As the finishing touches go on Blackpool’s bid for City of Culture 2029, Blackpool Social Club joined a Risograph workshop at Aunty Social to ask people living and forging creative careers in the town what winning would actually mean
Upstairs in Aunty Social’s Topping Street home, a Risograph press is churning out creative designs in lurid pink and blue, and a dozen or so Blackpool creatives are hunched over tables, cutting, sticking and chatting – about fonts, designs and techniques, yes, but also about one big question. This workshop is intended to facilitate a Culture Chat and the question on the table is – what would it mean for Blackpool to become UK City of Culture 2029?
The word that keeps coming back, says workshop host Joe Booth, is “bonkers” – people here embrace that identity of a town that refuses to conform. It doesn’t even quite fit into the competition for City of Culture – we are a proud seaside town – but our size allows us to compete and our cultural identity, people seem to feel, gives us a fighting chance of winning the thing.
And it’s not just the sandgrown who appreciate it. It’s the sandblown too – people who have arrived her and fallen for its unique charm. The “come-er-innas”, someone else creatively calls them.
“I think there’s always a really strong sense of community in Blackpool, especially within the creative industries,” Booth says. “We all tend to hold space for each other and also all know each other, so it made for really authentic conversations.”
It is exactly this kind of conversation – messy, funny, unguarded – that has fed into the bid over the past few months. Blackpool’s submission goes to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on Monday, the deadline for full bids in the competition to become the fourth city to hold the title, after Coventry, Derry-Londonderry and Hull.
From here, an expert advisory panel will assess every bid against the competition criteria and recommend a shortlist of up to four places, to be put to DCMS ministers for a final decision. The shortlist is expected in the autumn, when panel visits and final presentations will take place, before a winner is announced in December or early January 2027.
Eight community projects have informed the bid – each finding a different way to ask Blackpool what it wants to say about itself.
LeftCoast ran a creative summer programme across five neighbourhoods, gathering residents’ ideas through four short films. Creative Fusion, the country’s first youth-led Local Cultural Education Partnership (LCEP), brought local voices together to co-create a mural outside Blackpool North station. The National Literacy Trust’s Literacy Champions used Culture Scrapbooks to collect dreams and ideas.
Elsewhere, TramShed ran five weeks of inclusive theatre workshops; Empowerment Charity used creative mapping, postcards and storytelling to capture lived experience, particularly from adults with neurodiversity whose voices are too often left out; We Film Blackpool made a series of films spotlighting the town’s creative community; and Buzz Bury’s Soundavan – a mobile sound and podcast studio – has been touring the streets recording people’s hopes for the town.
Kerry Vasiliou, partnership director for Creative Blackpool, who’s been involved in putting the bid together, has been taking it all in.
“The feedback and ideas shared through these community projects have been invaluable to the bid writing process,” she says. “There has been such a buzz across Blackpool events and community groups as they discuss what it means to them.
“Common themes were creating a sense of belonging, feeling safe and welcome, having fun and celebrating Blackpool’s people.”
What has struck her most, she says, is how clearly people can articulate what makes the town special – proof, she believes, that the bid is rooted in something real.
Back at the workshop, that same clarity comes through in the room. Rose Hartley, an illustrator and designer who runs Happi Place shop in Abingdon Street Market, thinks first of visitors.
“It would mean being able to a lot more showcasing what Blackpool’s really about,” says Rose, herself a ‘come-er-inna’, having moved here a few years ago from Leeds. “We are such an amazing town full of creatives and culture and just great people. So many amazing things are here just waiting to be discovered.” She’d like to see bigger music acts playing the town alongside own own talent.
For Chloe Bristow, a social media and content creator, the appeal is practical as much as symbolic. After all, the prize is a £10m cash injection to our cultural economy, not just a title.
“I think we are all so collaborative in this town anyway,” she says, “but obviously with the City of Culture money we could all work together a lot easier – everything could just be a lot more streamlined.”
For Becky Davies, a freelance artist and designer known as Grumpy Girl, it comes down to access. She hopes any money that follows a win would go towards making space available for working-class creative people, “so that we have easier access to spaces and making the arts accessible to the community… as a form of creative wellness”. Beyond the creative circle, she adds, she wants a win to be a celebration of “the diverse talent Blackpool has, and everything the town offers – from the ocean, to the parks and the people”.
None of it sounds like a pitch. That, perhaps, is the point. A City of Culture bid can easily become a document written in the language of funding panels. What’s come out of these workshops instead is an argument for a town that already knows exactly who it is, and just wants the room, and the resources, to be louder and prouder about it.
The result of all that Riso ink-stained conversation lands with DCMS on Monday. Whether Blackpool makes the shortlist won’t be known until autumn. In the meantime, you can still make you voice heard by backing the bid here.
