We’ve just left Eccles on Sunday evening after a brilliant weekend at Get In! To Eccles, a brand-new festival created by Salford City Council and From The Other. It’s one that means a lot to us at Sundae; Eccles is our hometown, so to be part of something like this, and to see it land the way it did, makes you feel proud and hopeful for what comes next.
For one weekend, Eccles shifted. Streets and venues filled up with performances, installations and live activity that gave people a reason to move through the town differently, spend extended time there, and see familiar spaces in a new light.
Our brief was to showcase Eccles as a destination. Somewhere with cultural activity already happening, independent businesses worth shouting about, and a strong community identity behind it. There’s also a wider story around the future of the town centre and the ongoing regeneration work taking place there, and while that wasn’t the headline of the campaign, it gave real context to everything we were doing.
We started with a save the date announcement tied into the BBC 6 Music Festival, positioning Get In! To Eccles within a much bigger cultural moment from the outset. From there, it was about building out the different strands of the programme in a way that felt layered rather than overwhelming. Lowri Evans’ work at the station, the artisan market, the food and drink side of the festival, the family activity, the music, and the wider programme itself. Each part needed its own space and audience.
A big part of the campaign involved working closely with the 6 Music Festival publicity team at the BBC to make sure the activity complemented each other across both campaigns. That relationship was hugely important because it allowed Eccles to sit within a national conversation around grassroots venues, local culture and independent creativity.
That became even clearer once the Festival Insights feature we placed landed during the week of the festival, focusing on the importance of hyper-local festivals and the role they play within the wider industry.
A lot of the time, the industry conversation focuses on major festivals, but the truth is those events rely on local scenes, independent promoters, community spaces and smaller cultural moments continuing to exist and evolve. Get In! To Eccles felt like a really strong example of that – a festival rooted in its town, but still connected to something much bigger.
Across the weekend itself, it became obvious very quickly that people were buying into it; everywhere was busy and full of smiling faces of all ages. Lowri Evans’ Train Dreaming at the station completely changed the atmosphere of a space people usually just pass through. In the church, a string quartet played to pews packed with people, while the 6 Music Festival show at Eccles Town Hall Ballroom brought a diverse crowd into the building and showed a new audience what a special venue it is.
On Sunday morning we went to the BBC Philharmonic’s performance of The Musical Story of the Gingerbread Man, also at the Town Hall Ballroom, which was full early on, then headed over to the artisan market, full of high quality traders, which held a great turnout despite relentless rain for most of the afternoon. We finished up in The Moss, an installation in one of the shop units which created a quieter space for families and younger kids away from everything else happening outside.
That mix was the biggest strength of the weekend; people didn’t just arrive for one thing and leave – they moved between venues, explored the town and stayed longer than they planned to.
From a campaign point of view, the coverage built exactly how we’d planned. Regional, broadcast, theatre, trade and consumer titles all engaged with it across different stages of the rollout. That included two features in the Manchester Evening News (one about the artisan market and another about grassroots venues in collaboration with 6 Music Festival), interviews across BBC Radio Manchester and BBC Radio 6 Music, a review on British Theatre Guide, and a national trade feature in Festival Insights.
The trade coverage was particularly important. It allowed us to step back slightly and talk about the role of hyper-local festivals in the industry as a whole, and why projects like this matter. They create platforms for artists, bring new audiences into cultural spaces, and build the foundations that larger festivals rely on.
At the same time, we saw consistent support from Manchester and Salford’s consumer and news titles, with repeat coverage throughout the campaign helping to build awareness in the lead-up to an incredibly successful weekend.
Eccles deserves this, and it deserves the bright future on the horizon – it is a place like no other, and a place we are proud to call home.
Tom x
