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The Colchester Festival Association was founded in 2000 as a direct response to a perceived need to create a festival of local, regional and national importance and to replace the annually held Colchester Carnival. The much loved carnival, first held in the 1930's, had ceased to be held due to a combination of changing attitudes, health and safety legislation and insurance claims. We staged seven festivals in all (including a special Tsunami Appeal event) through the freely given hard work of volunteers and with the support of our many sponsors. However, lack of funds for the 2006 festival forced us to pull the plug on the event.
The Colchester Festival Association has taken a three year break since 2005 in order for its contracted Artistic Director Dorian Kelly to produce a comprehensive Festival Development Plan. This has been completed, running into two volumes each three inches thick. On the basis of this, applications for funding were submitted to the Lottery Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund to the amount of £190,000. This would have assured the continuation of the festival for the foreseeable future, including a full scale carnival (The Great Samba Ramble) and a series of high profile cultural events.
The first of the new-look festivals was scheduled for September 2008 with a Carnival procession and a Street Festival, building year on year until 2012 when a massive event of concerts and entertainments, heritage events and spectaculars, with a huge push to take advantage of the Olympics, with camping for 3000, with daily transport to the Olympics sites, and a crèche plus tourist events and shopping trips for families, with a massive multimedia pageantry event to celebrate Colchester past and present will take place.
However we have had to withdraw this application as Colchester Borough Council have indicated that they will not support our existence under any circumstances, preferring something "more cultural", and wishing to broker a festival and a carnival themselves. So there will be no festival and no carnival this year and we are back to square one.
The Colchester Festival consists of four main strands:
1) The Colchester International Street Arts Festival and Carnival2) Colchester Fringe Festival - to encourage independent contributions from other arts providers
4) Colchester EventsNet - a coordination body to draw together all the events activity in the area, with listings magazine and open access website
4) Colchester Festival Ltd, our trading arm - using our expertise to advise other events providers commercially and to raise funds by providing Health and Safety and technical management.
Our track record is impeccable. We have statistics that show that we have employed and given opportunities to thousands of performers, artists and craftsmen to take part in everything from parades to music stages and we have an unimpeachable track record of seven successful festivals and two smaller ones which came in on time, on budget and cost the Colchester taxpayers little or nothing, most events being funded by our generous sponsors. Our policy is, and has always been to ensure that the great majority of events are completely free, so that the poor and the disadvantaged can take part on an equal footing. Here follows a brief description of what we achieved in our six years:
We created a town wide extravaganza of movement, colour and spectacle which we hoped would be talked about and eagerly awaited next year.
In this, the first festival in 2000 was spectacularly successful. We were supported with a small grant from the borough council, which we managed to triple with sponsorship.
With this, from a standing start in eight weeks and a small group of organisers, we created no less than thirty-five events in fourteen locations over three days. The events encompassed every aspect of the arts, including:
Dance - traditional, ethnic and modern
Theatre: The Mystery Plays in the streets of Colchester
Visual Arts: three exhibitions
Sculpture show
Literature: three notable authors discussing their work in the library
Poetry: Well known poets performed in a local public house
Music: Classical in the Minories, folk and jazz around the town, ethnic music and one-man bands.
Workshops: Children's arts, and three dimensional sculpture, drumming and mask making workshops.
....and of course, The Grand Samba Ramble: a dazzling Samba Procession through the town with professional and amateur groups.
All in all, in the first year we involved more than 450 artists and performers - which makes us one of the major and most significant arts supporters in the town. We undertook an (admittedly simple) impact assessment which we forwarded to the Borough which showed that the local traders were delighted with the extra income generated. Our count showed that an additional 4000 people were in the town on that day specifically for the festival, many of whom were from out of town.
In the second year we themed the Festival as "Colchester Festival of the Walls" and were able to easily double the events which we undertook, which included:
The formation of the Colchester Town Watch - a significant tourist attraction and heritage item.
The creation of a children's games project which looked at street games and oral history and created a CD for free distribution.
The production of a major community play - The Colchester Promenade Plays entitled "Seat of Power". We intend that this work will be performed throughout the streets annually and hope that this will eventually be a major tourist attraction.
A large poetry competition which attracted entries of an extraordinary standard.
"The Great Boudicea Challenge" an invitation to produce and parade a Celtic chariot for an annual trophy
"The Grand Bavarian Evening" a free entry evening continental-style festival with Oompah band, and other entertainers. This included a Wine and Food Festival, which we hoped would be an annual occurrence.
"Poetry in the Pub" a hugely expanded poetry reading session with national and international poets.
Three of the best-known authors in the country discussing their work in the Library.
The History Fair in the Park - a highly successful afternoon of traditional crafts and displays. Medieval music and dance, falconry and willow work were featured.
"The Great Colchester Tug-of War" - (The nightclub door staff won!)
"The Great Maze" a pilot project which may culminate in a permanent maze on Hollytrees Meadow.
