Lancashire is bidding to become the UK City of Culture in 2025, a prestigious national event held once every four years.

To mark this, the county is calling on Prestonian artists and citizens to submit ideas that could become part of a high quality cultural programme for the Lancashire 2025 bid.

The Lancashire 2025 vision is of a virtual city of 1.5 million creatives that connects the diverse identities of Lancashire to reshape a better, creative, and more sustainable way of living across the UK.

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Director of Lancashire2025, Debbi Lander, said: “This is the first time a county has envisioned itself as a virtual city and this is our first call out to artists, cultural organisations, cultural innovators, social pioneers, curators and producers from Lancashire, the UK and the rest of the world.

“Our aim is to put together a ground-breaking programme for the Lancashire 2025 Bid. We are looking for new ideas, high profile events, creative projects and cultural experiences for a location in Lancashire – ideas that will bring our vision to life.

“We are offering up the county as a site for experiment at large scale between real and imagined, inviting proposals around our topics of living, connection, nature and digital.

“We hope to set an international standard for the way we live; illustrating, interrogating and illuminating better, creative and more sustainable ways of living. Help us build the Virtual City of Lancashire.”

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Lancashire 2025 is committed to equality of opportunity and access for all and encourages applications from everyone, irrespective of their age, gender, class, marital status, nationality, ethnic origin, disability, religious belief or sexual orientation.

The programme for Lancashire 2025 will explore the way we live between the real and imagined to create the Virtual City of Lancashire.

This will be a cultural environment using collectively imagined neighbourhoods, physical locations and a shared virtual space.

Fifteen selected projects from this initial call-out will be submitted as part of the Lancashire 2025 Bid and, subject to Lancashire being chosen to be UK’s City of Culture for 2025, will be awarded up to £25,000 development money to research and develop their proposal for potential commissioning from 2022.

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The Lancashire 2025 Bid is due to be submitted to the UK Government Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), between December 2021 and March 2022.

Details of how to apply and the application form can be found on the Lancashire 2025 website. Applicants should provide their submission by 31 August 2021.

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Will you be submitting an application for Lancashire 2025? Let us know in the comments below.