From fashion to festivals
An interview with Wayne Hemingway, Hemingway Design
Welcome to the sixth edition of my newsletter all about arts festivals. Thanks to my new subscribers for joining and to all my existing subscribers for sticking with me.
This month is the first in an occasional series of interviews with leading lights in the world of festivals, talking to the people who set up, create, curate and oversee their delivery. I’m kicking off with an interview with Wayne Hemingway of Hemingway Design.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Wayne and some of his team on place branding projects in towns and cities across England when I was a Co-Director of CTConsults.
Wayne and his wife Gerardine started out in the world of fashion, design and club culture creating the hugely successful Red or Dead fashion label in the early 1980s. So, their route into place branding, master planning, housing, interiors, brand identity, product design, regeneration, placemaking, festivals and events might seem a world away from their roots. Here Wayne explains how festivals are a natural evolution of their socially minded design ethos.
What was the first arts festival that you went to or a festival that had strong arts programming in it, that really made an impression on you. And why?
I went to loads of music festivals, like Rock Against Racism and all the stuff that took place in Victoria Park in London and in Manchester as well when I was a teenager, and they had a big impression, but they were music rather than multi-arts.
But the first kind of art focused festival that comes to mind was called the Village Fête at the V&A and I think it was when our eldest kids were about 10 or 11. My guess is that would have been 25 or more years ago [Editor’s Note: The Village Fête started in 1999 and ran for ten years]. And it took place in the outside areas in the courtyard of the V&A, and it was just lots of artists and designers doing things like painting strange things on plates and it was like a village fête. But like one you've never seen before.
It was around the time or just before the start of the YBA (Young British Artists) and they all had that feel about it where everybody was subverting, lots of artists and designers were subverting very normal things. And it was really funny, and it felt like it was for everybody, kids and adults. We used to go to it every year.
So, how did you get involved in creating and producing festivals?
Well, in the Red or Dead days when we were doing catwalk shows they were big events in the end. We'd got used to putting on events during the Red or Dead days, but we didn't really call them events, but effectively they were, and we enjoyed doing them.
And we'd been to lots of festivals and lots of gigs and lots of things with the kids, and at all of them I always wished that they would have content that was multi-generational. We've been to things to see like the V Festival [Editor’s Note: it was a commercial music festival that ran from 1996-2017] with the kids and all of the normal stuff. But they always felt just a little bit one dimensional in terms of being very focused on watching things on the stage. And yes, there was the ancillary stuff, a few workshops and things going on and a few installations, but ultimately, it was focused on a set of stages.
I've never been able to disassociate music, fashion and art that for me, when you had a movement, they all happened together. But for me, like punk that came when I was 15, it wasn't just about the bands, it wasn't just about the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks, The Damned. It was a whole aesthetic that it couldn't have happened for me without the way that you dressed, it couldn't have happened for me without the fonts and the graphic and the DIY aesthetic of the covers of the posters and the flyers and the invites and the tickets.
All of it was a movement and I started to think about it. That it was the same for all the things that I've been into, whether it was the post punk, whether it was the New Romantic, whether it was all these things. And because of Red or Dead, our first brand, we were right at the centre of these fashion and youth culture movements. But also, music was just as important, we couldn't have done Red or Dead without the music movements that went with it.
It was just hand in hand, we were going to the clubs, we were watching the bands, and everything came from that rather than, it just being, oh, let's do some fashion.
It felt to me as if there could be a festival that put it all back together and stopped being about being in a field and gawping at people on a stage. And it was all seeming to become really corporate and this whole thing about just thousands of people stood in front of the stage just wasn't Gerardine and me. We'd come out of club culture, and it just felt like youth culture was being hijacked by big business and big brands and it was all about money and less about the involvement of the public.
You know I was lucky enough to grow up at a time where everything was a bit more intimate in terms of club culture and youth culture and watching bands and all of that. So, I wanted to bring that back and we had this idea of celebrating - wouldn't it be great if you could celebrate the history of youth culture movements? And obviously our background as well, before Red or Dead, and the way that we've often dressed in second hand clothes has given us this kind of deep understanding of the history of fashion. I've always been a music collector, and into the history of music and I thought, you know, could it be possible to put together a festival that brought the history of music, the history of art, the history of fashion and bring that all together and do it kind of decade focused? That was the concept.
