The Lights Go Out: Durham's Lumiere and Artichoke's 16 Years, 2009–2025

In Durham in November, once four in the afternoon has passed, the sky sinks into indigo. In the north-east of England, inside the great U-shaped meander of the River Wear, a Norman cathedral and castle huddle together on the hill. For only a handful of days in the season when the nights are longest, in this World Heritage city of nearly a thousand years' standing, images are projected across the cathedral's enormous west front, and works of light are scattered along the riverbanks and the cobbled lanes. People do not buy a ticket; they meet the works simply by walking the dark winter city. Lumiere, the largest festival of light in Britain, is an event this city has kindled every other year since 2009. And in November 2025 it reached its final nights in its current form.

What this essay reads is the fact that the festival sustained a time-limited form — lighting the city every other winter — for 16 years, and then brought down its own curtain. Within the category this journal calls "KO (候)" — the lineage that takes climate, season and time-limitedness as the conditions on which a work comes into being — Lumiere is a case that made both the meteorological condition of winter darkness and the two-year cycle its conditions of existence. And now that the ending has been made public, we can see from the reverse side how fragile the foundations were on which a season-dependent festival of light stood.

One City, Kindled Every Other Year

Lumiere has been produced by an organisation called Artichoke. Founded in 2005 by Helen Marriage and Nicky Webb, who had run the Salisbury International Arts Festival, it is a non-profit production body that has made large-scale public art outside the museum — in city streets, in rural countryside, along coastlines. The idea of turning the city itself, temporarily, into the vessel for a work is this organisation's consistent gesture.

In November 2009 Artichoke staged Lumiere in Durham for the first time. From that first edition, which drew 75,000 people over four nights, the festival was repeated in Durham roughly every two years, across several nights in November. In 2013 it was staged in Derry~Londonderry in Northern Ireland, then a European City of Culture, and in 2016 and 2018 in London, and Lumiere came to be known as a touring festival that repainted British cities in light. But the centre was always Durham. The World Heritage cathedral and castle, and the very topography of a small historic city enclosed by a river, worked as the underdrawing on which the works of light were arranged.

The biennial cycle set the rhythm of this festival. Being held every other year rather than annually had a production rationale — time could be taken over the preparation — and at the same time it produced, on the city's side, a cycle of expectation: is this a year that has it, or a year that does not? The November dark of a year without the festival is merely winter dark. It is precisely because of that blank year that the city becomes something special in the year it is lit. Placing a deliberate ma — an interval — inside time was built into the design of this festival.

Who Makes the Light — BRILLIANT

What kept Lumiere at a distance from being a mere "trade fair of light by famous artists" was the existence of an open-call programme named BRILLIANT. Begun in 2011, the scheme invited ideas for light from the general public, and entry was not restricted to professional artists. Selected proposals were grown into finished works with Artichoke's support and shown in the streets alongside the work of artists invited from Britain and abroad.

Through BRILLIANT, Artichoke has stated, 27 works were presented at Lumiere by 2023, seen by a cumulative audience of more than four million. In the 2023 edition too, an artist based in Seaham in the north-east, a film-maker born in Durham, a Deaf architect and visual artist, and a maker fresh out of the Royal College of Art set their works along the same streets as the internationally invited artists. Who holds the right to kindle a light in the city — to that question, Lumiere had prepared an answer as an institution: an ordinary local resident will do.

In a seasonal event, this design carries no small meaning. The "ground" of winter darkness is a condition shared by the people who live in the city. If so, then the "figure" kindled into that darkness may come not only from artists invited in from outside but from the hands of those who live inside that darkness. BRILLIANT was a mechanism that left the brush for drawing in the tenkei half-open to the city's own side.

The Cathedral as Screen

At the core of Lumiere was projection that turned Durham Cathedral, an architecture without peer, into a screen. In the first edition, in 2009, the projection artist Ross Ashton made Crown of Light together with Robert Ziegler on music and John Del'Nero on sound. Taking the west front of the Norman cathedral — roughly 100 metres wide — whole as a screen, he ran imagery from the Lindisfarne Gospels, the illuminated manuscript made in the seventh century on the holy island of the north, and ornament from the cathedral's interior, across the full breadth of the stone. A thousand years of masonry became, for a few nights, a device that projected outwards the images it had held within.

Crown of Light was well received and was called back to Durham several times in later editions. Attempts staged on the cathedral did not stop there. In 2015 the French artist Miguel Chevalier projected an interactive work, Complex Meshes, onto the vaulted ceiling inside the cathedral. Outer wall or interior ceiling, in both cases the projection did not treat the shape of the architecture as a flat screen but drew the form of the stone itself into the movement of the image. It chimes here too with the gesture this journal observed at the Fête des Lumières in Lyon — using a historic building as support without erasing it.

The works were all free, and most were placed in outdoor public space. Rather than paying admission, the audience meets the works through the act of walking the winter city. Once the festival ends, the cathedral wall returns to the colour of stone and the lanes return to being everyday lanes. That very property — appearing for a few nights and then vanishing — separated the event both from the "permanent museum" and from "permanent lighting".

