Top hats at the ready: Whalley 's Pickwick Festival returns

The independent businesses of King Street in Whalley have joined forces to bring back the village’s biggest trading day of the year, seven years after it was last held.

Pickwick Festival returns on Sunday 29 November. King Street closes to traffic from 10am to 10pm, the village is set in 1837, the year Charles Dickens finished The Pickwick Papers, and the public programme runs from noon until 9pm. Entry is free.

The original Whalley Pickwick began in 1988 as a late night shopping evening and grew into the busiest night in the village calendar, drawing 3,500 people on a wet Thursday in 2015 and filling every pub, restaurant and shop on the street. It last ran in 2019. This time the shopkeepers, innkeepers and restaurateurs have come together as a group for the first time to bring it back, and have appointed Whalley based Crafty Vintage to produce it.

Councillor John Atherton, director of Athertons estate agents at 53 King Street, said: “King Street has one of the healthiest independent high streets in Lancashire, and Pickwick was always the day that showed it off. Everyone remembers it. When the businesses sat down together there wasn’t a single voice against bringing it back, and there’s real energy on the street about doing it properly and making it ours.”

The event has grown from a single evening into a full trading day. The Crafty Vintage Christmas Market opens in The Swan car park from 11am, Bewley’s Fun Fair brings a hand operated vintage fair, there is a live stage through to the close, and King Street’s hospitality businesses trade from noon with period food and drink on the street. Two local figures have also been sentenced to the stocks to raise money for the festival’s charity partner, East Lancashire Hospice.

Dan Johnson of Crafty Vintage, which is helping produce the festival for the traders, said: “People will travel for a day out that feels like something, and they spend when they get there. Commerce, culture and creativity are the same thing on a high street like this: the shops and pubs are the commerce, Pickwick is the culture, and the creativity is how you put the two together so people talk about it. Whalley has a story nobody else can tell, and the traders have organised themselves to tell it. It’s a great model and we think other Lancashire high streets will want to borrow it.”

Crafty Vintage has produced markets and festivals across the north west for close to 20 years, including the Darwen Christmas lights switch on, which draws crowds of more than 25,000 through a closed town centre.

Free ride passes for Bewley’s Fun Fair go live at 7pm on Thursday 12 November at pickwickfestival.com, with further announcements on the programme, sponsors and travel to follow. Businesses interested in trading, sponsoring or supporting the festival can contact Crafty Vintage through the website.