Last year’s Dalston Pumpkin Lantern Festival attracted an unprecedented number of visitors – over 20,000 – with thousands of people queuing round the block every night for a week, sometimes for up to two hours. Our team of staff and volunteers worked incredibly hard to keep everyone safe and make the lengthy queues as manageable as possible. We prioritised entry for children and their families, plus people with special access needs. However, despite our mammoth efforts, ultimately the long queues led to many families giving up and leaving disappointed.
We know that our Pumpkin Lantern Festival is a seasonal neighbourhood highlight for many people and it has brought them and us much joy and treasured memories for the last 15 years. It’s our favourite time of the year at the Garden. Each year most of the visitors are the people who have carved the pumpkins – children, young people, adults, community groups – who then bring their friends and family back to proudly show off their creations when they are lit up nightly. However, last year we could see that most of the visitors were not carvers, and the number of adults was crowding out family groups. At times it no longer felt like the magical experience that our team of hard working staff and dedicated volunteers work so hard to create.
Taking a year off from the Festival has not been an easy decision. However, this Summer’s prolonged extreme temperatures, drought and hosepipe ban has meant that all of our focus and efforts have – and still are – going into keeping our plants alive, restoring the Garden and planning for future challenging environmental conditions.
Rest assured, Dalston Pumpkin Lantern Festival will be back next year, and between now and then, we will be exploring ways to make sure that it’s full of the community atmosphere that we all value so much.
