The nave, emptied of chairs, filled with art. Modern, urban art, by Black Rose urban art collective.

I recognised those words immediately: they’re on the astronomical clock in the nearby north transept. Made fresh and startling, by Neil Ennui.

Obviously the Minster moves with the times. I know, from calling in every so often for a wander around, that it’s not a fusty place where everyone whispers and acts in a reverential way, and that it does incorporate many more modern additions into its historic fabric. Still, this was surprising, this ‘Minster Nights’ event.

The south transept, busy with people, and with tables set up, and children drawing. On one of the tables were T-shirts for sale, apparently by the artists whose work was on show around the nave. It didn’t seem very ‘religious’, and I was momentarily shocked, then laughed at myself for being shocked, and was pleased really to have my preconceptions about ‘churchy’ things challenged. I’m just a wandering agnostic, so what do I know.

And while I was wandering, saw this, above. I think it was created specifically for the Illuminating York event, but I hope it’s still in place, as it’s lovely:

Paper lanterns decorated by children from four local schools. Part of the Minster’s ‘community engagement work’, the nearby sign told me, ‘bringing new audiences into the Minster’.
I don’t remember anything like this when I was at school. I don’t remember going in the Minster before the age of 16. Then it was only because someone else took me there, at a time of crisis, and we went to the Zouche Chapel. Which I’d love to write more about. And how this place isn’t just a tourist attraction but a welcoming place of sanctuary when you need it.

Maybe another time. For now, my favourite lantern, spotted among the great gathering of lanterns:

I’m not sure whether the paper on the tables was for drawings on a particular theme, if so I’m sorry, we didn’t read that bit, but my companion left in York Minster a drawing of our cat. She’s giving a cheery wave and saying thanks to everyone in the Minster and beyond who worked so hard on Illuminating York 2013.

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The Treasurer’s House garden is normally a formal and refined kind of place, with statues and clipped box shrubs in pots. On Saturday night it was completely transformed, lights and smoke, dancing figures and animal shapes in metalwork and trees near the walls suddenly moving and not being trees at all but people.

The large scale projections on buildings tend to be the focus of Illuminating York, but perhaps shouldn’t be. The ’supporting pieces’ are often as memorable. This one certainly was.

It was beautiful as well as weird.

Illuminating York is all about presenting the place ‘in a new light’, and this definitely did. Fabulous.

We had some difficulty working out where the rest of the ‘trail’ mentioned was, which is a shame. I’ve only just found the map on the Illuminating York website, but a bit late now to find the Gray’s Court and Bedern Hall parts of it, which we missed completely.

After a quick half in the Cross Keys we headed for the Minster. I have a few photos and thoughts to share from that. More soon.

More information

The Treasurer’s House garden supporting piece was part of ‘Spark’, ‘a new strand of Illuminating York for 2013, which will enable emerging artists to showcase their ideas and creations through a mentored commission’. In partnership with York St John University. Spark: Tree of Life

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Ancient and modern, illuminated, at the end of Parliament Street. One of the smaller supporting pieces in the Illuminating York festival, and behind it the beautiful lantern tower of All Saints, Pavement. The lantern tower is there to be admired against the dark night sky all year round, but the 21st century illuminations of ‘IY2013′ are a temporary enhancement.

Under this illuminated tree were strings, and on the strings many handwritten labels. I couldn’t see any instructions regarding what people were supposed to write on these labels, and perhaps that was deliberate. Certainly its effect was memorable, so many ‘voices’. I read a few, some were messages to the world, one said ‘I take my goldfish for a walk’, many were wishes. One, in a child’s writing, in coloured felt tip, wished that grandad and dad would get better.

Like the spiral of candles in the Minster last year (repeated again this year), the smaller more personal installations, the places where we can participate and add something, form one of the memorable and special parts of this annual event.

Not far away, in St Helen’s Square. This was stunning, beautifully coloured. The projections onto buildings are of course the main part of the show in Illuminating York, and many people will remember the Minster lit up, and the impressive show on the front of the Castle Museum a couple of years ago. This was smaller-scale, onto little old St Helen’s, but unlike the larger ‘main event’ shows this year, this is free and open to all.

Difficult for the organisers after last year’s event, and the controversy over Vic Reeves’ ‘Wonderland’, which most people seemed to think wasn’t that wonderful. There’s a ticket-only show in the Museum Gardens again this year, and also one at Clifford’s Tower. This we had a look at too despite not having a ticket, as it’s fairly easy to see much of it without one. Many other people had also realised this and there were as many people outside the barriers as inside them, it seemed.

