7-580: The Bristol Harbour Festival is a free festival held annually in the English city of Bristol , which celebrates the city's maritime heritage and the importance of Bristol's docks and harbour. Most of the activities, including live music, street performances, fireworks and a variety of other live entertainments, are held on or near the waterfront of Bristol Harbour . Venues include Queen Square , Lloyds Amphitheatre, Millennium Square and Castle Park , with seagoing vessels moored nearby. The liveliest part of
14-608: A pirate ship in 2013. SS Great Britain hosts an outdoor stage with BBC Radio Bristol , while Happy City creates an interactive area within Lloyds Amphitheatre to demonstrate all the elements which make up a happy life. In 2013 the Thekla Harbour Stage was created in Muddock to showcase up and coming bands alongside a new festival bandstand. In previous years entertainment has included Beth Rowley ,
21-860: Is preferred. They are identifiable by being multi-day events connected by a camping community without centralised control. The pioneering free festival movement started in the UK in the 1970s. David Bowie's song Memory of a Free Festival , recorded in September 1969 and included on the 1969 album David Bowie , mentions the free festival organised by the Beckenham Arts Lab and held on the Croydon Road Recreation Ground on 16 August 1969. The 1972 to 1974 Windsor Free Festival , held in Windsor Great Park , England,
28-647: The Irene and the Matthew being two of the tall ships to attend that year. In 2013 fireworks returned to the festival after a two-year hiatus. The Bristol Harbour Festival has a variety of entertainment from dance acts, interactive theatre, international circus acts and a mix of musicians. The Dance Village, programmed by Swindon Dance, features a main stage and participation area where visitors can learn to dance. Cirque Bijou's famous circus stage takes over Castle Park , next to an interactive Children's Area, which featured
35-447: The Hot 8 Brass Band , DJ Derek , The Blessing , The Bristol Ambling Band, Phantom Limb , Kid Carpet , Natty , Barry Adamson and VV Brown . 51°27′N 2°36′W / 51.45°N 2.60°W / 51.45; -2.60 Free festival Free festivals are a combination of music, arts and cultural activities, for which often no admission is charged, but involvement
42-419: The festival is quayside, but the main attractions are entertainment designed to engage all the communities of Bristol, as well as entertain the thousands of visitors to the city. The city has hosted the festival since 1971, when it was started as part of an ultimately successful attempt to save the docks from being filled in. In 2012, the festival attracted over 300,000 visitors, its highest ever attendance, with
49-540: Was a free festival. The 'organisation' was mostly Ubi Dwyer distributing thousands of leaflets and asking people and bands to bring their own equipment and create their own environment – "bring what you expect to find." "Free festivals are practical demonstrations of what society could be like all the time: miniature utopias of joy and communal awareness rising for a few days from a grey morass of mundane, inhibited, paranoid and repressive everyday existence…The most lively [young people] escape geographically and physically to
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