Party in the Park was back at Miners’ Welfare Park in 2019 for another summer celebration — although nobody there could have known it would be the last normal event before a very unusual break in the story.
Another summer at Miners’ Welfare Park
The organiser-confirmed venue for 2019 is Miners’ Welfare Park. A surviving Facebook Event carries a conflicting location label, which is a useful reminder of why the archive checks social-media information against organiser records instead of copying it blindly.
The previous PITP website also preserved a substantial 2019 photo gallery. Those images give us a way to tell the year through real scenes from the event rather than generic festival photographs.
People, performances and community
Research is continuing into the programme and the organisations that joined the event. Contemporary community references are particularly useful because they can reveal groups that may never have appeared in a headline line-up but were still part of the day families experienced.
As those names are verified, they can be linked into the “Who was there?” section and to reusable profiles. That means a dance group, charity or performer appearing in several years can have one profile showing its relationship with Party in the Park over time.
The end of the first run
2019 has an unexpected place in the wider story because the following year would be completely different. The event had built a run of summer gatherings from 2015 onwards, but the COVID-19 restrictions in 2020 meant the normal Party in the Park could not take place.
That makes photographs from 2019 feel particularly valuable: they capture the community together before public events across the country were interrupted.
From 2019 to the year the park went quiet
The next timeline chapter is 2020. We have deliberately kept it in the archive even though there was no normal event, because the gap — and the return that followed — are part of Party in the Park’s history too.