Concrete Circus was founded as a voluntary organisation in January 2009. When it first started the only tutors were the juggling act ‘Him & Me’ which are Nigel Roder and Mark Bond. The classes were held at Holmwood school, Great Holm on a Sunday between 9am – 11am. The first class had 6 people.
After 5 years Concrete Circus moved to Wolverton Scout Hut. By then we had new tutors in Sian Philpott and Tracey Roder and regular parent helpers in Richard Phelan, Debbie Dickson and Theresa Cox. Mark left Concrete Circus about this time but still keeps an eye on the organisation. One advantage of moving to the scout hut was that we could store equipment on site. After a while we were running an aerial class on a Monday and a second general circus class on a Tuesday as well as the Sunday sessions. All of this was as a youth training establishment only.
With children stopping and other commitments we lost Debbie and Sian (although they are still aware of what we are doing). In September 2018 we moved again.
This time we moved to a dedicated circus space within Arts Central (an arts hub managed by the charity Arts Gateway MK). We were able to expand and extend our classes. Currently we run 3 general youth circus classes and 3 youth aerial classes and then we also run the same number of adult classes. Soon we hope to expand again with tutors such as Sian bringing in new classes to add to our repertoire.