Qualla: Shrewsbury Flower Show

Shrewsbury Flower Show: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roy Haworth, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower Show is the one everybody knows, but it is not the oldest. That title belongs to Shrewsbury, where the Shropshire Horticultural Society has been arranging marquees on the lawns of the Quarry Park since 1875 - thirty-eight years before Chelsea was first held in 1913. The 2005 Guinness Book of Records made it official: the longest-running flower show in the world. Until 2024 it ran every August in mid-month, drawing about sixty thousand visitors to the riverside park to admire chrysanthemums and watch military bands and stand back, twice on each show evening, for one of the biggest fireworks displays in the West Midlands.

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Image: Roy Haworth | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shrewsbury Flower Show: An Amphitheatre in the Quarry

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Buckingham, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Quarry is the obvious place. Twenty-nine acres of green lawn tucked inside the great loop of the Severn, descending in terraces toward the river, surrounded on three sides by Edwardian villas and ancient bridges, with the spire of St Chad's church rising over the cricket pitc...

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Image: Paul Buckingham | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shrewsbury Flower Show: Percy Thrower's Show

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Novacool88 (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. After the Second World War the show needed reviving. The man who did it was Percy Thrower, Britain's first television gardener and arguably the most famous horticulturist of the postwar generation. Thrower became Shrewsbury's Parks Superintendent in 1946 and held the post until 1...

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Image: Novacool88 (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Shrewsbury Flower Show: Sixty Thousand on the Lawn

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Jasonjsmith assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. At its peak, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the show drew about sixty thousand visitors across its two days. Marquees stretched across the Quarry. There were classes for chrysanthemums, dahlias, sweet peas, vegetables, dressed eggs, cut flowers, and elaborate f...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Jasonjsmith assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Shrewsbury Flower Show: When the Numbers Stopped Working

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.5. Even institutions that last 150 years can stop being financially viable. In April 2025 the Shropshire Horticultural Society announced that the 2025 show would not be held, citing the rising costs of staging an event of that scale: insurance, security, marquees, fireworks, public ...

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Image: CC BY-SA 2.5

Shrewsbury Flower Show: A Tradition Looking for a Future

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Victor Chetta, CC BY 2.0. Whether the show comes back depends on what the Shropshire Horticultural Society can negotiate over the next few seasons - on whether new sponsors emerge, on whether costs can be brought back into line with what visitors will pay, on whether some scaled-down version can fill the ...

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Image: Victor Chetta | CC BY 2.0