We came up with this idea of the Vintage Festival and then it went further, could we recreate the environment so that every single stage turned into club venues, and so we built club venues. We wanted to make it immersive so that as you went in to listen to soul music from the seventies, you were going into a facsimile of Wigan Casino - we even tracked down the same carpets. We did a bar that was almost exactly a reproduction of the Wigan Casino bar. We then built an outdoor rave set that just felt like it had come out of 1988 or 1989, like a warehouse set. And so, we built these almost like film sets. We had the authentic music. We encouraged people to dress up and we sold the clothing and the artworks that were hung in these places and so everything felt like you were experiencing that time.
Then we added workshops to that. So, you could make the clothes, make the punk seven-inch covers. It just worked, people loved it and the thing that surprised us the most was the fact that it was just as popular as dancing and purchasing of the clothing. It was just crazy how successful the workshops were and the hands-on stuff and in fact, the sign-ups for all of the workshops was almost immediate, they were the most successful part of it. So that's where it came from really and to have this kind of festival where you weren't just gawping, I think is the northern word.
I've never been a gawper [Translation: stare stupidly]
What is the process for how you work in a place to create the concept for a festival?
Well, there are two different kinds of festivals that we do. If we talk about the not for profits and the ones that come out of urban regeneration. So, the not for profits like the National Festival of Making, the Festival of Thrift, First Light and We Invented the Weekend.
So, the first one that we did was the Festival of Thrift. We were introduced to this guy who had taken this industrial estate that I think was built between the 1930s and 1950s. It was the old Paton and Baldwins factory, which made cotton and threads and that kind of stuff [Editor’s Note: It was the world’s largest wool factory on opening and was constructed between 1945-51]. It was just on the inner suburb of Darlington and what he'd done is he'd taken these buildings, like the kind of factory buildings that you draw as a kid. They usually all get knocked down. But these were in absolutely brilliant condition.
I love those buildings, and they're not listed or anything. We were introduced to the developer John Orchard, and we liked his attitude. He'd lovingly landscaped it and brought it back to life and he’d brought in progressive companies to start renting space within it. And we couldn't believe it, we thought it was one of the best regenerations of an industrial area we've ever seen. And it had had no publicity, probably because it was in Darlington. And he said to us - I'd love to get publicity because I need to rent more space, and I need to make this work. I just need more people to know about it and not just people from Darlington because we need to get businesses from further away to start to come and know about this.
We were there looking at what he's doing, and he was talking about how he'd done it so thriftily and what he'd done is he'd upcycled. He'd basically upcycled these buildings and then was using amazing materials to upcycle the development of it. So, we thought you can't do better than by having an event that people enjoy coming to and they use all these spaces and get the word out. So, we said to him - maybe we could do something based around what you're doing - and we came up with the concept of a Festival of Thrift. There wasn't a national festival of sustainability and reusing and that's how it came about.
He put a bit of money in, and I think the aim was for 3 to 5,000 people to turn up and 15,000 people turned up! Then we realised that we’d created something that was bigger than what we’d anticipated, and something that had more legs than just talking about the regeneration of this site, that people loved this festival. A festival that was full of recycling and fixing and making, and just looking at how we live a light touch life. Then we found somebody who we'd worked with called Stella Hall. So, we brought Stella in as well because the festival grew very, very quickly and we created a community interest company. That allowed us to start to bring in partners and Arts Council England [Editor’s Note: the national development agency for creativity and culture that provides grant funding]. And it's just grown and grown and grown and it's been going 12 years now. It's an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) now [Editor’s Note: in receipt of a multi-year funding agreement]. In fact, all of the not-for-profit festivals we’ve established are NPOs, apart from We Invented the Weekend.
The pattern has been the same for all the other festivals. The National Festival of Making in Blackburn is totally about regeneration. It started off with Blackburn is Open - regenerating a street that was totally and utterly decimated, then, Making Rooms, which is a place where creativity, technology and advanced manufacturing come together in a community facility. Everything was around this clear understanding that Blackburn as a town is a making town and always has been. These things have to be backed up with statistics and reality. Blackburn, statistically, is the town that's got more people making things, more people getting up in the morning and going to work and making things, than in any other town.
