly recommend to be there earlier rather than later!

There will be plenty different stalls in and outside of the Stirchley Baths. The Stirchley Community Market is now running since 16 years and it is a colourful community-led event filled with street food, arts and crafts, and community stalls.

The markets are entirely volunteer-run and are held quarterly at the historic Stirchley Baths - a Grade II listed former swimming baths and now a community hub.

Each market has a unique line-up of lovely local traders and community organisations, ranging from handmade items such as ceramics, artwork, clothing & woodwork, through to tasty treats such as baked goods, chocolate, jams and local beer. The market also has a fundraiser cafe run by volunteers, offering hot and cold drinks and snacks, which helps fund upcoming markets.

Reopening of Stirchley Library on Thursdays

Wohoo!! The Stirchley Library will be back open on Thursdays from this week and the Friends of the Stirchley Library are celebrating this small victory with cake (there will be some cornflake brownie from Loaf as well 🧡)! The event starts on 9am!

On Thursday 24th October, and over the coming weeks, they are inviting everyone to add their ideas for future Thursday events to their "Thursday Wish Tree", or to celebrate the community in both Stirchley and at Stirchley Library by creating a big jigsaw piece - showing how the local community all fits together.

Birmingham Open Studios
Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 September, 11am-5pm

There are plenty spaces all over the city where you can go and see some of the 161 artist exhibiting during The Birmingham Open Studios this Saturday and Sunday.

For those who don’t know it yet, this is also a good time to check out The Old Post Office Co-working space. Like many years before TOPO is hosting this weekend artists to show off their work. More information about the artists at the co-working space this year and the space itself you can read about in their own newsletter (which is one of my personal favourite newsletters to learn about what’s going on in Stirchley and beyond).

Kerry, who used to work at Loaf before my time is writing their newsletter and is one of the two fab co-directors running the beautiful space along-side lovely keyholders, who I am lucky to sit next to when I need a calmer work space and maybe help with fixing a bug on our website. They’ve got coffee and cookies too! What more do you need for some motivation to work?

Location: The Old Post Office coworking space, 1533 Pershore Road, Stirchley, Birmingham B30 2JH, Time and Date: Sat 26 and Sun 27 September, 11:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Artefact presents concert: Sourdure joined by Sam Bland

And if you dare to leave Stirchley at the weekend - our mates from Artefact are ecstatic to present you with another twilight performance of Gallic-based musical alchemy! This Sunday at Centrala in Digbeth!

An artist based in Thiers, Ernest Bergez, aka Sourdure, has been exploring the boundaries of distant sound worlds for the past ten years, combining a spirit of experimentation with a personal, hand-crafted approach to traditional musical objects. Hybrid and exploratory, Sourdure‘s music reveals itself in many facets: baroque inventions on traditional canvas, vociferous carnivalesque odes, stylistic borrowings from oriental music, sonic orfevrery marked by concrete music… Combined with the acoustic rusticity of the violin or the dotar (a Central Asian lute), electronics do their alchemical work, disturbing sound objects, altering perceptions and the course of time.

Whether exalted or bittersweet, the vocals borrow from the voices of classical Arabic, Turkish or Persian music. The Occitan language of Auvergne takes centre stage, deploying its metaphorical and polysemous mesh to express the common, the intimate and the sacred. The melody is born from the word, the poem gives birth to the song, in a form that could be distantly reminiscent of trobar, the art of the troubadours. A one-man orchestra, a single man playing from a universe of orchestras, Sourdure sings like the nose on your face.

Sourdure will be joined by Sam Bland, who surfs the shortwave radio waves for hazy esoterica and static-drenched enigmas, and accompanies this exquisite interference with jazz influenced piano. A real treat!

👉 Tickets - Location: Centrala, Unit 4, Minerva Works, 158 Fazeley St, Birmingham, B5 5RT - Time and Date: Sun 27th Sep 2026, 6:00 PM - 10:30 PM

No set lunch menu!

We will be assessing our lunch options each day and ask you to check our Instagram and Facebook stories for updates. Or just pop around to the shop and see what we’ve got!

Pre-order Info

➡️ Click HERE to pre-order bread and buns for Wednesday till Friday (no pre-order for Saturday this week, because of the market stall!). If you don’t want to pre-order that’s alright, we always have more to sell, but we try not to let anything go to waste, so pre-orders are very helpful.

➡️ Cut-off time for all pre-orders is 11am on the day before pick up!

Thanks so much to STEAMHOUSE for their continued support in letting us use a corner of their bakery in Redditch - we honestly do not know what we would have done without their generosity. 💛 💛 💛

Thanks for all the continued support & see you soon!

Team Loaf

Mina, Rach, Pete, Dave, Dorit, Molly, Michael, Kate, Fliss & Neil

👉 Support the crowdfunder here

Website: loaf.coop

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