Accrington Food Festival draws crowd of thousands

Thousands came out once more to enjoy the sights, sounds and the wonderful flavours of the Accrington Food & Drink Festival.

Accrington town centre was awash with foodies and revellers as they enjoyed what has come to be something of an institution in the town every year.

The 20th annual Accrington Food Festival, organised by Scott Dawson Advertising, built on the success of the previous two years, attracting numbers that even eclipsed the 14,000 of last year’s event.

More than 70 food stalls lined the town centre streets offering everything from Catalonian meatballs and fresh, oven-baked pizza to chilli jam and prosecco cocktails.

Attractions included live cookery demos in the theatre kitchen hosted by celebrity chef Richard Fox, a dramatic World War 2 re-enactment to commemorate D-Day, and a world record  ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ which raised money for East Lancs Hospice.

One the largest and most popular attractions of the day was the live demonstration by the wonderful chefs from The Balti House, Rishton, who turned heads as the scent of fresh chicken jalfrezi wafted around the market stalls.

Culinary students from one of the event’s main sponsors, Accrington and Rossendale College also got a few mouths watering with their gin and tonic sorbet creation.

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Murray Dawson, managing director of Scott Dawson Advertising, said: “This is the third year in a row that we have had the privilege to arrange the Accrington Food & Drink Festival. We have been able to increase attendance ten-fold since we began organising the event. And, considering the sheer amount of people, we can report that the event went very smoothly.

“We are always looking for fun new events and stalls to bring to the festival and this year we were really spoilt for choice. Richard Fox, in his third year at the festival, was fantastic as always, the WW2 re-enactment, the cooking demo from The Balti House, the Accrington pals bus, the Oops Upside Your Head record attempt and many, many of the other attractions went down brilliantly." Mayor of Hyndburn, Peter Britcliffe, said: “It really is a fantastic event which growing from strength to strength every year. There was 14,000 people last year and wouldn’t be surprised if records were broken this time around.”