Coventry City of Culture: Assembly Festival Garden reopens
80,000 tickets were sold for events there last summer
Last updated 14th Apr 2022
The Assembly Festival Garden is reopening in Coventry today.
The city centre site has been one of the highlights of City of Culture year so far, with 80,000 tickets sold for events there last summer.
A petition with 2,000 signatures calling for it to return this year convinced City of Culture bosses to bring it back this year, as we enter the final weeks of the celebrations.
It's expected to be open until late September.
Located opposite the Council House and a short walk from both Broadgate and Coventry Cathedral, the Festival Garden will play host to the double-decker, Queen of Flanders spiegeltent, the largest of its kind in the world, the Treehouse bar, and the bijou Piccolo spiegeltent.
During its 2021 residency, the pop-up space welcomed tens of thousands of visitors to its events with locals and visitors making the most of the social hub at the heart of the UK City of Culture.
Highlights of the summer programme last year included the first English dates for musical hit Choir of Man, the return of international performers with the spectacular Circolombia, as well as one-off gigs for big names such as Neville Staple, Nish Kumar, Rob Beckett, and Hazel O’Connor.
The Garden was also at the centre at some of the most anticipated events of the summer – with live outdoor screenings of the UEFA Men’s European Football Championships, and Ed Sheeran’s exclusive performance at the HMV Empire.
90 per cent of visitors saying their experience at the venue was good, and 81 per cent saying it had improved their perceptions of Coventry in a recent audience survey.
When it was announced last that the garden would return, Martin Sutherland, Chief Executive of Coventry City of Culture Trust, said:
“We are delighted to announce that the Assembly Festival Garden will reopen again in Coventry in the Spring.
“We originally intended the Garden to be in the city for this Summer only but we’ve had such great feedback and have welcomed so many visitors that we’ve decided, with our partners at Assembly Festival, to bring it back in 2022.
“With the ongoing support of our principal partners including Coventry City Council and Coventry University, we are very much looking forward to helping make new memories when it returns next year.”
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