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.’

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.

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. The walk takes about forty minutes at a child’s pace, with step-free access all the way.

‘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.’