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The Stoke Newington Festival is no more. An open letter from Chloe
Kane, chair of the Stoke Newington Midsummer Festival Association, sent out on 16 August
stated 'It is with great sadness that the Stoke Newington Festival will cease trading from
today. Hackney Council has recently changed its funding guidelines for the voluntary
sector to focus on the Council's 4 strategies (housing, education, environment and youth)
and made it very clear that there is no funding available to the Festival in the
foreseeable future. Consequently, there are no funds for the core costs (including staff)
to chase other funding bodies, private trusts and corporate sponsors; and no funds to
"match" against these in any case'.
The Midsummer Festival Association, which has always run the event, believed it had no
other legal option than to close once it was informed by the Council that it could not
guarantee Council funding for 2003. It had a number of debts, including money owed to the
Council, and there was no way to gain the all-important matched funding from other arts
funding bodies. The Festival, like other similar events across the country, was hit by the
need for a local council to balance its books. The last time the Festival was threatened
by Council cutbacks was in 1999. Councillor John Hudson wrote to the Labour Group on the
Council saying 'Remember that this isn't just a fun day for "Stokey". We risk
taking the blame for (cancelling) a major London event attended by 40,000+ people'. Then
the Council backed down. This time, under the scrutiny of a number of central government
agencies, the Council felt it had no option other than to act as it did, and that was
that.
To many, the Festival represented an opportunity to bring to a multi-ethnic, inner-city
area a blend of all that was best in the contemporary arts and involve the local community
in a celebration of the vibrant diversity of 'Stokey Village'. To others, it was the
lofty, self-appointed guardian of a peculiarly middle-class definition of what constituted
(or, in its view, should constitute) the essence of Stoke Newington an unwelcome
cultural imperialism which ignored the reality of most people's lives. But, whatever your
view, there is little doubt that over the last ten years the Festival has made a
significant impact on the social and artistic life of the area, and it has acquired a
reputation well beyond N16. Only last year The Independent highlighted the event as one of
the best festivals in the country and even the Hackney-bashing Evening Standard recently
acknowledged its merits. Overall, a local consensus emerged that the Festival was an
important and prestigious event for Stoke Newington and worth supporting and attending,
due in no small part to the unpaid efforts of the volunteers and the hard work of the
committee and director.
 Although the expansion of the Festival over the years has meant an increasing
number of installations, performances and artistic happenings across N16 ranging from
the banal and pretentious to the genuinely innovative and exciting the core of the
Festival has always been the Sunday closure of Church Street. This is where it began and
to most people this was the Festival. Revellers came from all over London and further
afield to join in the music, drinking and partying along the street and, although the
crowd numbers recently necessitated a spill-over to Clissold Park, the Church Street
Sunday remained the highlight of Stoke Newington's year.
However, hidden away in a Festival press release earlier this year was the statement that
the 2002 street festival would not be taking place, a decision which surprised and angered
many local people and businesses. The normal street closure day, featuring the somewhat
lacklustre Word on the Street, was something of a non-event, enlivened only by the World
Cup antics of Irish and Spanish football supporters and the N16 Fringe Festival. Would it
not have been possible to have allocated some of the resources available away from what
was a busy but essentially minority interest schedule of events in order to ensure the
continuance of the street festival? Why was there no local consultation on this perverse
and damaging decision? How did the Festival get into this situation?
We asked Kay Trainor, who resigned as director in 2001, to reply to a few questions
(overleaf) which have been raised generally by our readers about the Festival.
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