Barnsley Bright Nights Festival Celebrates Heritage of Eldon Street
The Barnsley High Street Heritage Action Zone took advantage of a local winter lights festival to promote the regeneration of Eldon Street.
The ambition
Barnsley Bright Nights is a 2-day free winter lights festival featuring illuminated artworks, performances and happenings across the town centre. Started in 2018, the festival is an established and eagerly anticipated highlight of Barnsley’s award-winning cultural events programme.
The Barnsley High Street Heritage Action Zone (HSHAZ) and Barnsley MBC Events team saw an opportunity to promote Eldon Street and place it at the centre of local consciousness as part of this popular festival. Since 2021 the parade has included Eldon Street as part of its route.
Through high quality community participation projects, they aimed to empower young people and help them gain a greater appreciation of the history of Eldon Street and of Barnsley.
Who made it happen
The Barnsley HSHAZ was a partnership scheme led by Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council (MBC) and supported by Historic England.
The festival events were coordinated by Barnsley MBC’s Events Team, who worked with numerous local organisations, schools and artists.
These case study details were provided by The Audience Agency on behalf of Barnsley MBC.
The funding
These activities formed part of a wider community consultation and engagement programme which was funded by a grant of £156,657 from Historic England and £92,068 from Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council.
The results
The Bright Nights festival starts with a luminous spectacle in The Glass Works Square. It continues on the light art trail with local, regional and national artworks at cultural venues across the town centre. The festival finishes with a big, illuminated parade with specially commissioned artworks and community groups taking to the streets.
Below, see some of the activity funded by the HSHAZ as part of Bright Nights.
For the 2021 festival, a temporary neon artwork by Patrick Murphy and poet laureate Simon Armitage was installed, illuminating the dark and underused alley Eldon Street, that was a priority for improvement through the HSHAZ.
The words for the artwork were from a new poem that Simon wrote as part of his residency with the HSHAZ. They link back to stories of Eldon Street shops like Harral’s jewellers where Barnsley couples bought their wedding rings, and Frank Bird’s who have sold wedding suits there for many years.
Watch Simon Armitage and Patrick Murphy talking about the artwork
The idea of the Eldon Beast came from HSHAZ funded outreach activities with schools and the community to create mythical creatures for a game, a co-created activity, engaging and empowering local people.
It was extended into a participatory project at Trinity Academy St Edward's school in 2022. Professional puppet maker and artist Sue Walpole worked with students to create an illuminated beast to parade through the town at the closing event for Bright Nights. The Beast made a second appearance at the 2023 Bright Nights, continuing and building upon the invented myth.
An artist was commissioned to create this game for Eldon Street based on the mythical story of the Eldon Beast... [There was a] community engagement event in the town centre that engaged over 150 families to raise awareness of what we're doing and involve the public in designing the characters.
The Secret Blues of Eldon Street alternative heritage plaques scheme is another example of the HSHAZ’s collaborative approach to cultural engagement.
Designed by students from nearby Horizon College, the trail of 14 plaques tells some of the forgotten stories of Eldon Street. The students visited Barnsley Archives to discover the stories, as well as talking to members of the Barnsley Civic Trust. Some plaques were hosted in shop windows, with others attached to buildings on Eldon Street and the Victorian Arcade. The Blue Plaques were launched as part of Bright Nights in 2022.
In 2023 Milefield Primary School in Grimethorpe worked on a making project with AmazeLab, a science teacher who specialises in creative approaches to STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and maths). Students built light up foxes, a reference to the ‘Fox on Eldon Street’, which features in the poem created for the HSHAZ by Poet Laureat Simon Armitage, 'Barnsley: An Unnatural History'. This project covered several curriculum topics including maths, design, electronics and coding.
As part of the workshops the pupils also explored the heritage of parades on Eldon Street and creative careers. The school displayed this learning for the students and teachers to reflect on over the term.
Pupils then took part in the parade with their parents or carers. This was the first time that many of these families had attended Bright Nights and for some, the first visit to town centre cultural venues. The school reported that the project resulted in the highest levels of engagement with parents and carers that they had ever seen.
In 2023 students from Trinity Academy (who were originally involved in the Eldon Beast project) also worked with Sue Walpole to make illuminated puppets of key historical buildings on Eldon Street. These were also included in the parade. The young people involved in the project learned about the buildings and their stories, and took a real sense of ownership over the puppets (and buildings) they had worked on.
Being part of the event and seeing the confidence in my child grow [was the best part], they’ve struggled at school and they would never have dreamt of doing this and being around so many people but everyone has been so lovely their confidence has increased so much.
The greatest success for me was…for the kids that were doing it is the engagement, the involvement and the sense of community, and also the spotlighting of art and how art can be used in these cultural processes. And specifically, it's been nice to have working artists coming in and working with the children, having the children talking to those artists and seeing that…there are specific careers in art they can do.
Looking ahead
- The Sunset Neon artwork was intended to be temporary, but had such a positive reception that it has been turned into a permanent installation.
- Students have expanded perceptions of the kinds of creative careers that they can aspire to.
- The active participation and co-creation processes used by the HSHAZ have resulted in Barnsley people beginning to feel a sense of ownership over their heritage and the way in which the story of Barnsley is told.
- Partnership working between the HSHAZ and the Barnsley MBC Events Team has evolved the way that the Events Team are now approaching their events planning, weaving in those stories of recent history that speak to Barnsley citizens the most.
- While likely the result of a mixture of factors, there is no denying that Barnsley is thriving as a town centre, and Bright Nights is a key part of this. Footfall at the core events for Bright Nights in 2023 was recorded at 24,000, a 45% uplift on the previous year.
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