In pictures: Light Night Leeds 2010

I love Light Night. Or as much as anything I love the atmosphere – for one friday night of the year the city centre takes on a whole different feeling – the drunken office workers and stag dos might still be there, but they’re much less noticable – the streets are thronged with families, friends, young and old, out for an evening of entertainment and enthrallment, and smiling people everywhere.

For me, the evening started straight from work meeting friends at the Victoria Quarter. A strange man clutching a Morrisons shopping bag stood next to us for a while rather awkwardly, before leaning in and conspiratorially whispering “This is the end of modern art!” then walking off. It’s probably testament to the unexpected nature of what you find at Light Night that we weren’t entirely sure if he was a performance artist or a nut job!

One of the slight down-sides of light night is that there’s so much stuff going on all over the city you only ever see a very small part of it. On the other hand maybe that is one of the great things about it – no two visitor’s experiences are the same! It does mean the photos you see here are effectively the view I saw (and with hind sight I think it’s better to start off around the town hall/library/art gallery – a lot of the performance art happens around there and by the time we’d got over there it was all finished).

For me, I think my favourite part of the evening was stumbling across A Nod & A Wink’s “Party Time” – a small section of carpet was transported around the city centre, along with a ghetto-blaster and a choice selection of rave classics, creating impromptu parties around the city. People were encouraged to throng together on the carpet and loose it to the likes of The Prodigy. You could hear the whoops and cheering well before you caught any sight of it, and people were having an immensely good time! More impressive still was when members of the passing public would start break-dancing, quickly ring’d by the cheering masses!

Another highlight was the take-over of the old TK Maxx store by Yorkshire animators, creating a huge dark open space filled with projections. Entering through the service passageways felt a bit like you were exploring an old abandoned warehouse.

Anyway, I hope the photos bring back a few memories, maybe you’d like to share your own experiences below in the comments?

When he’s not working for agency AWA as a web developer, Rick Harrison is a freelance photographer based in Leeds. [ Portfolio | Twitter ].