At times it looked like a scene from Dante’s Inferno. But the weather was mild and the crowds were mellow. No, it wasn’t the Nine Circles of Hell. This was just Brighton on an even-more-extraordinary-than-usual Saturday night.
We were out and about at the amazing White Night festival. Free live music indoors and out, art installations, galleries and museums open into the small hours, talks in coffee shops right through the night, pianos dotted at random for impromptu music making by passers-by, night-time knitting, a half-marathon that started at midnight, modern jazz on the beachfront bandstand at dawn.
And – as it came hard on the heels of that afternoon’s extraordinary Zombie Walk – we had the added bonus of the streets being full of Hammer-Horror-style people dressed as gory Zombies, scarey Clowns, and swooning Victorian victims complete with wild backcombed hair and full-length white nighties.
So, two zeitgeisty events in one to mark the day the clocks go back and the start of winter – reinforcing this free-spirited city’s brand values and providing plenty of reasons to visit, since all the White Nights events were unique to that one night, and Zombie Walks are still pretty rare.
For those of you that tweet, put #whitenight into Twitter and you can ‘watch’ the night unfurl courtesy of the people who were there: “I learnt to knit at 3am this morning!” and “watching weary zombies dance to live jazz (at 6am)” etc.
Funding was from Brighton & Hove Arts Commission, the EU Interreg programme, the City Council, SEEDA and the Arts Council. It was resourced by various council departments and public-funded bodies including the cultural team, VisitBrighton and Sussex Police. So, sadly, as with so many cultural activities these days, I have to ask: will we see its like again?