Garstang Victorian Festival

Are you and your family looking for something different to do this holiday season?

How about having a wander beneath fairy lights and stepping back into a bygone era full of Dickensian-style traditions from carols to characters dressed in the finest of Victorian costumes?

One of Lancashire’s oldest market towns, Garstang, holds an annual Victorian festival just in time for Christmas.

The festival is normally held on the Monday and Tuesday the week before Christmas from 18:30 until 22:00.
Each year the festival, which is also referred to as the Garstang Victorian Christmas Festival, is held on the High Street. Traffic is diverted and hundreds of people descend upon the street for two nights of themed food, fun and entertainment.

Children get to meet Father Christmas in his grotto and sing Christmas carols while a variety of street entertainers and dancers perform.

Garstang’s town crier also makes an appearance at the festival as well as Punch and Judy, brass bands and choirs, accordionists, carollers and tombola drawings.

Keeping with Garstang’s market-town traditions, shops and stalls along the High Street stay open late during the festival, giving you time to pick up those last-minute Christmas gifts in a market setting that dates back to 1310.

Where there’s shopping and Christmas flair, you are bound to find an assortment of Christmastime goodies such as mulled wine and roasted chestnuts.

The Garstang Victorian Festival offers all of this and so much more, including confectionery, homemade doughnuts and other homemade desserts, homemade pies and burgers and of course, that Northwest classic of parched peas.

The entire town comes to life during the Victorian festival, with shopkeepers, stallholders and tourists alike donning Victorian finery and playing the part.

Christmas markets have been long celebrated in the United Kingdom and were very popular until the overthrowing of Charles I, when Christmas was banned by the Puritan Oliver Cromwell, who felt that holidays were frivolous and should not be celebrated.

The banning of Christmas almost completely ended the tradition of Christmas markets in England. However, Britons would not allow tradition to be remised and continued to hold markets where Christmas goods and food could be sold and purchased in the weeks preceding the holiday.

In lieu of the banning, these markets were not referred to as Christmas markets. These markets, run as illegal operations, did not fully flourish to their former glory until the Victorians rekindled the excitement of Christmas, executing lavish festivities with decadence and expertise, which is where we get the phrase “a real Victorian Christmas”. Garstang seeks to honour the Victorian sense of decadence with its annual festival.

The Garstang Victorian Festival is a Garstang Chamber of Trade co-ordinated community event that is supported and organised by its community members. Admission to the annual festival is free. This festival improves each year and you do not want to miss it.