Hull’s maritime heritage will take centre stage in March with an outdoors show featuring a lighthouse erupting with fireworks, music, performance and flaming torchlit procession.
The torch parade featuring 500 community volunteers will make its way from Hull Minster to Hull Marina, where audiences will enjoy a spectacular performance of The Tower of Light – transforming the city into a magical theatre of pyrotechnics, performance and music.
Hull City Council and Walk the Plank, one of the UK’s leading outdoor arts companies, are bringing this celebration of seafaring heritage to Hull city centre on Thursday 14 March 2024.
The Tower of Light celebrates the Lighthouse, and the people who lived and worked in them: the Lighthouse Keepers who kept sailors safe for centuries.
All of Britain’s lighthouses are now automated and Walk the Plank was commissioned by The Tate (Liverpool) to mark the departure of lighthouse keepers. Since then, the show has toured internationally and now is heading to Hull, Yorkshire’s only maritime city.
It is a choreographed piece of outdoor theatre, centred around a spectacular Lighthouse and its three hapless Lighthouse Keepers who keep the Tower animated with light, fire and stunning pyrotechnic effects.
Free to attend, the event takes place from 6.45pm, when the parade will leave Hull Minster before arriving at Hull Marina for the Tower of Light performance at 7.30pm. It is expected to finish at approximately 8pm.
The Tower of Light event is being funded by Hull City Council’s Hull Maritime project. A city revitalised in 2017 as the UK’s City of Culture is set to be transformed once again as the £30.3m, five-year project celebrating 800 years of seafaring history is finally revealed.
Visitors to Hull in 2024 will get their first glimpse when two refurbished attractions re-open, Hull’s historic Spurn Lightship in the spring, followed later by the Arctic Corsair trawler at a new £3.8m ‘eco-friendly’ visitor attraction.
For more information about the event and Hull’s multi-million-pound Hull Maritime project, visit www.maritimehull.co.uk
For all other tourism information about Hull, see www.visithull.org
Photo: Tower of Light, Hartlepool, Tall Ships Festival 2023. Image by Paul Norris