I got the impression while walking around that most of the people around us were residents. Last year it seemed bigger, with more visitors perhaps coming in specially. Maybe they were put off by last year. Or maybe my impression was incorrect. Anyway, a very nice way of bringing extra beauty and charm to an already beautiful and charming place, and brightening the dark autumn evenings.

More information

This evening is the last night of the Illuminating York festival. See www.illuminatingyork.org.uk for more information. There are many supporting events, and all within walking distance, in and around the city centre.

Pictured above are (in Parliament St) ‘Thor’s Oak: A York Thing’, by Same Sky, and (St Helen’s Square) ‘Sampo’, by Jackson & Teed

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Today’s big story locally is of another event which has left many demanding refunds – a bonfire night event on the Knavesmire. Like Wonderland, it was a gated event, open only to paying customers booking in advance.

It’s years since I went to a fireworks display. Aside from the one I watched from a window in 2005, the fifth of November I particularly remember was spent in the middle of a massive tightly-packed crowd of people standing in Clifford Street, in front of the fire station, watching the city’s firework display over Clifford’s Tower, in the early 1990s.

I didn’t give a thought to who was paying for it – too young to care. These things just happened, were provided.

Last year when I dashed through the illuminated city, from a free event in a lit-up Dean’s Park to another free event by Clifford’s Tower, I did think about the amount of funding needed to stage events like these.

I’d ignored Illuminating York until last year. The fireworks display was for us, the residents. The relatively recent Illuminating York, though held at a similar time of the year, didn’t feel like it was for residents. It was designed to bring in tourists and visitors. But last year I read about the event in Dean’s Park, and liked the sound of that, and went along. The following night I visited All Saints church and the NRM. All excellent memorable free events lighting up that particular autumn weekend.

What I remember most about Illuminating York 2011 was the sense of community, and of a joined-up city. Being in Dean’s Park and then soon after in front of the Castle Museum, and in both places knowing that people I knew were there (even if I couldn’t find them in the crowds), and that it wasn’t just visitors to the city standing on the grass in front of the Castle Museum but the people who lived here. Perhaps including those who had worked in the famous York factories of our more recent history, making chocolate, or railway carriages. The history giving me my own ‘sense of place’, rather than Guy Fawkes, Dick Turpin, etc.

The open-air city centre events were something we could all wander along to. Personally I found Dean’s Park more memorable, though there we were listening rather than watching. The Castle Museum display is what most people remember, and it was on the strength of that that so many people came back this year.

In 2011 Illuminating York seemed to have gelled into a big celebratory event for everyone, residents and visitors together. Those who pre-booked, travelled and planned alongside those who lived here and wandered along from a last-minute decision.

I didn’t realise how lucky I was to see the 2011 Illuminating York. Only realise now, in hindsight. Just as I didn’t realise in the early 1990s how lucky I was to see a massive display of fireworks right in the heart of the city centre.

The scaling down of cultural/arts events seems inevitable in a time of so many cutbacks to important services. So it wasn’t surprising that this year’s illumination event seemed to have shrunk (though the advertising suggested it would be bigger or better).

Illuminating York 2011 might have seemed like a perfect example of an arts/cultural event creating a sense of social cohesion, but those days are no more. The lights have been taken in, behind railings and fences, and you need a ticket to see them.

I hope other residents saw last year’s events, and enjoyed as I did the brief, inclusive time of free access to all. We’ve perhaps seen the end of that wonderland.

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This ‘Kaleidoscopia’ by Andy McKeown was projected onto an interior wall of the nave of York Minster during Illuminating York 2012. The colours were beautiful and the unfolding of it mesmerising. I could have watched it for hours.

All the photos on this page show the ‘kaleidoscopia’ and were taken on 2 November 2012.

One or two other people commenting on the web said they found York Minster’s Illuminating York offering this year rather disappointing. These things are subjective, of course. One person’s ‘beautiful’ is another person’s ‘boring’.

Another factor causing some confusion and complaint was the relocating of the illuminated display to the interior of the building.

The exterior of York Minster has been lit during the Illuminating York festival in previous years. Not every year, I think, but I recall it being ‘painted’ with light a few times, in an intricate and detailed fashion. I confess I didn’t make the effort to go to see that even though it was free.

One of the previous Illuminating York events when the Minster was painted I walked along Petergate and could see the coloured light on the Minster, and large crowds were gravitating towards it, but I didn’t make the effort to have a better look. I felt it was for tourists, mainly, and it didn’t really interest me. I could admire the skill, but it did nothing to enhance my appreciation of the Minster, which I already find fascinating when lit by ordinary light.

