Belfast Culture Night is to return this year, but is to be taken “off the streets” with a new look led by money from City Hall.
Elected 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 £150,000. That is considerably more than the authority previously contributed, when the Cathedral Quarter Trust led a partnership which delivered the hugely successful event annually in September.
The new Culture Night will not programme street-based events and will concentrate on venue-based events across a wider space in the city, with more community involvement. The event will aim to move away from street drinking and concentrations of crowds, and will require organisations to prove they are paying artists.
READ MORE: Belfast city centre car park could be fitted with drug needle waste bin
READ MORE: Belfast Irish street sign surveys to go ahead despite “potential adverse impacts”
Established in 2009, Culture Night Belfast was a large-scale and free cultural event taking place in the Cathedral Quarter, based on the Temple Bar Cultural Trust Dublin event.
Audiences grew to an attendance of over 100,000 for the 2019 event held across two days in September 2019. The budget for Culture Night ranged from £240k in 2016 to over £328k in 2019 from a variety of partners, with around £12K coming from the council in its last four years.
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 “the existing model for Culture Night has become problematic”.
The review stated the audience for the event has grown exponentially whilst the volume and quality in the programme had not, and stated the idea that artists “could, would or should give their time for free is no longer a viable delivery model”. It said the audience’s relationship with the event has changed so much that family audiences “felt pushed out and unsafe”.
In 2022 organisers said that the event had “become too big and unwieldy” and the original intention of providing a platform for artistic and cultural communities to connect with a much wider audience “had been lost”.
Culture Night ran in Belfast in a smaller manner in 2021, but did not return after that. In 2023 the Cathedral Quarter Trust announced it would cease day-to-day operations after Stormont funding was ended. Financial pressures facing Stormont's Department for Communities were reportedly behind the decision.
The Cathedral Quarter Trust said: “As a Board we will continue to work with Belfast City Council and other stakeholders to explore all options around the future of this popular and important event.” In the absence of the Cathedral Quarter Trust, no organisation took on the lead to revive Culture Night in Belfast.
In the Republic of Ireland Culture Night is largely led by local authorities in each area, with investments ranging from approximately €30k in Cork to over €190k in Dublin.
Unlike the Culture Night Belfast model, which was largely about converting the streets of the Cathedral Quarter into a pop-up venue with road closures and 'on-street' programming, Culture Night Dublin does not involve road closures and is spread across the whole city.
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 “Culture Night Sector Engagement and Roadmap Delivery.”
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' concerns.
An online survey by Thrive showed 78 percent of respondents said they wanted Belfast Culture Night to come back, while most people mentioned wanting less alcohol and better crowd management.
The report states: “(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.
“Our 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’t 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.”
Thrive states that while staffing was increased, fundamental problems remained with the event. It states: “(By 2017) , it was during this time that there was a growing perception from both the cultural sector and audiences that the event became more about corporate interests and the profits of the bars than about the creative sector it was supposed to be celebrating.
“In 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.
“In 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.
“The 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.”
The report recommended Belfast Culture Night being limited to venue-based events with street-based events not being included in the programme. The report concluded: “It is essential that the creative sector is the main focus.” It stressed that events are located and scheduled appropriately to avoid crowding, and organisations will be required to show how they will pay artists in order to be part of the programme."
Green Party Councillor for Botanic, Áine Groogan, first 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.
She said this week: “I 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.”
“I want to thank Thrive and Daisy Chain Inc who have done great work over the past few months engaging with the arts and culture sector and other important stakeholders to build broad support to make Culture Night 2025 a success.”
“The 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 program, 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.”
For all the latest news, visit the Belfast Live homepage here and sign up to our daily newsletter here.
English (United States) ·