First Light is important because again, that started off from a Master Plan. We got paid to do a vision for the seafront at South Beach. We took our inspiration from the town of Lowestoft which is the UK’s most easterly town and where the first light of dawn hits our shores every day. So, we co-created a 24-hour arts festival of free events that celebrates the UK’s ‘First Light’ of the day over the midsummer weekend in July, and 30,000 people attended the first festival in 2019.
How do you work with private sector developers to create events?
Urban Village Fête in Greenwich Peninsula has been going a long time now. The biggest inspiration for that was the Village Fête at the V&A, which had stopped many years before we’d started the Urban Village Fête. But the idea was to bring to life a new district of London that had been just industrial up until then. London is a series of villages, like a lot of cities are and the idea was that this area was going to be an urban village. Villagers have fêtes and it's about community, but this is London, and it had to be a bit more creative and that's where that one came from.
What are some of the differences and challenges between public and private sectors?
All of the events that we do are based in community and working with the community, but we also want them to have regional and national appeal as well. Number one - think bigger. Number two - ultimately bring in more funding and just reach out to a broader set of practitioners and artists who are going to join you. I think the biggest is always funding, it's always the challenge. If you're clever and you understand what the public wants then getting people, getting the numbers there is not the hardest thing at all. The hardest thing always has to do with balancing the ambition, because all of our events have a lot of big ambition, and change, because you constantly need to change, you can't stand still. You've got to evolve; everything has to evolve and excite the public in a different way all the time. And I think the challenge is always having the money to do that.
Can you tell me about some festivals that you've had no involvement in that you've really enjoyed, that you think are worth attending and that you would recommend?
The Perth Festival in Australia is always interesting. It takes you around the city, which I always like. My perennial favourite from when I first came to London, has always been the Notting Hill Carnival. I mean, it has its issues if you're not used to negotiating or navigating the area because of the sheer size. They say it’s 2 million people and it always seems like a big number. So, I think that is unbelievable as a festival in terms of the freedom and that's a wonderful festival.
But what gets you really excited about festivals?
Getting people out of the humdrum of everyday life sometimes and just making people smile and making people happy. That's ultimately it. I think that's why everybody who's involved in it would do it.
Is there a place where you would love to create a new festival and, and if so, where would that be?
We get the biggest kick out of creating festivals in places which have been deprived. So, Festival of Thrift is now in Billingham and there's never been anything like this in Billingham (Editor’s note: Darlington and Billingham are both in the Tees Valley, North East England). Everywhere has got value and everywhere has got people who can bring that value out.
The joy of working with the team in Blackburn has been seeing communities come together. Blackburn is like a lot of places which has had its cohesion issues and has been badly maligned in the press. We’ve seen how the making narrative has genuinely brought communities together. [Editor’s Note: Wayne went to grammar school in Blackburn].
Then seeing how First Light continues to change and gives people a warm feeling about their town. People like that idea of ‘all back to ours’. People like the idea of showing off how great their place can be, and festivals can do that.
It wasn't a festival that we worked on at Dreamland theme park in Margate, although it's become a festival site now. The fact that people could show off Dreamland to the rest of the world has been wonderful for the people of Margate as well as the owners of Dreamland. And it's that thing about just doing festivals and helping to make a place feel good because of it.
Visiting seaside towns you think, imagine doing that here.
And obviously you've done Vintage by the Sea in Morecambe, where you were born.
Vintage by the Sea is another just joyous event really. That I'm obviously really proud of it because that was taking our vintage festival idea, working with two locals, Lauren Zawadzki and Elena Gifford (Deco Publique) and making it a free event.
Any top tips for anyone who wants to start a festival?
Well, don't go into it thinking you're going to get wealthy because I don't think that's very true. The people who make money out of festivals are the likes of Live Nation and you can't compete with those kinds of companies. So, go into it knowing that the main thing you're going to do is make people happy, rather than make yourself wealthy because it just doesn't do that.
And what's one of the biggest learnings you've had from working on festivals?
I think the biggest learning is to not get too disappointed when it pisses it down!
