July is arguably the month of festival crescendo in Harrogate: The much-loved North Yorkshire Spa Town is a riot of colour, culture – and cool – wherever you look.
Having just said goodbye to the magnificent Spiegeltent that had set up camp in Crescent Gardens for two weeks – and entertained artists including The Gypsy Queens, Punjabi Roots and Jo Harrop – who in-turn entertained us in this frankly ‘magical’ nomadic venue, the festival team are only days away from delivering their Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, which sees lovers of the genre head to The Old Swan Hotel from across the country – and the globe.
And the HACS Harrogate Music Festival has just taken a bow, following almost a month of unsurpassed international music from musicians including Esther Abrami (check out the brilliant Playlist she created for Mag North last year) and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
The Berwins Salon North series of lectures also returned for one-night-only on 14 July, when Journalist and Academic David Robson spoke with real passion about ‘The Laws of Connection’, the importance of maintaining social ties – and ‘the beautiful mess effect’. One of three speakers for the enlightening evening, Robson was accompanied by Sound Therapist Farzana Ali, who captivated/mesmerised/hypnotised an entire audience for 4 minutes with the frequencies resonating from her Himalayan Sound Bowls. Incredible.
The Writer, Journalist, Traveller and Soldier Ash Bhardwaj’s rearguard action confused his Northumberland with his North Yorkshire – but he did redeem himself by informing the knowledge-hungry Harrogate audience that “champagne isn’t just a drink – it’s a region too”. (Who knew?)
However, there is much, much more to Harrogate International Festivals and the dedicated team of creative professionals who welcome over 90,000 people to the town each year and who are responsible for an estimated economic impact of £8.2m on the local economy. So, when Mag North sat down last week with its CEO Sharon Canavar, we were anxious to talk about the stuff that festival-goers don’t necessarily consider.
And from the outset, it’s clear what motivates this cultural leader: “I had loads of opportunities growing up. I grew up in Harrogate and at that time in schools we had singing and assemblies, so everyone could have seen the benefits of that. There was Peripatetic music, which was free at point of access. All the way through my life - music has been such a key part.
“The big thing for me is that everybody should be able to enjoy the same [creative] opportunities that were available 20 or 30 years ago. I think these opportunities are needed more than ever, because we've got to be clear about what benefit involvement in the arts brings in terms of social and personal development.
“The health and well-being impact [of the arts] is key and just taking that time to see a concert or participate together in an ensemble is so valuable.
“From a personal perspective, I think that's where the arts absolutely make a difference. I've talked a bit about music but equally, reading was a huge thing for me. And I can see it in my own children; they don't read like I did. I was an avid reader growing up, but now there are so many distractions with screens and streaming – but just sitting with a good book takes you to a world that you couldn't imagine on your own. And that’s the motivation with our literacy development programme.”
HIF+ is an Ongoing Outreach Programme delivered by the festival team and its partners and because the registered charity isn’t publicly funded in any way, they are constantly working to raise vital income to provide this and their other development initiatives. Festival sponsorship and ticket sales are vital to allow HIF to not only deliver an unsurpassed year-round series of events, but also rebuild their outreach programmes, post-pandemic.
Sharon: “We’ve got The Big Read, which is the biggest book club in the North of England. We get 1500 books out and into the hands of a different variety of partners that we work with, from Food Banks to Libraries – and other community settings.”
This year’s Big Read launches during the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival this coming weekend (20 July) and the launch event will be led by the Festival’s Reader-in-Residence, author Luca Veste, who discusses Ajay Chowdhury’s The Detective.
“In September we’ll take Big Read on tour. Readers across the North will be able to head to a free event to talk about the book, make new friends – and be introduced to other work. The other objective of the project is to drive library participation.
“We also do programmes in schools. We have our ‘Kids, Spies and Private Eyes’ project, and that again is about getting kids, particularly Year 6 and below, involved in reading. It works particularly well for the boys, because we do CSI [crime scene investigation] – and set up a crime scene and then investigate a ‘real life’ crime.”
Sharon explains that blood spatter forms in a different way depending on if you clonk someone over the head with a wine bottle – or champagne bottle. (That’s good to know. We've logged that.)
“We show the kids all this stuff which they really love and that’s how we ‘hook’ them into reading. We do lots of work around writing a story at the crime scene as the perpetrator, the victim – and the witness. It gets them thinking in lots of different and creative ways and we get some amazing stories."
Ms Canavar has been the CEO of Harrogate Festival since 2009, but it does seem that her career was leading to this point from a very early stage:
“I had some great work experience as part of my degree working with what's now the Harrogate Convention Centre. I worked with the production department for a couple of weeks and so got to climb on the gantries and was up in the fly and all that sort of stuff Health and Safety would never let you do now!
“As part of that, I was seconded to the music festival which used to take place at Easter and I loved it. That camaraderie of making something special happen with a group of people who really care was amazing.
“The festival as we know it now, started in 1966 and quickly became an integral moment of the town and district’s cultural year. Clive Wilson, who was one of the founders of the festival said: ‘Look, if we want to have a festival for our town, we have to do it ourselves’.
