Arts Amplified

Your regular edit of the people, projects and ideas shaping arts and culture in Lancashire.

Jul 24, 2026

It’s a bumper summer of art, music and festivals and Blackpool is taking the spotlight - from a major Bowie exhibition and a free concert backing its UK City of Culture bid, to a photography show built entirely around its young people’s voices. Elsewhere across the county, there’s plenty happening. Here’s what caught our attention in June and July.

Image Courtesy of the Estate of Mick Rock

Bowie Comes to the Seaside

Showtown has landed one of its biggest bookings yet: David Bowie: On Tour, more than 100 pieces from the V&A’s Bowie archive, arriving 30 June to 26 September 2027. It’ll be the only stop in the North West on the whole tour - costumes, instruments, handwritten lyrics, and a stack of things that have never been shown before: Polaroids of make-up tests, a Ziggy Stardust-era acoustic guitar, unrealised scripts, material from his last two albums, The Next Day and ★ (Blackstar).

Blackpool’s been arguing for years that it’s more than the illuminations and the Golden Mile. This is the kind of booking that makes the case for you. Still a way off, but one to start planning around.

Image: KT Tunstsall

The People’s Stage: A Free Bowie Night to Back the Bid

Sunday, 26 July, the town’s throwing one of the biggest free music events of the year - and using it to do two jobs at once: celebrate the Showtown booking and put some muscle behind Blackpool’s bid to become UK City of Culture 2029.

The People’s Stage, at Blackpool Opera House from 7pm, is headlined by Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra and singer-songwriter Jack Savoretti, backed by an All-Star House Band pulling members from James, the Stone Roses and the Courteeners. Add Little Boots, Rae Morris and KT Tunstall, a specially commissioned Bowie-themed lyric from Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, Blackpool spoken-word artist Nathan Parker, Northern Soul singer Darrell Smith, and the town’s own Electric Pink Voices LGBTQ+ choir, and it stops looking like a tribute night and starts looking like a statement. Every guest performs their own take on a Bowie classic alongside their own material, hosted by Blackpool-born broadcaster John Robb.

It’s free, and it’s ticketed - 2,500 seats, allocated by public ballot, open now. Free entry is the point: everyone attending is also being encouraged to back the bid, which would bring £10 million to the town for a year of culture-led programming if it succeeds. John Robb doesn’t undersell it: “This is not simply a concert. It’s a civic statement... Blackpool is ready. Blackpool believes. Blackpool belongs on the national cultural stage.”

→ Enter the ballot and back the bid at blackpool2029.co.uk

Image Credit: Polly Braden

The Seaside Speaks Back: Polly Braden’s Against the Tide

Against the Tide is documentary photographer Polly Braden’s new exhibition, made with young people in some of England’s most overlooked coastal towns - Weston-super-Mare, Scarborough, Grimsby, Southend, Portsmouth, Whitehaven, Tendring, Rhyl and Blackpool among them. Braden worked with journalist Lisa Bachelor as part of The Guardian’s Seascape series, spending over a year listening to 16–25-year-olds talk about their towns and what they actually want from them. The usual coastal-decline story is in there. So is the version nobody prints: ambition, resilience, plans.

Blackpool’s part came through House of Wingz, whose founders Aishley Bell Docherty and Samantha Bell-Docherty worked with Braden and choreographer Michelle Tofi to let the town’s young people run the project themselves, rather than be photographed and moved along. It’s not nothing, seeing them hold a wall at a major Bristol gallery instead of being the subject of somebody else’s headline. Against the Tide is on at Arnolfini until 27 September. Worth the drive if you’re that way this summer.

→ Read the Guardian’s Seascape series

Pitbull at Lytham Festival 2026. Image Credit: Lytham Festival

Lytham Festival Marks 15 Years With Its Biggest Line-up Yet

Lytham Festival celebrated its 15th anniversary this month with five nights on Lytham Green, and the range of headliners said everything about how far the event has grown: Teddy Swims and Alanis Morissette opened the weekend, followed by Michael Bublé, the Pet Shop Boys and Pitbull closing things out on Sunday.

The festival has already confirmed its next headliner: Robbie Williams plays Lytham Green on Saturday 3 July 2027, his only mainland UK show that summer - the festival’s earliest headliner announcement yet. Five-day passes for 2027 are on sale now, with general tickets released at 10am this Friday via lythamfestival.com.

