For community and creativity

UK Town of Culture is a brand new national competition, launched in January 2026 by the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS). It's the first time the government has run a dedicated competition for towns (as opposed to cities) to be recognised for their culture, creativity and community.

The competition invites towns across the UK to tell their unique story, present a vision for a cultural programme, and show they can deliver it. One town will be named the first-ever UK Town of Culture 2028 and receive £3 million to put on a major programme of cultural activity during 2028.

It's modelled on the UK City of Culture, a competition that has transformed places like Hull, Coventry and Bradford, but designed specifically for towns of all sizes.

The Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) guidance is deliberately broad. Culture includes arts, heritage, creative industries, festivals, music, dance, theatre, literature, food, craft and community traditions. The guidance specifically encourages bids that draw on "a broad definition of culture and how it relates to your town's history, story and community.

The competition is split into size categories (small, medium and large) so Helston isn't directly competing against a town like which has a larger population. Each category produces its own finalist, and the overall winner is chosen from those three.

Beyond that, each town has a different story to tell. Helston's story - 800-plus years of unbroken living tradition, remarkable cultural life built almost entirely without national funding, the most southerly market town on mainland Great Britain - is wonderfully distinct.

Yes, and this matters. The competition is explicitly about culture in the broadest sense: community, identity, belonging, tradition, pride of place. It's not just about art galleries and theatres.

If you go to Flora Day, you're part of Helston's culture. If you shop on the high street, you're part of it. If you've watched generations of your family dance the Flora Day dance, if you remember what the town smelled like when you were a child, if you have a strong opinion about what's been lost and what should be protected, all of that is exactly what this bid needs.

The competition is specifically trying to reach towns whose culture is everyday and lived-in, not polished and institutional. That's Helston.

The Expression of Interest stage (the current phase) has been deliberately designed to be low-cost. There is no entry fee. The main investment at this stage is staff time from the bid partnership organisations.

If Helston progresses to the full application stage, the £60,000 development grant is specifically provided to cover those costs, so bidding towns aren't expected to fund the process themselves from local budgets.

Fill in the survey on this website, because the judges will be assessing whether this bid is truly community-shaped. The more voices we gather, and the more honestly they reflect what Helston actually is, the stronger that evidence becomes.

After that, the most helpful thing you can do is share this website with people who live or work in Helston, especially people who might not normally engage with something like this, people who've lived here their whole lives, older residents with long memories, young people with big ideas, people who love the town but have never put it into words.