As part of the Fringe Review Team, Anya Poerscout-Edgerton spoke to the traders in the Fringe Village about their stories.

You can see Mark Cosby’s paintings from all the way across Ventnor Park. They are a riot of colour: a kaleidoscope of acrylic paint on canvas, each shade mixed especially for each collaborator. Collaborators tend to be no taller than the easel, Mark tells me, but anyone of any age is welcome to come and paint with a colour of their choosing. Evienne, a fellow Brave Island contributor, gets her own shade of ‘Evienne Purple’ whereas (after almost being chased around the entirety of Ventnor Park by Mark trying to get me to paint) I plump for more of a mint green. We’re free to paint stripes, swirls, suns and smiley faces onto any part of the canvas we like, to express ourselves over the top of a painting Mark has started of Ventnor harbour.

Mark (‘Mark in the Park’) Cosby, the man, is a delightful character: proudly hailing from Stoke-on-Trent (‘I’m from the North-West, we never stop talking’), he describes himself as ‘a big ball of ego’, but his practice of encouraging anyone and everyone to express themselves on top of paintings he has spent hours on suggests he is anything but. He makes large, sweeping motions with his arms, and he’s as endearingly unpredictable as his paintings.

These paintings, all of outdoor scenes in Ventnor, are frenetic and effervescent with colours. Mark says they are partly ‘angst’, partly messing about with colours. They also reflect Cosby’s outlook on life – ‘Life is wonderful, and wonderfully, mind-blowingly, brightly lit with colours.’

If you would like to purchase one of Mark’s paintings, or one of his collaborative works, he plans to hold an auction in the winter at the Ventnor Exchange (‘for some colour in the dark days’). Follow him on Instagram @markcosby_paintings.

Lloyd Watkins is serving ice cream in the Fringe village wearing a pinny and a smile. In front of him is a 1930s vintage freezer box on a tricycle named Bertie, full of Isle of Wight ice cream. He recommends the ‘Lemon Shortcake’ flavour – ‘it’s lovely’ – and explains that they rotate the flavours everyday. Fringe-dwellers have been buying the mint choc chip and island-roasted coffee flavours most, and Watkins has relished each and every delighted grin on customers’ faces: it’s his favourite part of the job.

‘I love being out and about’ he says, grinning himself as he explains to me the fun he’s had starting and running his business with his wife, Alex, over the past couple of months. His love for ice cream (as well as his affection for their other ice cream vehicle, Bertie’s sister, a 1973 ice cream van called Betty) has driven him to deliver ‘a glorious taste of summer’ to his customers since he left his previous career as a headteacher at a primary school.

‘No one was doing vintage ice cream’

Lloyd and Alex saw a gap in the market, and now they serve stylish, locally produced ice cream at weddings, parties, corporate events, and all manner of special occasions. The business is in its infancy, and Betty is currently having a ‘tune-up’ for bookings next year, but the future of Vintage Scoops seems as bright as Lloyd’s smile.

If you’d like to hire Betty the van or Bertie the tricycle for ice cream with a vintage twist at your upcoming wedding, party, event or function, visit www.vintagescoops.co.uk, and follow the business on Instagram @vintagescoops.

Lucy Whelan and Katie Millis-Ward have the kind of friendship that makes you feel good about the world. Their stall – a black gazebo near the entrance to the Fringe Village, full of magnificent preloved pieces you wish you’d found by yourself (but don’t have to) – is an open invitation to browse, chat, and hopefully fall in love with a garment. When I get there, Lucy is encouraging a woman to get a bright yellow dress she’s not sure she can pull off – she said she doesn’t usually wear things like this – and within the hour, she’s showing off her new frock to friends at a bench across the park, twirling around in the afternoon sun.

Lucy and Katie started out working at Reggie’s Retro on Ventnor high street, but COVID-19 caused the shop to stop selling clothes, and moved more into records. So, they left, and with houses full of clothes they’d loved or hoped could be loved by someone else, they started their own gig. They’ve been building their collections for years, and any garments they can’t sell are made into waistcoats by Lucy, at her Shanklin design studio.

