Illuminating place: the making of community light festivals in the north of England

Skelly Faragher, Gail (2025) Illuminating place: the making of community light festivals in the north of England. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This situated research project investigates the vernacular practices of community light festivals as a mode of progressive place-making. I propose that this form of placemaking encourages alternative visions of place to be produced and shared. These visions of place identity are capable of providing participants with a sense of togetherness, communal expression and excitement. If places are temporary, relational and processual then these festivals provide a mobile demonstration of the re-negotiation of a sense of place. Participants embody and carry the meanings and values of a place as they walk right through the middle of it, challenging the power dynamics therein. They re-invigorate a sense of place through annual, symbolically illuminated festival iterations. By employing communal practices, participants demonstrate an openness to the future (Massey, 2005) as all those who live in, or who subscribe to, a place identity are folded in to festival life. Community light festivals occur largely outside of the creative economy and currently survive with little external policy input. This study therefore investigates alternative scenarios of progressive place-making including mobile geographies, vernacular creativity, cultural practices, materialities of illumination and the nature of community festival temporalities as evidence. My unique contribution to knowledge is in unearthing the detailed practices of community light festivals and of the participants who produce, create, situate and experience them. This research therefore reveals how a sense of place is re-constructed, reiterated and shared through mobile processions of illuminated artefacts which are symbolic of both an individual and a shared sense of place.