A 'Festival of Festivals' which would include the Folkestone’s traditional summer season festivals and carnivals as well as local celebrations to mark unique national events is being planned for 2012.

Folkestone Town Centre Management (FTCM) has invited local businesses, entertainment providers and community organisations to help present next year’s all-embracing programme of events.

Branding the events programme as a three-month something-to-please-everyone festival, claims FTCM, would enhance the marketability of Folkestone as a leisure, recreation and shopping destination and create extra sales opportunities for commercial and other enterprises which cater for and entertain holiday and day visitors.

Says town centre manager John Barber: “Folkestone hosts hundreds of events, large and small, during the summer months. Our idea is to raise the town’s visibility by promoting them under one label – Folkestone Festival of Festivals is the provisional name – starting in 2012 which, with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic Games, is shaping up to be one of Britain’s most exciting years.

“Locally, the Multi-Cultural Festival, Green Fair, carnivals, regattas, entertainment, sporting, cultural and a diverse range of other events – including Jubilee and Olympic Games celebrations – will provide great opportunities for the kind of high-impact promotion which cohesion via an overall branding would offer.

“With organisers developing their own ideas, FTCM would act as the co-ordinator of Festival of Festival activities which would be promoted by our partner organisation, Discover Folkestone, Hythe and Romney Marsh. There has been enthusiastic response to our invitation and we will announce plans to take it forward shortly”.

For more information, telephone 01303 850522.

Hawkinge Gazette and Channel Coast News 2011©