Newtown Food Festival organisers say there are "lessons to learn" after town centre residents complained that the music levels caused “immense” amount of anxiety and made a house “thud”.

Hundreds of people enjoyed a weekend of food, music and performances in the Town Hall Grounds on September 3 and 4 when the festival returned for the first time in two years due to the Covid pandemic restrictions.

Newtown and Llanllwchaiarn Town Council said the mass event that they helped organise was “one of the best festivals in terms of attendance”.

However, Councillor Pete Lewington (Llanllwchaiarn West, Welsh Conservatives) said he had received concerns about the music that was played during the evening.

“I’ve received several complaints unfortunately about the music noise and length that the music went on,” Cllr Lewington said. “Comments along the lines that to certain residents it caused immense amount of anxiety, and the noise was making the house thud, peace disturbed from midday to midnight and couldn't get to sleep as the music was going past way beyond 11.30pm.”

The council was told that the finish time was 11.30pm and that the sound technicians who delivered the stage infrastructure monitored the music levels.

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Zak Howard, development officer at Newtown and Llanllwchaiarn Town Council, said the food festival ran “very smoothly” and that the people who have raised concerns “won’t be ignored”.

“Lessons to learn from every event as always,” Mr Howard told councillors on September 5 during an update about the food festival. “We are never going to have a perfect event because we always want to improve them.

“I think that we dealt with the last-minute changes to the site plan based on the area not being completely available to us with cornered off sections.

“It was nice to see so many people and so many families out and about on both the Saturday and Sunday.

“I feel like it was one of our best festivals in terms of the attendance. There were loads of people there. When we started opening up from 10am it was busy and right through the afternoon and evening.

“We have had a couple of queries and complaints around some of the evening music which I will be dealing with this week. They won't be ignored we will respond to them.”

Councillor Richard Edwards, committee chair, said it was “another successful festival and good to have it back in the town after a couple of years away. Already looking forward to next year.”