Because it does sometimes and when you have a free festival and it pisses it down, it doesn't feel very good sometimes because people go home. But you know you’ve always got to bear in mind that next year it possibly won't rain.
And finally, I’d like to say a huge thank you to Wayne for taking time out of his always busy schedule to chat to me and share his vast experience of developing festivals for this edition of my newsletter.
UK Festivals News
Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture launched its programme to great fanfare with highlights including the opening event RISE with theatre director Kirsty Housley & Bradford-born Steven Frayne (formerly known as magician Dynamo) bringing magic to unexpected places, and a New Music Biennial.
I’ll be attending this online Power of Events report launch run by the Belong Network. They’ll be discussing findings from their latest report exploring what makes an event that results in people feeling more connected to their communities and that builds social cohesion.
Herefordshire Council is developing a new Events and Festivals Framework and is looking for local and regional input. CTConsults (my brother Andrew is one of the Directors) has been commissioned to develop the Framework.
London’s Voila! Festival relaunches as a multi-venue festival that will include the biggest number of venues and languages in its three-week programme.
Tate Modern has announced a new free festival to mark its 25th anniversary in May 2025.
Brighton Dome + Festivals has revealed their new Chief Executive, whilst Hay Festival shares news of their new Trustee.
Exeter Northcott Theatre has relaunched its Artists’ Scheme as part of October’s Elevate Festival.
Next year marks the 200th anniversary of the modern railway with a year-long national celebration taking place as part of Railway 200. A nine-month international festival is also planned across County Durham and Tees Valley to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in S&DR200 from March to November, culminating in a mass street theatre performance – Ghost Train.
Critics are warning of ‘chaos’ next summer when the recently announced Oasis gigs at Murrayfield Stadium clash with the first weekend of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Clash diary, what clash diary?!
And continuing with Edinburgh, The Stage outlines why the Festival Fringe is facing its biggest fight for survival.
London Design Festival has announced the winners of this year’s London Design Medals, and the first London Soundtrack Festival will take place next year celebrating music in film, television and games.
A last-minute entrant – Julian Trevelyan - to the Leeds International Piano Competition has beaten 60 other musicians to make it to the Grand Final.
Liverpool’s DaDaFest International announces the dates for its 40th anniversary next year. And Liverpool Biennial is looking for a new Chair.
Wonderful to see that the National Lottery Heritage Fund has awarded a grant of £248,500 to Manchester Histories for Queer Up North 1992-2002: Celebrating Manchester’s LGBTQ+ Heritage. I was on the board of the pioneering and influential Queer up North festival in its later years.
Derbyshire County Council has secured a major Arts Council England Place Partnership award to deliver Derbyshire Makes, a three-year countywide programme, including an annual festival celebrating making in all its forms. Full disclosure, I’m the Marketing and Communications lead for this exciting programme.
International Festivals News
The city of Lublin has been selected to be Poland’s European Capital of Culture for 2029. I was lucky enough to visit one of the four bidding cities - Bielsko-Bíala - in June, and despite not winning the European designation, it will be Poland’s first Capital of Culture in 2026. You can read about my visit to the city here.
ARTNews selects the must see shows at Berlin Art Week including an exhibition on filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the shows to see at PST Art: Art and Science Collide in Los Angeles, as well as the must see biennials for autumn, and includes a review of the Bienal Femsa in Mexico.
Unfortunately debris from artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s fireworks display at PST Art: Art and Science Collide struck several guests, some of whom needed first-aid treatment.
In a previous newsletter, I included a story about the postponement of the Dakar Art Biennial. ARTNews explains how the local community rallied together to put on a ‘non-off-non-Biennial’ event as a selling event. I think that basically means they put on an event anyway.
Uzbekistan has launched a new biennial for 2025 – the Bukhara Biennial, set to be one of the biggest exhibitions of its kind in Central Asia.
Dublin Theatre Festival is looking for a new Artistic Director and Chief Executive.
In news that will surprise no-one who remembers London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics, attendance at museums in Paris during the Olympic Games dropped 25% despite their involvement in the Cultural Olympiad.
Toronto International Film Festival cancelled screenings of a controversial Russians at war documentary amid security concerns.
