About Us
Who is Involved?
Great Yarmouth borough Council, East Suffolk Council, together with Norfolk County Council and Suffolk County Council are leading the Bid. Our stakeholder map spans 180 organisations already involved – and the range and depth of support can be seen in our letters of support for partner and supporting organisations across the business, community and voluntary sectors, our health sector, police, academia, transport sector and arts, culture and heritage sector.
About Great Yarmouth
The borough of Great Yarmouth stretches from Winterton in the north via Great Yarmouth and Gorleston-on-Sea to Hopton-on-Sea in the south, encompassing the south Norfolk Broads and Breydon Water. Its seaside attractions range from traditional to cutting-edge.
It hosts the annual Out There festival (the UK’s biggest cultural gathering of circus and outdoor street arts), plus the newly created Out There Fire On The Water extravaganza on the town’s newly-restored Venetian Waterways. Its circus-led offerings place it as the ‘UK Capital of Circus’, while its historic Hippodrome is Britain’s only surviving complete circus building and is still in regular use.
There are also a wealth of current and former theatres and venues which have played host to the great entertainers of the day, and the Great Yarmouth Arts Festival offers cultural activities, performances and collaborations, while the Maritime Festival celebrates the area’s links with the sea and the Wheels Festival showcases all types of classic and contemporary vehicles.
The communities within the borough are diverse and far reaching, lending themselves to the landscape and shaping the future of the town. They have enriched the culture by bringing unique and fresh ideas, creating a legacy in their own right.
East Suffolk
East Suffolk is the largest district in the country and benefits from a diverse creative community working in unique locations across 126,000 hectares and 175 towns and parishes.
Lowestoft is the most easterly town in the UK and the first to see the sun rise at the summer solstice, hence its inaugural First Light Festival in 2019 attracted tens of thousands of visitors. It is also home to the Excelsior – an authentically restored fishing smack which is a member of the National Historic Fleet.
The area is the southern gateway to the Broads National Park via Carlton Marshes nature reserve which is under the custodianship of Suffolk Wildlife Trust. The Trust cares for nearly 8000 acres of some of Suffolk’s most inspiring wild places, while important wildlife habitats include the coastal nature reserve of RSPB Minsmere and the Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB.
East Suffolk also hosts major arts festivals including the Aldeburgh Festival, Latitude and events at Snape Maltings, one of the world’s leading centres of music founded by Lowestoft-born composer Benjamin Britten; while its iconic buildings include Norman castles at Orford and Framlingham (made famous as the ‘castle on the hill’ in a song by local boy Ed Sheeran), ancient monuments such as the Anglo Saxon royal burial site at Sutton Hoo, and other historic sites like Felixstowe’s Landguard Fort and Bawdsey Radar.
This Moment in Time
Both areas are fast becoming a favourite as film locations, with two recent major films being shot locally. The 2019 Beatles-inspired Yesterday features Halesworth, Shingle Street, Dunwich and Gorleston’s seafront; while scenes in the 2021 British film drama The Dig, telling the story of Sutton Hoo, were filmed around the real site near Woodbridge.
