MULTIMEDIA JOURNALIST –
CUMBRIA AND THE LAKE DISTRICT
MULTIMEDIA JOURNALIST
Cumbria and the Lakes
ABOUT ME
I'm a journalist and writer, originally from Manchester. I've worked in London for a variety of national newspapers and magazines, as a writer and subeditor, including at The Guardian (News, Business, Features, Arts); The Observer (News, Business); The Times (as a classical music critic, and in Arts, Features, News, Opinion, Obituaries); The Sunday Times (News, Business); The Times Online (night editor); The London Evening Standard (Londoner's Diary); and Classic FM Magazine (deputy editor). I also freelanced for Time Warner Books, the UN University, the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, and BBC School Radio. I now live in the English Lake District, working as a freelance journalist, editor, self-publisher, media composer and producer for promotional videos and podcasts. I'm also a fiction writer, poetry-to-music composer and occasional triathlete.
'The more people who learn how good Matthew is, the more difficult it will be for us to be blessed by his skills. He responds to tasks with graciousness, enthusiasm, competence and timeliness – and his videography, film-editing and writing skills show us he is one talented person!'
REBECCA TRUMAN, CO-FOUNDER,
THE CLIMATE FOUNDATION
'The more people who learn how good Matthew is, the more difficult it will be for us to be blessed by his skills. He responds to tasks with graciousness, enthusiasm, competence and timeliness – and his videography, film-editing and writing skills show us he is one talented person!'
REBECCA TRUMAN, CO-FOUNDER,
THE CLIMATE FOUNDATION
Recent arts reviews
LYR
Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal, April 2026
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In search of hope: Poet Laureate Simon Armitage with his band LYR
THE LATEST Poet Laureate since Wordsworth to grace Cumbria with his presence is Simon Armitage, who swooped into Kendal last Friday on tour with his performance poetry band, LYR.
South Lakes’s coolest cultural hub, the Brewery Arts Centre, with its bustling cinema, theatre, bar, restaurant and music venue, was buzzingly full in anticipation of Yorkshireman Armitage’s brilliant, mind-exploding poetry.
The support act was singer-songwriter Natalie Wildgoose, whose gorgeously mellow tones massaged the senses while her wistful piano felt out the intimacy of disused buildings and old, cold chapels of her family’s native Wensleydale to lyrics of gentle, rustic spirituality.
Then came the dark, deadpan drone of the Huddersfield-born word-wizard, in a musical setting – thanks to LYR singer and guitarist Richard Walters – that brings to mind the bleak beauty of Radiohead and the acerbic miserabilism of Morrissey.
Ten-year-old LYR (Land Yacht Regatta) – Armitage, Walters and Patrick Pearson, their DJ-esque live producer – are “navigating towards sightings of hopefulness and constancy in an increasingly bewildering and storm-battered world” with songs from their new album, Dark Sky Reservation.
They included the hilariously sardonic Blah! Blah! Blah! about information overload, the piercing Guernica Jigsaw, about commercialising war in art, and a touching celebration of daydreaming called Under Artificial Lighting – “I do my best writing under artificial lighting”.
One of the simplest and best songs, Pray Silence – “the curtains closed, the night fell apart and you kept your speech in your heart” – is a lovely tribute to modesty. Although LYR come across as gloom-scrollers sifting life’s landfills for scraps of hope, in between songs they’re light, playful and funny, especially Armitage – timing good one-liners such as “LYR stands at that musical intersection of TS Eliot and the Eurovision Song Contest”.
A flickering background screen bled shapes, finger shadows and surreal doodles in and out of each other; Walters’s warm, plaintive descant soothed Armitage’s verbal assault; and Pearson’s beats, bleeps and key chords made this so much more a gig than a poetry reading. But LYR is a “language-based band”, as Armitage described it, and a vehicle for his subversive genius.
Whether he’s in the antique shop of memory fingering small, sad, resonant things, or rocketing Artemis-like to the dark side of the “chocolate-coin moon”, the frontman affects you with an insatiable poetic imagination that – to borrow from TS Eliot – always seems to be “moving into another intensity”.
Read the review here too.
LARKRISE TO CANDLEFORD
Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, March 2026
Larkrise: not some sugary, elegiac sniffle but a sheer dance of joy
LIKE ALL THE BEST experiences in life, this is One You Will Never Forget. Which is partly what Lark Rise to Candleford is all about – cherished memories in the building and revisiting. But this co-production by Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake and Newbury’s Watermill Theatre is not some sugary, elegiac sniffle: it’s a sheer dance of joy – to be alive and have really lived, however hard it’s been; to love and have really loved.
Featuring six insanely talented actors who dance, sing, play instruments, shift scenery (comically) … oh, and act radiantly well, Lark Rise to Candleford is an inspired rewriting for the stage of Flora Thompson’s 1945 novel trilogy drawn from her own memories of growing up in the Oxfordshire countryside at the end of the 19th century.
