Seaside Revival Vintage Festival
With funding from Funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund Great Place Scheme, Seaside Revival aims to re-position Bangor as a modern seaside town – the Brighton of Northern Ireland – with a distinctive cultural offer.
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This Year
Coming soon…
About Seaside Revival
Why are we doing it?
Previous Festivals
What happened at the last four Seaside Revival’s including photo gallery.
About Seaside Revival
Why we’re doing it
In recent decades local people have become increasingly disconnected from the town’s heritage. With very little cultural infrastructure and a failed retail sector, Bangor has suffered a downward social and economic spiral symptomatic of many British and Irish seaside towns.
Older people in Bangor look back with fondness to its heyday, but with a sense of regret for all that has been lost, while many of the younger generation who know little of the town’s past condemn it as a boring place to live. But we believe that Bangor has so much to offer everyone who lives here.
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Our Aims
Through this new vintage festival we want to revive positive memories and use them to create new ones. We hope to reposition Bangor as a modern seaside town, drawing on its unique assets of the seafront, a thriving community of artists and creatives, Victorian architecture, its closeness to Belfast – and most importantly, an appetite among residents for regeneration.
We believe that if local people can connect with their past, they will start talking the town up – a key part of the next chapter.
Funders & Partners
Seaside Revival is primarily funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund with additional support from Ards & North Down Borough Council.
The Project also brings together six organisations representing different businesses and community interests in the town: Bangor Chamber of Commerce, North Down Community Network, North Down Development Corporation, Boom! Studios, and Main Street My Street.
Translink have also played a historic role in linking Bangor to the rest of Northern Ireland and we’re proud to have their support for another Seaside Revival.
Previous Festivals
2018
The first Seaside Revival Vintage Festival took place in 2018. It featured a vintage car & bike show, the best dressed window competition, vintage food & drink stalls and the Revival Picnic.
2019
30,000 people attended Seaside Revival in 2019. With a huge range of events including rebooting the Pickie to Pier swim, live music & swing dancing, vintage fashion show and a dog show.
2020
Although we couldn’t be together (due to Covid-19) we celebrated Seaside Revival in 2020 at home with vintage themed food, drinks and outfits, including a competition for each.
2021
2021 combined a mixture of ‘at-home’ events and some in person events including the Pickie to Pier swim, classic car & bike show, classic cinema in the park and the Revival Picnic.