Orlando, Florida has gone big on promoting its autumn/winter festivals for the visitor market.
Los Angeles-based artist Nikita Gale has won the Whitney Biennial’s $100,000 Bucksbaum Award.
UK Festivals Highlights
October is a busy month again in my home city with Manchester Literature Festival, Manchester Science Festival, Beyond the Music and WOMEX.
Spoilt for choice for other literary festivals across the country including the Scottish International Storytelling Festival in Edinburgh, also in Scotland, the Orkney Storytelling Festival and Tobermory Book Festival, Cheltenham Literature Festival celebrates its 75th anniversary, two university-led festivals with Off the Shelf Festival of Words from the University of Sheffield, and the Liverpool Literary Festival from the University of Liverpool, London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre, the Caribbean’s leading literature festival - the Bocas Lit Fest - returns to the British Library, Lancaster’s Litfest Autumn Weekend, the inaugural Norwich Book Festival, Durham Book Festival, and in Yorkshire, Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival plus a former client, Ilkley Literature Festival.
Did you know that Manchester and Norwich are both UNESCO Cities of Literature, along with Edinburgh, Exeter and Nottingham? I worked on Norwich’s unsuccessful bid to stage the first UK City of Culture which helped to pave the way for the city and its National Centre for Writing to secure the city’s designation.
Wales presents its major biennial art festival Artes Mundi across Wales again in Cardiff, Swansea, Llandudno and, for the first time, Aberystwyth, which is already home to the annual International Ceramics Festival. The six shortlisted artists in line to win the UK’s largest contemporary art prize of £40,000 have been announced.
Film festivals include BFI London Film Festival and Yorkshire Silent Film Festival becomes Northern Silent Film Festival this year with a month-long, open-access region-wide celebration of live-scored film. For music documentary fans, there’s the Doc’n Roll Festival with screenings across the country.
An eclectic mix of London festivals include Dance Umbrella, Bloomsbury Festival with this year’s theme of Human.Kind, Native Spirit Festival for the best in Indigenous Cinematic Arts, Kite Festival by Tortoise Media at Abbey Road Studios, and Streatham Festival, originally founded by my friend and fellow consultant Mel Larsen in 2002.
In Birmingham there’s the Comedy Festival and the biennial Fierce Festival.
The season of light festivals starts, more on that in a future newsletter, with Lightpool Festival in Blackpool to coincide with the Illuminations, River of Light in Liverpool, Enlighten in Accrington, and Diwali celebrations happening across the country including in Leicester, which is one of the biggest outside India, and in Trafalgar Square in London.
Leeds presents Light Night, and good luck to my friend and colleague Natasha Howes who has taken over running the event this year. Also in West Yorkshire, there’s Marsden Jazz Festival.
More music at the 10th The Cumnock Tryst festival in East Ayrshire, Scotland led by Scottish composer and conductor Sir James MacMillan CBE.
Blackfest, the grassroots arts festival celebrating black artists continues in Liverpool till the end of October.
International Festivals Highlights
New York has a bumper month of festivals with The New Yorker Festival, celebrating its 25th anniversary, Brooklyn Academy of Music’s The Next Wave Festival, and the Annual Festival of New Musicals.
Elsewhere in the USA is the 15th San Francisco Dance Film Festival and they always have an online strand too - a must for dance fans like me.
Over in Canada, there’s the equivalent with Nuit Blanche Toronto with this year’s theme of Bridging Distance.
In Ireland, Derry hosts the International Choir Festival and for gothic goings-on there’s the Bram Stoker Festival in Dublin, celebrating one of Ireland’s most beloved writers.
For jewellery lovers, there’s METALLOphone biennial in Lithuania.
The first SXSW festival outside America returns for the second time to Sydney for all things technology and innovation, screen, music and games.
One of the world’s biggest Puppetry Festivals takes place in Bielsko-Bíala, Poland.
Taiwan also stages its Yunlin International Puppet Arts Festival, and Nuit Blanche Taipei transforms the city into a large-scale art museum for one night only.
All Hemingway Design festival photos courtesy of Hemingway Design.
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See you next month for more festival news, stories, and insights.
Fantastic. There’s so much in here.