Alongside, Katie is also a communications director for a company in Brighton, and the two are mothers. Motherhood is a cornerstone of their relationship, having had babies at the same time, and being able to be there for each other through the hard moments is incredibly important for them. Lucy’s own mother turned up to the stall (‘looking for things she wants back’) and it seems that if Lucy and Katie are anything to go by, the long-held tradition of hoarding beautiful pieces of second-hand clothing is in safe hands.

Follow Lucy on Instagram @lucywhelaniow.

The Noble Steed is advertised as a ‘high end cocktail and micro pub service’; in reality, it’s a highly collaborative work of visual and mixological creativity, resulting in a striking horse-box conversion serving classic cocktails. When I approached the staff of The Noble Steed for an interview for this profile series, I asked them how The Noble Steed was created, and who by, but the answer wasn’t exactly straightforward.

Pictured on the right is Katy-Rose of Katy Rose Design (@KatyRoseDesign on Instagram and Facebook), who created the branding, t-shirts and chalkboards for the bar. Katy-Rose also did a lot of the design for this year’s Ventnor Fringe as well as for Brave Island, has her own Etsy shop, was part of this year’s Makers Market, and hosts a drawing club at Ventnor Exchange. She explained to me how the bar’s design concept was inspired by the speakeasy bars of the prohibition era of 1920s America – also known as blind pig or blind tiger bars.

The bar tops are wooden flooring, upcycled by Chasing Autumn Design (@chasingautumndesign on Facebook and @chasing_autumn_design on Instagram); the cocktails are created by the IOW Cocktail Company (‘Cocktails for Badasses’); the coffee in the Espresso Martini is Island Roasted. The owner of The Events Co., the company that lets out The Noble Steed, is Khia Janzen. Immediately her name came up, described as an ‘entrepreneur’: ‘she’s the hardest working person I know’. Khia brought all of these local businesses and creatives together to create the spectacle and experience that is The Noble Steed.

If you’d like to hire The Noble Steed for your Wedding or corporate event, go to https://www.theeventsco.co.uk/the-noble-steed, or follow The Events Co. on Facebook and Instagram @theeventsco.iow.

By night, Jayne Derbyshire is a dancer. She runs Spotlight IOW, a successful stage school for children and young people on the island. By day? The founder of The Coffee Bubble, a stylish coffee truck working at this year’s fringe. Fringe-goers have been treated to island-roasted coffee, cookies, cakes, and the friendly faces of The Coffee Bubble staff.

The business has just celebrated its one year anniversary, but its story began in the first lockdown, as COVID-19 put a stop to in-person rehearsals for Spotlight; Jayne, like many others, was bored. Then, on June 20th 2020, Jayne’s sister-in-law Rachel passed away in a car crash. The pandemic, and everything else, melted away as Jayne began the long, unpredictable and arduous journey of grief – she was living with her brother, and they were both dealing with the loss of a sister and a wife.

In August of the same year, Jayne decided to enrol onto a coffee course for something to do (‘I’m a mum, I have an inability to sit still’), and a distraction from the grief. With ‘no work to focus on’, Jayne pursued a lifelong, but sidelined, dream of having a coffee shop. She sold coffee and cake from her front door during the lockdowns, and purchased the trailer ‘on a whim’ from eBay. The business has grown, from a regular pitch at the Bembridge lifeboat last winter, to now – zipping around the island for festivals, events, and charity fundraisers.

Now, Jayne’s life is full of the things she loves: coffee; her husband and business partner; her little boy, aged 4; her Coffee Bubble colleagues; her customers. Without the restrictions of ‘bricks and mortar’, Jayne is constantly moving around from place to place, meeting all kinds of interesting people, and serving them her delicious coffee. She’s 38 now, and says that if she could see her late sister-in-law Rachel again, ‘I’d thank her for this’.

If you would like coffee, cake and chats from The Coffee Bubble at your next event or function, or to buy a brilliant coffee where the business pops up next, follow them on Instagram @the_coffeebubble, or on Facebook @thecoffeebubble.