The Cost of Keeping the Lights On

Free to encounter simply by walking the city — behind that ease, Lumiere was never a cheap event. The budget for the 2025 edition reached about £2.5 million. From roughly £650,000 for the first edition in 2009, the cost swelled greatly as the scale grew.

That cost was supported by several public and private funding sources. For the 2025 edition, Arts Council England provided £500,000, Durham County Council carried substantial operational support of just under £10 million, and Artichoke raised the remainder from 101 supporters to make it happen. To be a free public event is also to have no admission income from visitors. So long as the legitimacy of the festival rests on the fact that anyone may walk it for free, the cost of keeping the lights on can only be shouldered by public money and donations.

A second factor that pushed the cost up was security. Since the Manchester Arena attack of 2017, safety measures for events that gather large crowds outdoors have demanded a scale and cost incomparable with what came before. For Lumiere, with hundreds of thousands of people pouring out into winter streets, this is a burden that cannot be ignored. Artichoke's director Helen Marriage later spoke frankly on this point. A season-dependent festival of light depended, doubly and triply, not only on the weather but on a social condition — whether people can gather in the streets in that season with any sense of safety — and on the financial condition that underwrites it.

When the Lights Go Out

In April 2024, after weighing measures for managing ever-swelling costs, Durham County Council decided that the 2025 edition would be the last in the current format. And in November 2025, Lumiere lit its final three nights in its current form. Across nine editions, an estimated 1.3 million people came to Durham, leaving some £43 million in the economy of this World Heritage city. Sixteen years, nine editions, free of charge — on the numbers alone, this reads as the record of a successful public cultural programme. And still the lights went out.

Helen Marriage put it this way as the festival came to its end.

There has been a tide of goodwill, so it may be that something will emerge. But I don't think it will be us, it won't be Lumiere, it won't be Artichoke.

— The Art Newspapersource

The very person who has sustained the festival denies any restart by her own hand, and yet leaves behind the words that "something will emerge". What this remark shows is that although the particular event called Lumiere is over, the desire of a city to kindle light in the winter dark remains. The agent that kindles the light can change hands. But the place where the light is kindled — the long winter nights of a World Heritage city — does not move.

Here the core of the category "KO (候)" appears. The season comes round every year. In November 2026, and in November 2027, the sky over Durham will sink into indigo at four in the afternoon. The "ground" of winter darkness will visit the city without fail, festival or no festival. What has changed is whether a "figure" of light is kindled into that darkness. Tenkei was the concept by which a small figure or boat drawn into a vast landscape gives the whole landscape meaning and scale. The darkness comes every year. But darkness alone is still only the "ground" of a tenkei. Only when someone kindles a light in it does the winter city become a single picture possessing figure and ground.

This journal has looked at festivals of light organised around the season: the Fête des Lumières in Lyon, which the city itself lights; Vivid Sydney, held in the winter of the southern hemisphere; Signal Festival, which occupies a central European city in autumn. While most of them still continue, Lumiere is the rare case that has shown us an ending. A season-dependent festival of light looks as though it could be held every year, as long as winter comes round; in fact it stands, only barely, on conditions that have nothing to do with the season — public money, donations and security. Once that foundation crumbles, the darkness stays as it is and only the light stops coming. After a tenkei of sixteen years has vanished, the November dark of Durham should look a little deeper than before.

Sources

1. fig.001Lumiere Durham 2025 — Artichoke (official project page)
2. fig.002Lumiere — Durham County Council (commissioning authority, official)
3. fig.003Lumiere Durham 2015 — Artichoke (official project page)
4. fig.004Lumiere Durham 2023 — Artichoke (official project page)
5. [5]Artichoke (company) — Wikipedia (founding, history, host cities)
6. [6]Crown of Light — Ross Ashton (artist's official site, work description)
7. [7]BRILLIANT ideas chosen for Lumiere 2023 — Artichoke (open-call programme, track record)
8. [8]Farewell to Lumiere? UK light festival holds what may be its final edition — The Art Newspaper (closure, budget, statements)
9. [9]Let's not let the lights go out — LUCI Association (commentary on the closure, significance)

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Artichoke (producer) / Durham County Council (commissioner)

LOCATION

Durham

MODEL

Festival programming — A public–private model: produced by Artichoke (a charity founded in 2005) and commissioned by Durham County Council; every edition was free to attend. Works were invited, and also drawn through the open-call programme "BRILLIANT" launched in 2011

ARTIST PAY

Works were commissioned or invited; BRILLIANT accepted proposals beyond professional artists and supported selected ideas into production

CADENCE

Biennial in Durham from 2009, over several November nights (usually four; three in 2025). Also staged in London (2016, 2018) and Derry~Londonderry (2013)

SPEC

Projections and installations across Durham's streets, bridges, riverbanks and historic buildings; about 160,000 visitors over four nights in 2023, and 37 works in 2021

SINCE

2009

STATUS

Ended — The current format ended with the November 2025 edition; Durham County Council decided in April 2024 that 2025 would be the last of the current editions. An estimated 1.3 million people attended across nine editions

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