“Over the years, we’ve had some amazing artists and have been able to do fantastic things. Because of the timing we’re able to work with a lot of artists who are on their way to the Edinburgh Festival.”
With an incredibly talented team alongside her, Ms Canavar is clear that the festival has become a key Northern socio-economic, environmental, community and cultural cornerstone.
“I often get really frustrated when the national press talk about Harrogate and it's all; ‘Lovely Gardens. Bettys Tea Rooms - and sometimes a ‘Darby and Joan’ approach to the town. All those things are phenomenal and are part of what we are, but they're not all that we are and I think it can just be lazy journalism, or they haven't really got under the skin of who we are as a town. There's a huge part of Harrogate that's massively underrepresented, certainly in terms of poverty statistics and other indices that you know aren't addressed because it doesn't fit the narrative necessarily of who Harrogate is. I’m passionate that no one in our community misses out on opportunity.
“We're a small team, so in my role, fundraising, operational and marketing is central - as well as cleaning the toilets and mopping the floor at the end of the night. But we're really lucky and it just takes time to get people on board for them to understand what we represent, because sometimes if they only see one part of what we do [as a festival], they miss the bigger picture.
“Doing anything in the arts is expensive – and certainly the cost-of-living crisis and increase in prices have made a massive difference [to visitor numbers], so when you’re reliant on ticket sales like we are, that's always a challenge. But we have so many amazing sponsors and partnerships – and those organisations don't just give money. They give time, they give resources and they're massive advocates and ambassadors for our work too.”
With a backdrop of large and small cultural events across the UK often struggling – or ceasing to exist, why are arts festivals so important?
“I think Arts Festivals are special. They're often seen a little bit as the icing on the cake because they of what they do. Even if you've got a great cultural sector full of theatres and art centres and lots of amateur artwork, they bring something else to a town or community.
“A festival brings that sprinkle of something a little bit unique and they also provide a liminal-space experience that you're away from everything and you can 'take your foot off the brake of life' and try something new, try something different. See things in a different light or in a different space.
“They are also great for the economy. You must look at our Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival [which runs this year Thursday 18 to Sunday 21 July]. We buy up all the hotel rooms for that weekend and we sell 2000 hotel bedrooms, just through the town alone.
“And we know that of the visitors to the Crime Writing festival, 70% come from well over an hour's drive time and will stay overnight for the full three nights. A further 5% travel internationally. For our Music Festival, the stats are almost reversed.
“There's a whole amount of community and opportunity elements that are tied into the concept of a festival too. Certainly with us, there are our ‘Masterclass’ opportunities, we have free tickets for students too – we want everyone to come along and have a go. You might find something about yourself and the world around you that you didn't otherwise know.”
Another hugely popular element of the annual festival calendar is the Berwins Salon North series, which presents stimulating ideas in arts, science and psychology, ‘in a cabaret-style evening designed to excite your curiosity and change your life for the better’.
“2012 was our first one we did together and we never expected that it would still be running all these years later, but I feel it's one of those things that is really needed now more than ever. There's something that sounds really weird - and I don't mean it to – but it’s almost religious, because nobody goes to church anymore and is able to sit for half-an-hour while someone speaks (regardless of if you believe it or not). But it's in that half-an-hour when you aren't interrupted, that your thoughts could wander.
“I think Salons offer that same experience, because some – not every speaker is going to be for you and if you've got 3 speakers, there'll be a moment where your mind wanders and you cogitate what you've just learned. You can find yourself saying: ‘I totally didn't know that…and I'm going to apply that to my life'. Or 'I'm going to read more about that'…It's thanks to those these experts that come and speak from the stage, who try to condense their entire life of knowledge into 25 minutes.”
Summer is clearly a key moment for the festival team: “This is our biggest, hardest month [July] because it's when we're delivering all the stuff we've worked on throughout the year. There's so much that can go wrong because we do so much. We’ve got Spiegeltent, we've got our Classical Music Festival, we've got Pop-Up, then we've got Theakston Crime coming down the road. But we're also trying to plan and think about next year.
“We've got a bigger challenge ahead because obviously with the demise of Harrogate Borough Council [which was subsumed as part of the new Unitary Authority for North Yorkshire] I think the cultural landscape will change significantly. We need to distribute funding and opportunity equally across the county, so I think that's going to be a challenge. Communicating the value again [of what we do] will be key.
“While funding is hard to secure – and it's getting scarcer, there are lots of renegotiations of different deals underway that aren't quite as valuable as they once were, because everybody's feeling the pinch.
“It comes back to the fact that I want everyone to be able to access a bigger, wider world around them. Not everyone's going to be able to stay in Harrogate and live here. They're going to go off to university or they might move for work or family. I think sometimes the Harrogate ‘bubble’ can be a little bit protective and we need to show that there's a whole world of opportunity and a whole world of difference out there - and it's really important that we embrace that as early as possible.”
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