You now have an all year round festival?
The festival takes place during the whole month of August, but we also run free music concerts in Ward Park every Sunday during July and August. We get thousands of people coming to those events.
We put up a marquee which can hold 400 people at The Walled Garden at Bangor Castle and we run that for a few weeks. We have a big Seaside Revival Festival, a free one day event, which includes a vintage car show, stalls and music. We revived the Pickie to Pier Swim which had been going for a hundred years and then stopped in the 1980’s. We have 200 swimmers for that event.
What we are trying to revive is that Bangor was a seaside town and its economy was built around leisure, music, dancehalls, culture and we think that can drive the regeneration of Bangor City Centre now.
How did you take over The Courthouse?
The year the Open House Festival moved to Bangor was the same year The Court House was decommissioned, 2013. That was a symptom of Bangor having lost its status as an administrative centre. A lot of Bangor’s administrative functions were moved to Ards and to Belfast. Bangor effectively became a dormitory town.
The building was lying empty, falling into dereliction and a group of local volunteers got together to try and save it and we got involved and then took the project on.
We had a two pronged approach; we wanted to acquire the building through Community Asset Transfer and that took 7 years. Then we had to raise money, we raised over £2 million pounds, mainly through the National Lottery Heritage Fund, to allow us to complete the restoration and now we have a permanent home, a dedicated venue and a community hub.
Where to now?
The Court House has given us a permanent base which allows us to continue our work in terms of the regeneration of Bangor. We want to grow our creative community, we want to grow the arts community here, but we also get involved in other projects.
I am part of a steering group which is trying to set up a BID – that’s a Business improvement District. We don’t have town centre management here, despite being the 3rd largest city in Northern Ireland. A lot of local traders believe there is a need for some form of town centre management, so we are involved in that process, and then we have just been part of setting up Late Night Art.
