Bristol Pride 2027

Bristol Pride is the big LGBTQ+ celebration of South West England. The programme runs for about a fortnight, usually from late June to mid-July, with gigs, theatre, comedy and circus nights, film screenings and workshops. It ends with Pride Day on the second Saturday of July. A parade goes through the city centre, and the party then moves up to the Downs, the large open green space in the north of the city. Moving the festival there roughly doubled its capacity.

Pride here goes back further than in most British cities outside London. The first Bristol Gay Festival took place in the late 1970s as a fundraiser for Gay News, which Mary Whitehouse was suing for blasphemy at the time. In the mid-1980s it became Avon Pride, and the city's first Pride march followed a couple of years later. Through the 1990s the event was called Pride West. Then funding ran short, several years were cancelled, and after a final edition the festival lay dormant for almost a decade. The registered charity Bristol Pride brought it back and has run it ever since.

The charity works all year against homophobia, biphobia and transphobia, with school visits, consultations and campaigning for better policies. Alongside the main events, the fortnight includes the Queer Vision Film Festival, comedy and theatre nights, and a Pride dog show. It hasn't always gone smoothly. Small groups of counter-protesters have turned up more than once, and police treated vandalism around one edition as a hate crime. Many events are family-friendly, and Pride Day on the Downs is open to anyone who wants to join in.