End of the rainbow? A review of community events in Liverpool

This chapter highlights the issues that eminent places often experience in maintaining a ‘community festival’. It is particularly interested in how community festivals are maintained and managed where the identity of a place has changed or become fragmented, due to either an occasion that thrusts the place into the general public’s notice (such as industry or a particular cultural activity) or an influx of another culture due to migration. Such fragmentation of a place can force a move away from the ‘heart of a community’ (Wheatley & Kellner-Rogers, 1998) to places comprising smaller groups often with a single focus (such as music, food, ethnicity or even sport). Quinn's (2013 p9) suggestion that community festivals emerge as small-scale, localised endeavours founded by people in placed-based communities who are interested in celebrating something is becoming more difficult to achieve as local government places considerable focus on a return on their 'investment' through tourism. As places grow in reputation as well as size, the community activities often disperses into the more contrasting festivals for sections of the community rather than the community as a whole. This chapter discusses these developments and considers how eminent places manage to maintain, revive and in some cases formulate a local identity from both a personal and civic perspective.