10 days in September featuring artwork in 30 locations;  an art-trail around this historic town; daily events and live experiences.

Altrincham is thoroughly enjoying its new reputation as a dynamic foodie town. The award-winning Altrincham Market House is packed to the rafters and ‘doing an Altrincham’ has become a NW region byword for food-led regeneration.

This historic charter market town is becoming a great place to live again – but there remain gaps. Sited on the fringes of Manchester, with a tram service every 6 minutes to cultural attractions in the city just 30 minutes away, arts and culture is a bit low key. That needs to change. The exciting food scene is attracting new, younger residents and visitors and the time is right to capitalise on this.

Open Studios Altrincham is doing just that. Building on its inaugural event last year, Hidden Altrincham 2017 (14-24 September) will shine a spotlight on the town’s less familiar gems, creating and showing art in places that celebrate and appreciate the space it is in.

We are helping this small organisation plan its marketing and stakeholder engagement and to set a route to 2020 when the aim is for Hidden Altrincham to be a well-established event in the town’s calendar.

There are some major stirrings in Yorkshire’s East Riding. Hull 2017 is the biggest cultural event in the country this year, but as the UK City of Culture the fun doesn’t stop at the Humber Bridge. In the context of Northern Powerhouse and the forthcoming Great Exhibition of the North…well you can see where this is going. The destination management organisation Visit Hull & East Yorkshire was successful in securing first round Visit Britain Discover England funding, in partnership with its opposite numbers in Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool. We were brought in to develop a series of cultural itineraries linking these four Trans-Pennine cities with highlights including Hull 2017 events, Leeds West Indian Carnival 50^th anniversary celebrations, Manchester International Festival and Liverpool’s 50 Summers of Love programme. These new cultural itineraries are specifically targeting visitors from Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. First Transpennine has created a new Cities of North England rover rail ticket to encourage visitors to hop on a train and travel cross-country. We also developed bespoke cultural itineraries for travel trade operators and travel journalists from all three countries who visited all four cities using the new rail ticket in March. The itineraries are listed on www.citiesofnorthengland.com.

Have a look at this article announcing the new North of England Rover Ticket.

We like the definition of mentoring that says ‘a mentor is a person who has a sincere desire to enhance the success of others.’ Over the course of two years Helen worked closely with the Project Coordinator and partners of the Bristol and Bath Cultural Destinations First Round programme in a mentoring capacity, sharing learnings, providing advice and generally supporting the development of the consortia. Helen spent time in both cities getting to know the people and places to help in shaping the work programme, deliver training on cultural tourism and support wider advocacy with public and private sector partners.

As they gear up for a second-round of Cultural Destinations funding, Lakes Culture held a workshop to raise ambition and encourage bold thinking with culture and tourism partners from across the Lake District. In the lovely surroundings of the Daffodil Hotel & Spa in Grasmere, Alex and Helen delivered a hands-on session. Delegates were guided through practical activities designed to get the best out of cross-sector collaborative working and identify and overcome some of the regular misunderstandings that occur between different sectors.  Drawing on direct experience from Creative Tourist’s Culture Hosts programme in Manchester, the session compared the city-centre experience with the rural and it was fascinating and reassuring to see that the challenges (and solutions) are the same.

The 2017 edition of Wonder Women, produced by Creative Tourist, takes place between 2-12 March. A 10-day celebration of creative-feminist-activism will animate the city of Manchester, with over 35 individual events making up this year’s diverse lineup.

The festival’s official launch event was Making The Strange Familiar with Instigate Arts at Manchester Art Gallery. Other highlights across the ten days include Dolly Mixtures – a day of feminist theatre performance at The Royal Exchange; a screening of Rebel Dykes at HOME; an in-conversation at Working Class Movement Library about the experiences of black women; a focus on well-being in partnership with SICK! Festival and The Lowry, and a script-in-hand reading of a new play at People’s History Museum that will be researched and written during the festival week.

For the latest information on Wonder Women you can follow on Facebook and Twitter. You can find the full line-up here.

Having researched and written the successful award application, we are delighted to be starting work with Stoke-on-Trent’s Cultural Destinations team on their 3-year journey. We’ll be focusing on building partnerships and capacity for cultural tourism at an exciting time for the city, not least because Stoke-on-Trent is bidding for the designation of UK City of Culture 2021.

The project work with cultural and tourism partners from across the city region will map the cultural tourism, digital and network assets to identify training needs, development opportunities and where the overarching strategy needs to be directed. From there we will help to inform a number of priority areas, including securing the right investment, effective marketing communications, skills development, and content and information provision.

Image credit: World of Wedgwood

Arts Council England recently announced the sixteen successful bidding consortia of the 2^nd round of its Cultural Destinations programme. The fund aims to help the cultural and tourism sectors to work together more effectively to grow local visitor economies.

We are thrilled that our advice and support directly informed three of the successful bids: Potteries Museum & Art Gallery (Stoke-on-Trent), Marketing Manchester and Spike Island (South West).

Starting on local ground, we have been working with Marketing Manchester for the last seven years to create partnerships with the cultural and tourism sectors through a range of initiatives. This funding will help us to develop the innovative Culture Hosts platform that we have piloted in Manchester, extending its reach with cultural and hospitality partners to make sure visitor-facing staff are well informed about what’s happening in the city.

We’re looking forward to working with Stoke-on-Trent partners to create new opportunities to collaborate and extend the visitor offer in a city that is gearing up to bid for UK City of Culture 2021. And we are delighted that the Spike Island programme will continue and extend its ground-breaking work to connect Bristol & Bath culturally, across the South West region. We have mentored the project since the programme began two years ago, and are currently delivering a dynamic series of digital optimisation workshops with cultural and tourism partners across the two cities.

Tourism in Northern Ireland is on a roll. The peace dividend has seen investment in its capital (not least the Titanic Belfast, just voted the World’s Leading Tourist Attraction), and Derry Londonderry City of Culture 2013. Game of Thrones is attracting new visitors in new ways. But what about the rich existing heritage, as strong as any other part of the UK? Heritage can play a much stronger role in the nation’s visitor economy. We’ve been appointed to seek out opportunities that can do just that.

Image: Titanic Belfast

Sleepy market town. It’s a well-worn stereotype – and it’s not always true. Take Cheltenham. It has some of the strongest cultural events to be found in the West – Cheltenham Festivals, and the Gold Cup spring to mind. Working with the inestimable consultant John Knell, we developed an outcomes-based tourism strategy that can take the town forward together.

Outcomes is an important word. A new partnership has been established – but with clear and shared goals. A new post has been created – working to a 3-year development route map that Creative Tourist developed with the key tourism partners. Cheltenham punches above its weight already, and our work is part of ensuring that their planning, investment and infrastructure can match their product and promotion.

View CTConsults’ case study – Setting the alarm for a sleepy festival town