{"id":14141,"date":"2025-04-12T16:01:10","date_gmt":"2025-04-12T16:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/14141\/"},"modified":"2025-04-12T16:01:10","modified_gmt":"2025-04-12T16:01:10","slug":"culture-night-new-look-event-to-return-to-belfast-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/14141\/","title":{"rendered":"Culture Night: New-look event to return to Belfast this year"},"content":{"rendered":"

It will instead concentrate on venue-based events across a wider space in the city, with more community involvement.<\/p>\n

Last held in 2021, the event will aim to move away from street drinking and concentrations of crowds, and will require organisations to prove they are paying artists.<\/p>\n

\"Culture<\/p>\n

Culture Night in 2015.<\/p>\n

Members at a Belfast City Council committee meeting this week agreed to launch a public procurement exercise to deliver the 2025 Culture Night programme up to the value of \u00a3150,000 – considerably more than the authority previously contributed.<\/p>\n

Established in 2009, Culture Night was a large-scale and free cultural event taking place in the Cathedral Quarter.<\/p>\n

Audiences grew to an attendance of over 100,000 for the 2019 event held across two days. The budget for Culture Night ranged from \u00a3240k in 2016 to over \u00a3328k in 2019 from a variety of partners, with around \u00a312K coming from the council in its last four years.<\/p>\n

Covid resulted in the suspension of the event in September 2020, with a digital version staged instead. That year the Cathedral Quarter Trust and Belfast City Council co-commissioned a review which said \u201cthe existing model for Culture Night has become problematic.\u201d<\/p>\n

The review stated the audience had grown exponentially while the volume and quality in the programme had not, and stated the idea that artists \u201ccould, would or should give their time for free is no longer a viable delivery model.\u201d<\/p>\n

It said the audience\u2019s relationship with the event has changed so much that family audiences \u201cfelt pushed out and unsafe.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2022 organisers said that the event had \u201cbecome too big and unwieldy\u201d and the original intention of providing a platform for artistic and cultural communities to connect with a much wider audience \u201chad been lost.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Culture<\/p>\n

Culture Night 2015. Picture: Kevin Scott \/ Belfast Telegraph<\/p>\n

Culture Night ran in Belfast in a smaller manner in 2021, but did not return after that.<\/p>\n

In 2023 the Cathedral Quarter Trust announced it would cease day-to-day operations after Stormont funding was ended.<\/p>\n

Financial pressures facing the Department for Communities were reportedly behind the decision.<\/p>\n

After an attempt by the Green Party last year to get Culture Night up and running in Belfast again, a report was commissioned from City Hall by culture organisation Thrive called \u201cCulture Night Sector Engagement and Roadmap Delivery.\u201d<\/p>\n

It again showed that the event in the later years became a victim of its own success, and highlighted that corporate concerns were overwhelming artists\u2019 concerns.<\/p>\n

An online survey by Thrive showed 78% of respondents said they wanted Culture Night to come back, while most people mentioned wanting less alcohol and better crowd management.<\/p>\n

The report states: \u201c(By 2016) a lot of the budget and team capacity was dedicated to managing crowds and ensuring safety. The management team felt at this point that the budget had not grown in line with the numbers they were managing.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur research points to audiences feeling that security and stewards became less visible over time which was down to the volume of people. This growth didn\u2019t just suck up resources and creative energy but placed a significant amount of mental strain on the staff team who were dealing with a major city-wide event for a fee that was in no way commensurate with this responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Culture<\/p>\n

Culture night, such as the event in 2019, was a popular date in the local arts calendar.<\/p>\n

News Catch Up – Friday 11th April<\/p>\n

It added: \u201cIn the later years, there was a focus on staging larger showcase events across the site, spreading the event across a wider footprint in an attempt to reduce overcrowding.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn retrospect, this move to bigger showpiece stages and shift in focus away from a collective melting pot of diverse smaller events changed the atmosphere of the event. It lost, for many of the people that we spoke to, the idea of something that you explore.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe large gaps between significant stages, which previously would have been filled with smaller pop-up events, felt empty and populated by street drinking. Even though the plan was to make the event safer by spreading it out more, almost everyone interviewed said they felt less safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report recommended Belfast Culture Night being limited to venue-based events with street-based events not being included in the programme.<\/p>\n

Green Party councillor \u00c1ine Groogan proposed that Belfast City Council scope out the possibility of supporting the return of the event in 2024 when she was Deputy Lord Mayor of Belfast.<\/p>\n

She said this week: \u201cI am buzzing to say that Culture Night will be back in Belfast in September 2025. It is a great celebration of the best of Belfast, providing a fantastic free opportunity for the public to engage in the arts and be inspired and have a positive impact on the nighttime economy during the summer season.\u201d<\/p>\n

She added: \u201cThe event might look a little different than before, we will know more when procurement has completed, but I am confident that we can create an exciting and inclusive programme, which returns Culture Night to the roots which made it a success in the early years, and which can meaningfully support the arts and cultural sector.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It will instead concentrate on venue-based events across a wider space in the city, with more community involvement.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14142,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5011],"tags":[2378,5813,1144,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-14141","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-northern-ireland","8":"tag-belfast","9":"tag-belfast-city-council","10":"tag-northern-ireland","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114325833875638522","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14141\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}