The first attempt to enhance the outside of the Minster with light I did see, by accident, while walking home from the pub with a friend. It’s ten years since that night we laughed in disbelief at the snowflakes projected onto a luridly-coloured Minster. I’ll never forget gawping in horror at the tacky multi-coloured lightshow on that beautiful west front, and the way we said to one another ‘Oh no! What have they done?’, and did that covering our faces with our hands in disbelief thing that the young people now call ‘facepalm’.

I think that was maybe just me and him. Everyone else seemed to like it.

Anyway, things have moved on somewhat since then, and moved inside too.

In 2012 we had to pay to go inside the Minster for its Illuminating York event. The light was concentrated onto one area of one wall of the nave. This smaller-scale projection was my kind of thing. It seemed connected to the spirit of the place in a way those exterior illuminations never did. Perhaps because it was small-scale, and detailed. Visitors walking across the front of it caught the light for a moment, some stood long enough to be part of it, colours projected onto their clothing. The circular designs unfolded and retracted like a kaleidoscope, like flowers, like the sun coming out and going back in. Parts were richly-coloured, others more subtle.

Around us the stone columns and above us the vast space of the nave, as high as our medieval ancestors could make it, as they reached towards heaven. I wonder what they would think to see us gathered here – agnostics and atheists some of us – watching 21st century technology beaming colour onto those walls they built centuries ago.

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Illuminating York finished last night. Its main event was for the first time held in the gated space of the Museum Gardens, and required payment and pre-booking. I gave it a miss and attended supporting events instead, but did take a few photos of the bits visible through the railings.

Views good and bad

Comments made on Twitter seem fairly balanced between positive and negative. Many visitors to Wonderland appeared to be very impressed, and of course these positive comments were retweeted by the festival organisers, while the negative ones weren’t. Can’t blame them for that, but a less filtered representation of public reaction appears on their own Facebook page, and in comments on the Press story.

On these pages of mine, comments from people who rather liked Wonderland.

Expectations, and bigging it up

Many people have compared Wonderland with last year’s main event, which took the form of a massive, complex and impressive light and sound extravaganza, with images projected onto the front of the Castle Museum. There have of course been similar displays as the centrepiece of the festival for some years now. Last year’s was seen as particularly stunning, and as Marc said in comments on a previous page ‘pretty much anything attempting to follow that will feel like an anticlimax.’

It has to be said though that expectations were also raised by the media coverage and press releases. Here’s a few of the comments in the run-up to the event:

The Yorkshire Post: ‘However, with miles of lighting, thousands of LEDs and banks of projectors, this year’s festival is expected to outshine last year’s’ and ‘organisers claim that the event is 
bigger than ever before’.

Quoted in The Press was Councillor Sonja Crisp: ‘The scale and ambition of this year’s festival will be truly spectacular. We have never attempted anything this big before.’

The Press also quoted the organisers explaining the decision to charge an entrance fee for the first time, in order to provide ‘something on the size and scale of this’.

Overview/through the railings view

The event seemed smaller rather than bigger than ever before. We walked through York on two of the nights (Friday and Saturday), visited four of the &#8216supporting event’ venues and had a peer through the railings into the Museum Gardens. Wonderland looked rather quirky and charming from my ‘looking through the railings’ perspective. But if you’d expected a spectacular, and been thinking it would be as good as last year’s display, you were perhaps going to feel let-down.

Many people did enjoy it, but those who didn’t have expressed their disappointment forcefully, often so scathingly that I’ve ended up feeling quite sorry for those on the receiving end. Particularly Vic Reeves, who, it seems, was asked to do this, rather than putting himself forward. There has been a suggestion that he wasn’t paid for his contribution, though this hasn’t been clarified yet. If he wasn’t, then the amount of flak he’s getting seems unfair. Even if he was, the vicious condemnation of his work by some has seemed unfair. But then that’s what happens when people have to hand over their hard-earned money, thinking they’re seeing the ‘biggest ever’ ’spectacular’ Illuminating York event.

I’ve read many reviews, but found one by Hellboy62 on Trip Advisor which includes one line encapsulating the disappointment, with added pathos:

“The high point was the exit, where there was a guy with a torch without batteries.”

Elsewhere on the web

Steve Galloway’s blog: Wonderland or Blunderland?

Letters to The Press, York: Cost of illuminations

From wonder to money-making

Julian Cole, in The Press: Do we want Vic Reeves to light up York? Expressing concerns which appear to have been justified.

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