What better way could there be to mark midsummer than staying up all night dancing in the sand dunes and greeting the sun at dawn in Britain’s most easterly town?
This is how locals and visitors to Lowestoft in Suffolk will be spending the solstice at First Light, a free arts festival now in its fifth year, which runs for just over 24 hours, with a few brief breaks in the programming for sleep.
About 40,000 people are expected at the event, which will feature an eclectic array of attractions, from the musical headliners Nubiyan Twist and spoken-word events with the poet Jackie Kay to silent discos and sound baths dotted around the sands. As night falls, the action will transfer indoors with a hedonistic club night from Horse Meat Disco and more ambient musical offerings in a church.
The solstice festival came out of a regeneration project aiming to revive the fortunes of the seaside town, led by the designer and Red or Dead co-founder Wayne Hemingway.
Hemingway recalls a meeting in which “someone said their favourite thing was to go down to the beach on Midsummer Day and be there at around 3.50am for the first light in the morning”.
“We said: ‘That sounds lovely but why does it mean so much here?’ The person responded: ‘It’s Britain’s most easterly town. So that means I’m getting the first light to hit Britain on Midsummer Day, and it feels mystical and like something special is happening to me,’” Hemingway said.
Throwing a big party on the town’s vast, sandy beaches seemed the ideal way to celebrate this, and for Hemingway one of the most important elements has been engaging the community, with local musicians, schools and choirs all performing.
The town’s teenagers were initially dubious of the festival’s Balearic vibe. “They were a bit disruptive,” says Hemingway, “because they’d not heard this kind of music – they were more into house [music]. The next year, the same lot came back and said: ‘Actually, we like this music, we’ve got into it … can we help you clear up after?’ Every year they come back and help. They’re about 18 now and one of them is DJing.”