The BBC adaptation of the book 15 years ago lasted three years, but this fast-paced play with music, written and composed by Tamsin Kennard of Hammerpuzzle Theatre Company, shaves off any sentimentalised superfluities and aims its sharp, merry arrow straight at the forever-young chamber of your heart.
With ingenious directing by Hammerpuzzle’s Bryn Holding – the Polly the pony scene is hilarious – Lark Rise to Candleford comes at you with such fun, flair and itchy energy that even cold slabs of Borrowdale rock would be moved to tears of both flavours, happy and sad.
Home, change, class, education, nature, a woman’s lot, the past, the future … all the above are swiftly and skilfully captured in this story of young Laura who moves from the poor hamlet of Lark Rise to the posh town of Candleford. The script fires with electricity and the acting – by Rosalind Ford as the inimitable postmistress Dorcas Lane, Jessica Temple as Laura, Rosalind Steele, Alex Wilson, Zrey Sholapurkar and Christopher Glover – crackles with chemistry.
With gorgeously vintage sets and costumes by Anna Kelsey, lighting by Jane Lalljee that not even designer ‘sepia-plus’ rose-tinted specs could compete with, and songs so pretty, simple, folksy, touching and perfectly performed you could be born or die happy listening to them, this production is pure, non-soppy nostalgia nirvana. And how those heroic performers play their instruments so excellently well while doing everything else at the same time is a real puzzle.
Lark Rise to Candleford is the treat you promised yourself. Five stars is churlish, let’s say six. Oh, go on, seven.
Read the review here too.
MAKING A SHOW OF MYSELF
Edinburgh Fringe, August 2025
Opera diva of the spoken word: Mary-Kate O'Flanagan
An Edinburgh Fringe show entitled Making a Show of Myself implies, you might think, some kind of ritual of public embarrassment. But far from it: this 60-minute one-woman show, written and performed by Mary-Kate O’Flanagan, is more like its creator’s finest hour.
In her unpropped and purely spoken ‘demonstration and celebration of the power and magic of stories’, the Dublin-born film-script consultant discerns the shape of what a ‘story’ actually is – when and how it can begin, what can happen in the middle, how the plot can twist and why it’s all so important in the end.
She does this not by talking about Hollywood movies but by telling real and raw anecdotes drawn from her own experience – five stories capturing some of the loves, laughs and losses by which we are all blown about in life.
And if part of her mission has been to find her own story and authentic voice, what’s amazing about Mary-Kate O’Flanagan amid all her wit and wisdom is how many voices she’s managed to find.
We get the laugh-out-louds of a sassy stand-up; the whispered why-are-we-heres of a deeply thoughtful thinker; the pay-attention-class bulletpoints of a storytelling teacher, and then our eyes begin to moisten at the moving gimme-a-hug moments of a confiding best friend.
“Songwriting and storytelling are,” she declares, “two art forms at which the Irish are disproportionately good.” Well, if spoken-word could sing, Mary-Kate O’Flanagan would be quite the opera diva, delivering with real power and vocal range her great unsung aria about that magical, bittersweet story we all recognise – being alive.
Making a Show of Myself is running at Just the Tonic at The Mash House - Just the Snifter Room, 16:35 daily.
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/making-a-show-of-myself
https://www.makingashowofmyself.com
Self-publish your fiction or non-fiction book in the Lake District and beyond ...
with Swallow Books
OF THE ENGLISH LAKE DISTRICT
This is what Lake District author Jill Clough has done through Swallow Books ...
Anna & the Snake Queen
"In Anna and the Snake Queen Jill Clough makes magic real, and reality magical." Caroline Moir, author of 'Brockenspectre'
Morph
"Absolutely magical, and so beautifully written! I found this a fascinating book.' Jilly Cooper, best-selling author
If Dreams Should Die
"Storytelling at its best – themes of first love, adoption, the finding of self, seamlessly woven in to give a story of depth and character." Amazon
About Jill Clough
Jill Clough is a former teacher, headteacher and educational consultant who is now fulfilling her teenage ambition to write fiction. She has lived in the Lake District for 20 years and never wants to leave. All her novels are set in Cumbria. She spends hours photographing and mapping the area to make sure her readers can follow the experiences of her protagonists. Her first published novel, Morph, won the Lakeland Book of the Year Award for Fiction in 2019. Anna and the Snake Queen came out in 2020, If Dreams Should Die was published in 2022 and The Making of Cassie Clearwater came out in 2024; all are found at jillclough.live including book trailers for which I prepared video and composed original music.
This is how Swallow Books helped climber and author Nick Wharton ...
About Nick Wharton
Nick Wharton is well-known throughout the British climbing community for his intrepid approach to "Trad" climbing, which he's adopted on climbs all around the UK and abroad, but predominantly in the Lake District. Swallow Books contributed to the planning and manuscript editing of his book How Hard Can It Be?, which he published in 2021 under his own name. You can find out more about Nick and his amazing story at nickwharton.co.uk
This is how Swallow Books published my first novel ...
