Maiden City Festival's week long festivities are set to kick off this weekend

Derry is set to play host to the Maiden City Festival, which starts on Saturday, August 3. 

Festivities are taking place across the city between August 3 and August 9. 

Jonathan Burgess, the organiser of the festival, has worked tirelessly to ensure the city has the best experience of events, remembering the history of the Siege of Derry. 

He said: “It is a fun-packed and flat-out week. 

“We have living history characters out by the walls. 

“We will have 10 living history characters from the 3rd until the 9th of August, representing different aspects of the siege. The historical characters are fictional characters, so they can tell the story of the time without being constrained by historical facts.

“We do a promenade show in St. Columb's Cathedral called the ‘Siege Story’ and it takes you through the whole siege, from the closing of the gates to the eventual relief, and that lasts about 35 minutes, and we do it three times a day at 12, 2, and 4pm.

“We do highland dancing and piping displays on the hour; that is done with Solace Hill dancers. That is Monday to Friday, and it starts at 11 in the morning and ends at 4 in the afternoon. 

“There will also be tea dances in the Memorial Hall as well. Those tea dances bring a big cross-community crowd as they remember back to a pre-troubles time.

“There is a play from about four or five years ago that was written by myself called ‘A funny thing happened on the way from the 12th’. It is all different perspectives about parading, the apprentice boys, and the history and culture of five different people at a bus stop. 

It is a bit of craic and allows people to ask questions with a facilitated discussion at the end of it.”

While there are loads of events taking place across the city during the festival, many of them free of charge, there are hopes Maiden City Festival can expand in the future. 

But Mr. Burgess is concerned about the fine line the festival is surviving on as funding within the arts in Northern Ireland remains perilous. 

He said: “People want to celebrate their culture and their community, and they are finding better ways to do that.

“We have great plans to do other projects and do things across the year as opposed to just focusing on August. 

“There has been a major financial drain on the arts sector in Northern Ireland. At the moment, we are operating on fumes. 

“With most of our events being free, you can charge people for community outreach. We are never going to be self-sufficient, and if we don’t have the funding or if it is cut further in the future, we will be treading water.”

However, with the growing tourism industry in Derry, with a particular focus on the walls, Mr. Burgess is hopeful there can be growth within the city's population to utilise the walls more. 

He said: “I also think we need to utilise the walls more; they are such an underused facility in our city, and I know this may be a legacy from the Troubles when people weren’t allowed on them. 

“It is getting people back on the walls and giving them a reason to use them, the same way visitors are using the walls.

“We would love to see more of our own communities coming up onto the walls and participating in the events and celebrating the festival.

“We did our own survey of the festival last year on the walls at the end of days with the actors and the highland dancing. We found 60% of the people we were performing for were not from Northern Ireland, not even just Derry. 

“There were people from Venezuela, Japan, Australia, and all across Europe and America. We found that on the walls during the festival, of the people we surveyed, only seven percent of them were from Derry or the Waterside.”