Let’s celebrate and showcase our town

Monday August 19th – make sure that date is marked in your diary.

It is the launch date for the Celebrate Ipswich Festival, incorporating the Maritime event over the following Bank Holiday weekend.

This is the town’s annual opportunity to showcase itself to tens of thousands of visitors, a huge number of whom travel the length and breadth of this Country (not to mention from overseas) to be here and celebrate with us.

Time spent telling you what is going on is not necessary – look at www.allaboutipswich.com, or at one of the 30,000 festival brochures that have been produced. What is more important is why the event is now so important.

Of course, there are differences of opinion locally about any town centre – but, quite simply, visitors love ours. Hotel rooms book months in advance, restaurant tables are reserved and retailers rely upon this new and important trading period.

This year, businesses are helping to ‘spruce up the streets’ in the week before the Festival.

I read a recent article from Paul Geater in which he expressed concern that traders should be helping with the clean-up, when it should be provided for them. There are two reasons why it’s happening – firstly, if we all treated the streets like our own rather than someone else’s problem, there wouldn’t be a need for Council cleaning; secondly, over 100 businesses have led on this so that they can demonstrate a commitment to civic pride.

So, for the month of August, let’s view our town through the eyes of our visitors.

We should talk up our town centre and do everything that we can to make sure that, when they arrive, they see it at its absolute best and want to come back for more