Lancashire Encounter: the Preston city centre festival and programme

A street arts festival built around the one paved square in Preston big enough to hold it, and the museum steps that serve as its backdrop.

The Lancashire Encounter festival is a street arts and performance festival held in Preston, first staged in 2016. It occupies the city centre itself, needing no venue, and the Lancashire Encounter Preston layout has barely moved since: the Flag Market takes the main stages, the Harris steps become a backdrop and a seating bank, and the streets running off the square carry the walkabout and installation work.

It matters to the city out of proportion to its age because it filled a specific gap. Preston has the Guild every twenty years and very little at that civic scale in between; the Lancashire Encounter festival gives the same grounds a recurring reason to be used.

What the Lancashire Encounter festival is

The festival's centre of gravity is outdoor performance: aerial and circus work, large scale puppetry and processional pieces, street theatre, and music on temporary stages. Because it is free to walk into and staged in public space, the Lancashire Encounter Preston crowd is the ordinary Saturday crowd of the city centre, never a ticketed one, and the programming is built for that — work that reads from a distance and does not need a darkened room.

Indoor and seated elements do appear, using the Harris and the city's other culture venues, but the identity of the event is the outdoor half.

Lancashire Encounter in Preston city centre: the grounds it uses

The Flag Market is the site. It is the paved square in front of the Harris, and it is the only space in the Preston city centre large enough for a main stage and a crowd at the same time — which is why the festival, the Christmas lights and the Guild processions all end up on the same flagstones.

From there the festival spreads along Fishergate and Church Street and into the markets quarter, and in some editions down into Avenham Park for work that needs grass or height. If you are navigating it, the Harris is the landmark: everything is within five minutes of the museum steps.

How the programme is put together

The Lancashire Encounter programme is assembled around commissioned outdoor pieces, with local companies and community participation built in alongside touring street arts work. The printed Lancashire Encounter programme has historically been the main way audiences navigated it, laid out by ground and time, never by company, which suits a festival where the deciding question is which square to stand in.

Programmes and evaluation material from earlier editions survive as documents, never as web pages, and the ones this site holds are linked from the annual events sheet. The festival's own channels carry the current programme and its dates.

What to expect if you turn up without a plan

Because the work is outdoor and free to walk into, there is no wrong time to arrive and no ticket to hold. The practical advice is to stand where the crowd is thinnest at the start of a piece, and never where it is thickest, because aerial and processional work moves and the good sightline is rarely the obvious one. The Harris steps give height, which is why they fill first.

Street food and bar provision comes with the event, and not from the surrounding businesses, and the ordinary shops on Fishergate keep trading through it. If the weather turns, the museums and the arcade are both inside five minutes; see galleries and museums.

Where the festival sits in the Preston year

The festival takes the summer slot in the city's calendar of events in Preston, alongside Preston Mela and the Flag Market summer programme. It has not run to an unbroken annual rhythm since 2016, so the useful thing to know is that it is a recurring festival on a multi year pattern, with no fixed date in every calendar.

The festival and the Guild, twenty years apart

It is worth setting the festival against the thing it is not. The Preston Guild is a civic ceremony held once every twenty years, with processions, a Guild roll and a formal programme running across a week; it is the reason the city owns the event infrastructure it does. It is an arts festival on a normal festival footing, and it uses that same infrastructure in the long gaps between.

That relationship explains the scale of it. A city of Preston's size would not ordinarily build the capacity to close its centre and stage large outdoor work, but Preston has to be able to do it once a generation regardless. The festival is, among other things, what keeps that capability exercised, and the festival's use of the Flag Market and the Harris steps is a smaller version of the arrangement the Guild uses.

For a visitor the practical consequence is that the festival feels more established than its 2016 start would suggest. The routes, the sightlines and the crowd handling on the Flag Market were worked out long before it existed.