About the project
Millfield Festival was a yearly community arts festival in the heart of Millfield, Gladstone, and New England that ran from 2017 – 2024. Each year communities came together to make, play, and watch some great creative and cultural activities. The festival welcomed everyone in the area to an uplifting and inspiring event.
From 2017 – 2019, and again in 2022, the festival took place on New England Rec, also known as Rock Park / The Triangle.
In 2021, as we were coming out of the pandemic, we hosted a small series of events in lots of different venues around Millfield: Allama Iqbal Centre, Bharat Hindu Samaj Mandir, Gladstone Park, PARCA, and Beat This’ Chime Creation Centre.
In 2023, there was a storm, which meant we moved the party to inside Millfield Community Association.
In 2024, Millfield Festival became Millfield Makers, an indoor making fair where people could try lots of different cultural arts & crafts activities.
Each year, Peterborough Presents worked with local people and organisations to put on interesting music and dance, fun arts & crafts, and amazing performances.
How it was received
We’re proud to say that every year people scored the event highly across the board on our feedback forms. The aim of the festival was to bring people together from different communities and backgrounds to have fun, make memories, and have a better understanding for each other, which we feel the festival definitely did. The vibes, even in the rain, were there in full!
In numbers
- Over 100 community groups and organisations partnered with us to perform or host activity
- Approx 3000 people attended each year
- We estimate over 12,000 people across the full 6 years
- 85% of our audiences came from a PE1 postcode.
- 27 carnival performers including 1 golden bird, 4 frogs, 1 proud lion
In words
“Yesterday and today my Facebook is flooded with pictures and videos from yesterday Millfield Festival 2022 !
I myself did not have many opportunities to take pictures and videos, because I had honorable, important duties during this celebration: first of all, as a member of the Šokių grupė “RASKILA” team, wearing Lithuanian national clothes, I was part of a great dance performance, and later, unveiling the golden bird costume by mandinga arts team from london along with other mini carnival characters, entertained the crowd and posed for photos with them! I’m proud I had the opportunity to be there and do what I did! This is a unique, one-of-a-kind experience for which I am grateful to the Peterborough Presents team!”
“Great organised event, supportive volunteers, was great to see a diverse audience and participants, interesting programme”
“Met wonderful people. Enjoyed the performances.”
“From the entertainment to the stalls, amazing! Did not know this happened every year – will def come back. Peterborough is the best! (Not worst city in UK!) Thanks to all the volunteers.”
“It was very fun”
Mandinga Arts Community Carnival
We commissioned the amazing Mandinga Arts to work with us to host two mini carnival performances at Millfield Festival. Featuring members of the community as the stars.
Link to carnival video here.
Other programme highlights over the years include Zain Awan’s “Once We Were Too” photo exhibition, Deljit Singh’s Magical History Tent, a performance from Chand Ali Khan, Anita Nayyar keeping the crowd entertained while the rain delayed proceedings, a one-of-a-kind fire display from External Combustion, Lukhmann Ali’s special poem which celebrated all the local community champions in Millfield. Here’s a gallery of images throughout the years to give you a sense of just how vibrant and fun it all was!
Why did Millfield Festival stop?
Whilst people really enjoyed themselves at the event, we learnt that it is really difficult to make a festival sustain itself. It takes a lot of organising, and a lot of finances to cover things like toilets, heras fencing, staging etc, which meant a lot of our attention and funding went on that one day.
Another reason why we originally set up Millfield Festival was because we met lots of amazing groups of dancers and singers and performers who said they had very few places locally to share their talents with others, especially outside of their own communities. Now, there are bigger platforms such as Peterborough Celebrates, and many confident community champions organising their own events in collaboration with other cultures.
If you want to deep dive further, have a read of our “at the pace of trust” case study by JBR Research, which is a written case study about all our work in Millfield, and features a section on Millfield Festival.
