Ramsgate Winter Festival lights up the darker months

Now in its second year, Ramsgate Winter Festival is back to light up the darkest months of the year. Beginning on at the end of November with the town’s Christmas light switch on, it will run through to the end of January. Events in the programme include illuminated boats in the harbour, live music, a Christmas tree festival and much more.

The event’s organisers hope to attract locals as well as tourists and put Ramsgate on the map as a must see winter destination - bucking the traditional ebb and flow of the coastal economy. 

“Margate and Broadstairs are their own entities over the summer,” says Ramsgate Winter Festival co-founder Jess Hudsley. “Our plan is that Ramsgate becomes that, but in winter.” 

Events like Margate Pride, Broadstairs Food Festival and Broadstairs Folk Week bring huge numbers of visitors to the area in the warmer months. Ramsgate has much to offer too, but can sometimes feel left behind. 

“I love the three towns and I think we are stronger together,” Jess says. “But I think [sometimes] Ramsgate is like the little sibling that nobody really thinks about. This is our opportunity to put ourselves on a bit more of a level footing by becoming something really special over winter.”

Many of the events now under the Ramsgate Winter Festival banner have actually been in existence for years. Working in collaboration and promoting them as a single programme gives greater opportunity to highlight what’s happening and draw more visitors to the town, says Jess. 

“People have always come along for events, especially for the lights, but not so much for the other activities,” she explains. “They were very word of mouth. So not many people knew about them.”

One of the two co-founders of the festival, the strand of the event that Jess oversees is the Light Up Ramsgate art trail - a new addition to the town’s winter calendar last year. The idea for the art trail pre-dates the wider festival, she explains, and actually helped to bring it into existence. 

“I've done a lot of big light projections and light installations at various light festivals around the country,” she says. “When I moved to Ramsgate about three years ago, I thought it would be amazing for a light trail, like Light Up Leeds or Canary Wharf - the big players in light art festivals.”

Explaining what sparked the idea, she says, “Everyone always talks about the fact that the high street has a lot of empty shops. I thought, well, let's activate the high street, let's bring some activity and some art and some culture where it's public realm, it's free, it’s accessible.”

Tentatively beginning conversations about this led her to meet Teresa Askew, who has run Ramsgate’s winter lantern parade since 2019. Their conversations sparked the idea to come together to work on a larger festival.

“We're both very inspired by the illuminations on the boats in the harbour,” Jess continues, referring to the annual Ramsgate Illuminations event that has been running for over a decade. “That was really the trigger for me, seeing how many people come to Ramsgate in the winter to see the boats. I thought, okay, that's really interesting. We've got something here.”

So this is how the festival began, launched under the name Ramsgate Lumiere in 2024. Pulling the town's various winter illuminations events together and setting the Light Up art trail alongside them. It proved a huge success.

“It really sparked the town," recalls Jess. “The whole town really got behind it and it was magical to see. The scale of positivity was so visceral and I think everyone felt it.”

This year the event expands further. Renamed Ramsgate Winter Festival to allow for a broader programme - not just light-related events - it will also stretch out to the end of January. The extra month of programming comes as a result of visitors last year calling for more.

“One piece of feedback from last year was that it was a shame that everything went dark on New Year's Day,” says Jess. “So we're pushing the trail through into January.”

Part of the new programme will be the launch of Light Up Lates, a series of ticketed evening events. This includes a Bring Your Own Beamer event, where people are invited to arrive with a projector to create a huge, DIY art exhibition shown all of the walls and ceilings of the venue. 

The festival launches on Sunday, November 30 with the Christmas light switch on in the town centre. Following on from that is Let There Be Light at St George’s Church, where there will be music and light shows. 

“It's going to be really fun and loud and bright,” enthuses Jess. “I think we had about 600 people packed into the church last year - it’s a great way to launch the festival.”

If you want to really pack a lot into your visit, look out for the Weekend of Wonder - the four days of the festival with the greatest concentration of events - which happens between December 11 and 14. 

“There's so much going on in the town over those four days that I can't even list it all,” says Jess. “That's when we're launching our Light Up art trail. We have late night shopping, the Christmas tree festival launches, we have advent doors in the Ramsgate Tunnels. And Santa is actually going to be sailing into the harbour - so that's really exciting.”

On New Year’s Eve there is the lantern parade, where members of the public will march through the town holding lanterns. And there will be free lantern making workshops throughout December, if you’re not storing a load of portable lighting around your house. 

“That's a chance for everybody of all ages to celebrate the end of the year and start of the next one,” says Jess. “That's really lovely. It was brilliant last year.”

Jess continually comes back to the idea of bringing people together when talking about the festival. The commitment to ensure that they deliver a programme that the whole town can enjoy and be proud of is clear. 

“As founders of the festival, what united us is this ambition of being able to do something of real quality and real impact, but still really grassroots,” she says.

They are committed to making it “about the community and for the community” and ensuring that “it doesn't become one of those parachuted in light festivals that can feel quite generic and soulless.”

While a key aim is to attract visitors from outside Ramsgate to the town, she says, “it's also about giving local residents something here that they can walk to or get the bus to. That's at the heart of what we're about.”

As much of the programme as possible is made available for free, she says, to ensure that it is accessible to all. It was their goal from the outset, she says, to “create something that's literally on people's doorsteps that they feel part of.”

With plans to continue building on what they’ve created each year, there is more to come. As for many arts organisations, this year accessing the funding necessary to realise some of their ideas have been challenging. Jess admits that “maybe some of the ideas we had this year were too big,” but says that they remain ambitious. 

“We had some really big ideas and it's been a process of scaling them back, unfortunately,” she says. “But ultimately we've got those ideas still there and they're great ideas. We're going to keep rolling them out until they actually get funding. We're still in our infancy. So, we'll get there. The show must go on and on and on.”

This brings us back to Ramsgate’s future, which Jess thinks is bright. More new businesses and venues are opening in the town, and there is a growing desire for event organisers to work together in a more cohesive way, she says. 

“It feels like people are starting to talk about collaborative working, which is really great because that's the background that I'm from,” she goes on. A consortium of event organisers is now attempting to identify six points throughout the year for community focussed events like the Winter Festival. “Because, when the town comes together, like for the Operation Dynamo little boats event earlier this year, it's buzzing.”

This is exciting, she says. “It feels like there's a lot of people who haven't given up on Ramsgate and see that it's a really beautiful town, full of incredibly creative people. That's two things that I think are a really strong, winning combination.”

Ramgate Winter Festival runs from Sunday, November 30 to Thursday, January 25. Find out more and see the programme on the event’s website.