Practice Makes Pigeons by Ben Hall at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery. Image Credit: Jules Lister

The National Festival of Making Returned to Blackburn

This year’s National Festival of Making brought 300-plus artists and makers to Blackburn, across more than 100 workshops, exhibitions, performances and markets. Johnny Vegas and Michael Winterbottom gave talks. There were dens built from 200 pallets, virtual reality installations, and the eighth season of Art in Manufacturing. A packed weekend from start to finish.

One thing’s still running if you missed festival weekend: Ben Hall’s Practice Makes Pigeons at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery, on until 29 August.

The Festival’s Industry Day brought together filmmakers and industry leaders to talk about where screen goes next in Lancashire, including the launch of Screen Lancashire’s new brand, built by the chase. It feeds straight into ongoing work to make Blackburn with Darwen the film capital of Lancashire. Winterbottom’s own films were a real highlight of the day.

Image credit: Culturapedia

Lancashire’s Smallest Arts Space Opens for Business

Blackburn Market now has a free library with proper seats, a mini performance space, and perhaps the smallest gallery in Lancashire, run by Culturapedia in partnership with Blackburn Market, Blackburn with Darwen Library Services, Blackburn BID and Arts Council England. Culturapedia has worked out of the market for four years already, so this isn’t so much a launch as an upgrade.

The summer programme opens Saturday 25 July with a poetry trail across the town from Dommy B, and the space’s first exhibition from Amelia Riley, a recent Fine Art graduate from Blackburn College.

Image Credit: Faiths4Change

LANDS Unveiled Its Autumn Programme

LANDS - the Lancashire Arts Network for Developing Sustainability - has its autumn plans out. Headline item: LANDS Assembly, a day of talks and collaboration at LICA in Lancaster on Wednesday 18 November. Full details in September.

Before that, LANDS Talks is back with The Sacred Earth Calls: Voices of Faith for Climate Action, featuring Zarah Ross of Faiths4Change and Abdur Razzak, founder of ACT Bangladesh. Free, online, 10–11am, Thursday 3 September. Register here.

The UK Town of Culture Shortlist

The UK Town of Culture shortlist was announced this month. No Lancashire town was included, and that is a genuine disappointment.

It doesn’t diminish what was achieved in getting there. Fourteen Lancashire towns developed cultural bids this year, bringing together artists, councils, businesses and community organisations around a shared case for culture in their places. That collaboration was real, and it continues.

Much of that energy is now going into Blackpool’s bid to become UK City of Culture 2029. We congratulate the towns that were shortlisted, and we thank everyone across Lancashire who contributed to this year’s bids.

What Local Government Reorganisation Means for Culture

From April 2028, Lancashire’s council map will change under local government reorganisation. Subject to Parliamentary approval, four new unitary councils will be created to replace the current 15 councils. A model for Lancashire which will see the region split into four unitary authorities:

Chorley, South Ribble, West Lancashire (South Lancashire)
Fylde, Wyre, Blackpool (West Lancashire)
Lancaster, Preston, Ribble Valley (North Lancashire)
Blackburn with Darwen, Hyndburn, Rossendale, Pendle, Burnley (East Lancashire)

What that means for how culture is funded and supported is still being worked out. Arts Lancashire is working with the Lancashire Combined County Authority, Lancashire County Council, Blackburn with Darwen Council, Blackpool Council and the district authorities to help shape that picture, and we’re also contributing to Active Lancashire’s current consultation, connecting into discussions around creative health. We expect to share more detail in the Autumn.

We’ll keep representing the sector’s interests through this process, and keep the cultural community informed as the new structures take shape. Visit the Lancashire LGR website for more details on the new structure.

86 and Counting: Music Funding Advice Landed in Lancashire

Eighty-six music artists, promoters and producers turned out for An Introduction to Arts Funding for Music People & Projects at Burnley Mechanics Theatre, run jointly by Arts Lancashire and the Lancashire Music Association. On the agenda: how to raise money, where the training is, and details of Arts Council England’s new Music Growth Fund and PRS for Music’s support. Clitheroe promoters So It Goes talked through their own funding journey with PRS backing.

To Be Read

Four things worth ten minutes this month: DCMS’s Turn It Up plan for music, out this month; the Manifesto for Cultural High Streets, signed off this month ahead of a September launch; Arts Council England’s Annual Report for 25/26 - £894 million invested last year; and the LANDS Green Festival & Events Guide, if you’ve got a festival to run before the summer’s out.