A themed exhibition in the Minories on the festival subject of "The Wall"
AND OF COURSE, HUNDREDS OF MUSICIANS AND PERFORMERS
And not forgetting a greatly expanded "Grand Samba Ramble", this time down a specially closed High Street. This was wildly successful and hugely popular. This time we used over 700 participants, including schools, community groups and special interest groups as well as the actors, dancers and other artists. Numbers in the town were very much higher than last year. Again the traders were delighted.
This Year the festival theme was "Textile Town" and we planned a very large number of additional attractions, the chief of which were:
"The Great Cloth Fair" in the Upper Park.
This recreated the Charter Fairs of Edward the Second. The programme included:
An opening service in Tudor Costume led by His Worship the Mayor, Councillor Nigel Chapman.
A "Fleece to Cloth" project in which a fleece is turned into a piece of dyed cloth in seven hours. It will then be inspected and stamped with the official five Colchester seals of approval.
"The Colchester Embroidery" a 4 metre long tapestry / embroidery depicting scenes from Colchester's History and including images of 71 local people. This will take a year to complete, at which point an additional section will be started. This will form part of the Colchester Collection and be available on request for display in perpetuity.
A variety of textile related stalls and displays
A fashion display with intelligent and space age fabrics, and a charity shop fashion show with prizes for most elegant, most bizarre and most inventive outfits assembled from a charity shop.
A children's arts workshop to create and clothe a series of life-size Colchester Characters.
As well as a wide variety of entertainers and displays.
There was also the Tug of War again, together with other displays.
This was of course in addition to a greatly enhanced street and arts element as per last year - but bigger and better!
AND OF COURSE, HUNDREDS OF MUSICIANS AND PERFORMERS!
This year we were really proud to announce that we presented to Sir Charles Lucas Arts College a complete Samba Band kit of instruments in order to enable them to form their own Samba Band. For this we are very grateful for the generosity of one of our significant sponsors, First Great Eastern PLC.
We are commissioning six "Colchester Stories" which will be available for everyone to tell in perpetuity. We hope that the "Street Hosts" we envisage will be able to tell these in the street to anyone who wants to hear them together with Hervey Benham's "Colchester Ballads". In addition to the six commissions we are offering, we are also running a competition to write up to twelve more which will be published in a book and on a CD.
For 2003 we consolidated all that we had learned from previous years, which special emphasis on increasing the content of the Great Cloth Fair. This year we had to find all the necessary funding by voluntary subscription, with no financial help from the borough council or grant making authorities. We were delighted to see the formation of the Colchester Festival Fundraising Group which made such a major difference to our morale and funding availability.
Three weeks before the 2004 festival, we were seriously considering pulling the plug. Uncertainty over funding is always a major issue, but this year it was especially so. The fundraising group that had been formed last year failed to materialise this year and the indifference from Colchester Borough Council ensured that no help was given to us there. However, with a supreme last minute effort we were able to pull it all together and the festival went ahead, albeit on a much reduced budget. This year we started the festival with a sixties music night in the Castle Park. We were delighted to be able to incorporate the Town Crier competition into the street festival which added much entertainment to the day. We concentrated our street performances on Lion Yard Square and Culver Shopping Precinct, with a full programme of bands playing in the Stena Tent of Dreams. On Sunday we had a very different festival programme in the shape of our 'Dreaming of India' event in the Stena Tent of Dreams.
It was noticeable that there were many more people in the town for the festival. According to Mr Mike Lowe of Lion Walk Shopping Centre, footfall in the town shops was up by 30 per cent on the same week last year!
There were many complimentary comments, although some people missed the Great Cloth Fair. This event was suspended this year because of funding constraints. Although there are several historically-based events in Colchester - including the Priory Day and the Oyster Fayre, we feel our event more closely represents a contemporary version of the original Edward II Great Cloth Fair; being an eclectic mix of stalls selling cloth, demonstrations of ancient crafts, performances and entertainment. And, of course, like the majority of our events, it is free! We look forward to restoring the Great Cloth Fair to all its former glory in a future year.
What better than to have a look at the 2005 web pages
This shows what was achieved and was intended to be repeated year after year.
2006
CANCELLED!
Over the six years since it started, the Colchester Festival had grown from strength to strength. A lack of funding and support from the borough council killed it.
In 2008 with a refreshingly clear wind of change from a non-Conservative borough council, there are calls to bring back the carnival. Not the festival. The carnival. We applaud this change of thinking and wish it well and offer our support.
RIP
Whether you like it or not and despite many attempts to revive it, the Colchester Carnival, set up in 1926, is dead! It is, like the Norwegian Blue parrot, no more; bereft of life; deceased. It is an ex event. Health and safety issues, apathy and changing society values killed it. Let's face it, it was getting tacky, boring even; filled with self promoting vehicle companies. It was getting smaller and smaller each year and it finally died when somebody tragically died at another carnival in the area, having fallen off one of the floats and run over. Our Bob, Mr Bob Russell, MP for Colchester, made a last ditch attempt to revive it in 2002. The attempt failed. The idea has been revived in 2008 - but what has changed?
The front covers of two carnival programmes from 1927 and 1938. Please keep returning to this page for updates. 
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Last updated 26th June 2008
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