ABSTRACT
In the year 2002–2003, the City of Glasgow in Scotland (hereafter referred to as the City) introduced a Winter Festival that sought to agglomerate many existing cultural events and festivities under one banner, while also seeking to introduce new events to the calendar. The dual aims of this programme were to extend the tourist season by creating an ‘artificial’ winter festival and simultaneously providing entertainment for the local population. Other Scottish cities (see, for example, Foley & McPherson, 2004) hold ‘Hogmanay’ type festivities (which last up to six days after Boxing Day) during the winter season. What was unusual about the initiative in Glasgow was that organisers sought to extend their festivities in two directions simultaneously — across both time and cultures — by seeking to move beyond a celebration of Christmas as the only public festivity apparent in the City centre and branding the resulting entity as a single unified concept, namely ‘Glasgow's Winter Festival’. The festival itself comprised of a wide range of events, starting with the political celebration of Guy Fawkes Night, and also including ‘Glasgow Lights On’ (illumination of the Christmas lights), ‘Glasgow on Ice’ (an open-air ice rink and fairground in the City centre), an Autumn/Winter shopping promotion, a further fairground in another City centre area, a continental market, ‘Glasgow's Hogmanay’, and ending with the ‘Celtic Connections’ folk music festival (all of these are subsequently referred to as ‘the events’). Through this programme, the City sought to provide events that were accessible to all members of the culturally diverse population. It should be added that the time period covered by the Winter Festival also encompassed annual religious festivities of considerable significance to the City's Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist populations.
