Canterbury will be shining brightly this Christmas with lights provided by Canterbury BID.
Over the last ten years, we have provided Christmas lights for the city, testing every possible location and expanding the scheme where we can. Canterbury is an historic city with listed buildings and, in some areas, old infrastructure. Our Christmas Lights contractor, Gala Lights, tests all the fixing points and installs lights around the city. For lamp columns and trees, load testing and permission has to be obtained from Kent County Council, and unfortunately, they haven’t given us permission to put lights on all of the lamp columns we would like. Nonetheless, it’s still an extensive scheme that covers as much of the city as possible.
All of the lights will be on timers this year and will be on from 3:00pm-3.30am. We check the lights daily both in the morning and at 4pm, but please do let us know if you have any questions.
Here are the Christmas light facts in a nutshell:
Here are your lights, in numbers:
6: miles of lights put up each year
12: people to put up and take down the lights over 7 nights
17: switches along the parade route
100s: of permissions obtained by the BID team, allowing lights to be attached
5,000: in attendance at the annual switch-on event, enjoying themselves in our city
£77,000: is the annual cost for our Christmas decorations
118,000: LED lights twinkle above our city from 15 November to early January
