Have you stumbled across this post while looking for full details of the 2013 parade and festival? Click here for more info!
The West End Festival’s 18th Birthday will be celebrated in style as last night it was confirmed by the organisers that, after a five-year absence, the Mardi Gras-style parade will return to Byres Road and could attract up to 80,000 spectators on the 9th of June.
Previous crowdsourced fundraising efforts to return the parade on Festival Sunday to its former glory proved fruitless and it took an eleventh hour pledge of capital from itison.com founder - and West End boy - Oli Norman to secure policing and licenses for the event. It sees hundreds of people snake along Byres Road in elaborate costumes, ringing in the beginning of a festival of culture in the leafy area running throughout the month of June.
At the launch of the festival programme, Director Michael Dale was keen to emphasise that, contrary to perceptions of West End isolationism and snobbery, the location was irrelevant. The West End is simply “a place where it takes place”. A charming anecdote from a Glasgow City College student who had organised fundraising events confirmed the universality of this long-running festival. She told the assembled audience of bloggers, journalists and performers about trips with a youth group to previous festivals: this was the only cultural event where the children did not feel out of place.
This somewhat disarming unpretentious attitude runs through the festival programme. Dale was at pains to emphasise the importance of keeping the festival as low-cost to audience members as possible. The festival is also positioned - very deliberately - as a ‘cultural festival’ rather than an ‘arts’ festival. One which the organisers believe has the potential to be “the best festival in Britain.”
So it’s nice that it’s been saved by a local business.
Because Byres Road is dying. At least four shops have closed since the start of the year. Michael Dale talked about a new Traders’ Association but, all over our city, people are moving away from local shops. People are losing a sense of community. Before itison’s involvement the crowdsourced funding effort had raised 2% of its £15,000 target.
Maybe, in the end, beauty and love won’t save us. But it’d be a damn shame if this was the last hurrah for the festival. We need to make the most of the events that are going to take place in a month’s time. Never danced to big band music? Get up to the Queen Margaret Union to get on down to the Byres Road Big Band. Ever taken part in a torchlit procession from a Tall Ship to a Big Park? Thought not! So dae it!
Get out. Support this festival. Believe the hype. This isn’t the West End Festival, this is a celebration of joy that just happens to be held in the West End.