Dances with the Daffodils reached No 3 on Amazon UK's literary fiction bestseller list in summer 2022
About Dances with the Daffodils
It is spring 1802 in the English Lake District. Luke, the prodigal son of a Lakeland shepherd, is drawn back into the land of his birth after a life undone. By Ullswater Luke stumbles upon the enigmatic Dorothy – enthralled by the daffodils, but in the shadow of her brother, the poet William Wordsworth. Luke and Dorothy’s worlds collide, changing both their lives forever. Drawing on Dorothy’s journals and William’s poetry, Dances with the Daffodils – a novel fundamentally about redemption through nature – re-imagines the Wordsworths' life in 1802–03 in Grasmere, deep in the heart of the beautiful English Lake District.
TESTIMONIALS
"I am so lucky to work with someone as professional as Matthew. Knowing that his ears and eyes are editing our weekly podcast, making us sound as if we are far more eloquent and fluent than we actually are, and bringing each episode to life in such a seamless and sensitive way, has helped make the podcast an enjoyable and rewarding experience."
JEREMY LANGMEAD OF 'HOW LONG HAVE YOU GOT?' PODCAST,
AS FEATURED IN THE TIMES MAGAZINE APRIL 2024
'I worked with Matthew on a project commissioning him for podcast editing and podcast audio creation and he did a highly professional job with excellent attention to detail. He is very thorough in his approach and produced highly professional outcomes.'
'DR MILLI', HEALTH INFLUENCER, LANCASHIRE
'The more people who learn how good Matthew is, the more difficult it will be for us to be blessed by his skills. He responds to tasks with graciousness, enthusiasm, competence and timeliness – and his videography, film-editing and writing skills show us he is one talented person!'
REBECCA TRUMAN, CO-FOUNDER, THE CLIMATE FOUNDATION
'A brilliant writer, Matthew has written for us for several national publications, on the back of which we've secured additional opportunities for clients. Whether writing for the press, websites, marketing, social media or editing copy, the quality of his work is first-class.'
CAROLINE PAGE, EX-BBC DOCUMENTARY PRODUCER
'Matthew has been invaluably helpful in the work he's done preparing all my books for publication and beyond.'
JILL CLOUGH, LAKE DISTRICT AUTHOR
'Matthew has massively streamlined our podcast production workflow, editing, transcribing and uploading fortnightly episodes of The Clientside Podcast to our website and other platforms. He’s thorough, highly competent, multi-skilled, always keen and courteous, and has proved a highly dependable communicator with our podcast guests.'
ANDREW ARMITAGE, A DIGITAL, KENDAL, LAKE DISTRICT
'The attention to detail Matthew puts into each project is exceptional. He writes with
a creative flair very rarely seen.'
GARETH O'ROURKE, WE ARE DIGITAL, LAKE DISTRICT
"I am so lucky to work with someone as professional as Matthew. Knowing that his ears and eyes are editing our weekly podcast, making us sound as if we are far more eloquent and fluent than we actually are, and bringing each episode to life in such a seamless and sensitive way, has helped make the podcast an enjoyable and rewarding experience."
JEREMY LANGMEAD OF 'HOW LONG HAVE YOU GOT?' PODCAST,
AS FEATURED IN THE TIMES MAGAZINE APRIL 2024
'I worked with Matthew on a project commissioning him for podcast editing and podcast audio creation and he did a highly professional job with excellent attention to detail. He is very thorough in his approach and produced highly professional outcomes.'
'DR MILLI', HEALTH INFLUENCER, LANCASHIRE
'The more people who learn how good Matthew is, the more difficult it will be for us to be blessed by his skills. He responds to tasks with graciousness, enthusiasm, competence and timeliness – and his videography, film-editing and writing skills show us he is one talented person!'
REBECCA TRUMAN, CO-FOUNDER, THE CLIMATE FOUNDATION
'A brilliant writer, Matthew has written for us for several national publications, on the back of which we've secured additional opportunities for clients. Whether writing for the press, websites, marketing, social media or editing copy, the quality of his work is first-class.'
CAROLINE PAGE, EX-BBC DOCUMENTARY PRODUCER
'Matthew has been invaluably helpful in his work preparing my books for publication and beyond.'
JILL CLOUGH, LAKE DISTRICT AUTHOR
'Matthew has massively streamlined our podcast production workflow, editing, transcribing and uploading fortnightly episodes of The Clientside Podcast to our website and other platforms. He’s thorough, highly competent, multi-skilled, always keen and courteous, and has proved a highly dependable communicator with our podcast guests.'
ANDREW ARMITAGE, A DIGITAL, KENDAL, LAKE DISTRICT
'The attention to detail Matthew puts into each project is exceptional. He writes with
a creative flair very rarely seen.'
GARETH O'ROURKE, WE ARE DIGITAL, LAKE DISTRICT
