OPINION: What price would you pay for the arts? Sharon Canavar, Harrogate International Festivals

We think we provided employment whilst animating one of Harrogate’s amazing spaces; creating the space to see it in a new way, at a different time, and to create some excitement and fun after a difficult couple of years for everyone.

The feedback has been fantastic, in person and across social media, and we’re thrilled that people loved visiting it as much as we enjoyed delivering it.

Seeing kids jumping up and down in excitement before they entered the park and the wide-eyed feedback from our audiences including my favourite “I thought the fire experiments were odd, but then spent 40 minutes watching their wildly therapeutic performance!”

Isn’t it funny the comments that stay with you though?

‘How ridiculous’, ‘up there with the UCI debacle’, ‘how dare they close the park’ and finally ‘it’s too expensive’. These were such a small segment of the commentary during the early event marketing, but this stuff sticks.

Particularly for me, the pricing issue.

I grew up in Harrogate. I had the benefit of getting to see great gigs as part of the Harrogate International Festivals, world famous artists performing right here in what was then quite a sleepy town of flowers, and posh tea rooms and fancy cakes. I want other people to have the same opportunity, and here at HIF we have tried to keep as much as possible free for everyone.

All our digital delivery was free to access during the pandemic, and continues to be through our HIFPlayer.

We hosted ‘brass on a bus’ gigs from an open top bus, delivered our 1571 lighting and sound projects, the projector bike tours across town and the ‘In Memoriam’ installation on Harrogate Stray, and most recently the North Pole Post Office to name just a few that we have delivered over the last 18 months.

All free to everyone when there was little to no ticket or sponsorship income for the festivals, but we wanted to create something for our community to enjoy.

That’s not to say we don’t recognise that there is a real squeeze on the cost of living at the moment. That’s why we tried to keep the cost for the three day event as low as possible, by underwriting the cost of tickets to keep them as accessible as we could.

The same show elsewhere was over £18 for adults and £16 for children. By using our own funding we reduced the cost to £12 for adults and £6 for children - and if we could have gone further we would have done so, but we couldn’t without compromising quality or safety.

We hope those that were able to come enjoyed every moment of it.

We’re really grateful you chose the Festivals to support, and we hope you loved the event as much as we did.

As we open up even more, we’ll announce even more events within our Summer Season, and hope that we can continue to find a balanced mixture of free and ticketed events that benefit our beautiful district and our communities.