Gloucester city centre will be stepping back in time next month, as the annual Retro Festival gets underway.

The festival was created by councillor Colin Organ and first appeared as a live event in 2015 and in so doing immediately became an award-winning festival by creating the largest crowds ever seen in the city centre.

The 2018 event will take place on Saturday 25th August, and Colin Organ says he’s looking forward to welcoming visitors to the city on what will be a memorable day for the people of Gloucester. He said: “The event was designed to increase tourism and footfall and maximise longevity of visitor time spent in the city to support its businesses, charities and its residents and is part of the overall cultural strategy, with a particular emphasis on the inner-city in helping to raise its profile.

“For 2018 we will be hosting around 350 classic car owners and their vehicles, who are coming at our invitation from all over the country to create a display of very valuable classic and historic transport through the ages.”

The pedestrian gate streets of Gloucester will have different themes – Westgate Street will be themed from 1900s to 1949, Northgate Street 1950s, Eastgate Street 1960s and Southgate Street 1970-1980s. Colin continued: “The event will reflect our recent living history with each gate street representing a different era of time and each having nostalgic themes through music, fashion, song, dancing and food with re-enactors and famous celebrities from television playing a major role in this fun event.

“Kings Square will be the area for live entertainment, while our industrial past will be represented in Kings Walk.

“The event is very popular. With it we attract tourism and followers who hopefully will love our city and what it has to offer and come for repeat visits which naturally helps our economy, employment and regeneration into the future.

“It is therefore very important that we encourage the businesses, community groups, residents and charities to all join in to and engage with all of our visitors and make them feel very welcome.”