So, Open House moves to Bangor?
At that time Belfast was doing well economically and, as I said, it was the City of Festivals. Bangor on the other hand seemed to be slowly entering a death spiral. The data was showing that around £80 million pounds a year was going from Bangor to Belfast through retail, leisure and hospitality.
When we started, it was a bit like the Cathedral Quarter was when we started there. There were no dedicated venues but we searched out spaces, pretty much anywhere we could find, to hold events and we had a ready-made audience we had spent 15 years building. We ran a small pilot festival in 2012 and that went really well.
In 2013 and 2014 we ran parallel festivals in Belfast and Bangor and then in 2015 we took an office in one of the containers, Project 24, close to the Bangor Seafront, and we wound down the Belfast festival. We brought all our experience of 15 years building the festival in Belfast, and we were able also to bring our Arts Council and Tourism NI funding with us.
That sounds like it was a good move?
It was but there were drawbacks. Bangor is the third largest town, now city, in Northern Ireland, but it had no dedicated music venue, no civic arts centre, but while that was problematic, it was also an opportunity, in that it was, in a way, a blank canvas. It was incredibly exciting.
What was the shape of the festival once it moved to Bangor?
We broadened out the festival because we were able to look at the whole of Bangor to curate arts activities, but in order to have the impact we had in Belfast, we couldn’t just programme a niche festival. Bangor wasn’t big enough for that, so we had to become a multi arts festival.
We aimed to showcase the positives of Bangor, because there were lots of negatives; vacant shopfronts, transient communities, crime, dereliction and deprivation. Bangor had one of the most deprived wards in Northern Ireland, the Harbour ward which was designated a Small Pocket of Deprivation, (SPOD).
So we did things like screen Jaws in the Aurora Swimming Pool, we screened The Guns of Navarone at Grey Point Fort, the old World War 2 fort. We organised book readings in The Masonic Hall, DJ’s in the British Legion, all kinds of pop-up events in any spaces we could get access to. We had a Burlesque show in a tattoo parlour, gigs in the Yacht club.
It sounds like you were able to mirror the success you had with the festival when it was in Belfast?
The festival ran right up until Covid. We programmed over 160 events in about 40 locations during the month of August.
And then we took over The Court House and had it renovated, and we opened it up and now we have streamlined the festival and we run events all year round.
