The Lantern Parade is back, and this year it goes past the river

At six o’clock on Saturday 17 October, the lights on Market Square will go off, the band will start up and around six hundred paper lanterns will set off down Corn Street. For the first time since 2023, they won’t stop at the Town Hall. They’ll carry on over Wharf Bridge and along the river to the old warehouse, where the evening finishes with soup, mulled apple juice and a bonfire.

The parade has walked through Brantwick in some form since 1952, when the Wharf Street Methodist Sunday school made forty lanterns from jam jars and tissue paper. It has grown every decade since. What hasn’t changed is the rule that every lantern is made by hand, and that nobody is charged to walk.

Why the route was cut, and how it came back

The parade lost its riverside stretch two years ago, when the towpath was closed for repairs and the organisers couldn’t find enough stewards for the longer walk. Sue Kettering, who has chaired the parade committee since 2011, says the path was only half of the problem.

‘We needed forty stewards and we had nineteen,’ she says. ‘You can’t walk six hundred people, half of them under ten, along a river in the dark with nineteen volunteers. So we cut it short and hoped people wouldn’t mind. They did mind. We had more letters about that than about anything else in twelve years.’

This year the path has reopened with new railings and lighting, and a call-out in these pages in June brought in fifty-two new stewards. The committee has also borrowed hi-vis jackets from the rugby club and torches from the scouts.

Make a lantern before the night

Free lantern-making sessions run at St Anne’s Hall on the two Saturdays before the parade, from 2pm to 5pm. Willow, tissue and glue are provided; bring a jam jar if you have one. Sessions are drop-in, but the committee asks families to arrive before 4pm so there’s time for the glue to dry.

• Saturday 10 October, 2pm to 5pm, St Anne’s Hall

• Saturday 17 October, 10am to 1pm, St Anne’s Hall

• Ready-made lanterns from the Market Square stall on the night, £5

On the night

The parade gathers on Market Square from 5:30pm and leaves at 6pm. Corn Street and Wharf Bridge are closed to traffic from 5pm to 8pm, and the 14 bus will divert along Station Road. The walk takes about forty minutes at a child’s pace. There’s step-free access all the way, and a quieter section at the back of the parade for anyone who’d rather avoid the drums.

Food stalls at the Wharf will be run by the Plough, the Market Hall bakers and the Year 6 parents from Riverside Primary, who are raising money for a new library corner. Bring a little cash: the signal by the warehouse is famously bad for card machines.

‘It’s the one night of the year the whole town is in the same place,’ says Kettering. ‘Grandparents who walked it as children, toddlers who’ll be walking it in seventy years. That’s worth a few extra stewards.’