Tens of thousands crossed the Peace Bridge from one bank to the other and back again, a strange pilgrimage by night across a river that still divides communities.
The journey was to see a projection across the front of Ebrington Barracks, part of the Lumiere festival in Derry-Londonderry.
In the past seven days I have been to Cardiff, Hull, Leeds and Derry. Each of these cities has made me think about the importance of place.
In Cardiff I saw the Peter Blake show at National Museum Wales, his own personal tribute to Under Milk Wood. The show is part of the Dylan Thomas centenary. In the play the inhabitants of Llareggub, a fictional Welsh village, muse and dream about relationships, place and belonging.
In Hull I watched the city's video bid for the 2017 City of Culture. It opens with a Philip Larkin quote: "A place cannot produce poems: it can only not prevent them."
The film shows a diverse cross-section of Hull residents explaining what is special about their city and what it means to them. They insist: "This city belongs to everyone."
David Hockney's Biggar Trees explores place and was painted close to Hull. When the paintings were shown at the Ferens Art Gallery last year locals queued around the block to see them.
Hockney's return to Yorkshire after years in California has been warmly received. Worrying then, that he has had to step into the row about Bradford councillors proposing to sell works from the city art collection to make ends meet.
Hockney threatened to turn his back on the town if it went ahead with the sale. But is it right to shun the place of your birth?
After Hull I went to the place of my birth, Leeds, for the opening of the Tetley contemporary art space.
At the height of production in the 1960s the brewery employed over 1,000 people; now the art deco headquarters is a gallery employing 30.
At the opening, former brewery workers who would not have normally entered the office spaces looked slightly uneasy in the artsy crowd.
But better an art gallery than another boutique hotel. Cultural regeneration won't win former brewery workers their jobs back but at least the project has preserved a memory of the city that will enhance its sense of place.
The neon sign that blazed across the top of the gallery with the legend "The Home of Tetley's" was immediately brought to mind when I arrived in Derry for the final night of the Lumiere light festival, part of its City of Culture programme.
Atop the BT building on the waterfront another neon sign shone out the Undertones' lyric, "A Teenage Dreams So Hard To Beat", while in the distance above another former industrial space, the Rosemount shirt factory, "A Stitch In Time" was lit up in neon.
The City Factory Gallery, also a former shirt factory, has been converted to exhibtion space and houses the show of local boy, Willie Doherty.
His brutal and beautiful photography and video capture the spaces and places of his native Bogside and the sites of the tribal rituals of kneecapping and punishment killings.
Away from the main City of Culture programme, the Museum of Free Derry provides a context for how some residents feel about the place that they live in. It's a hard hitting community-view of the events running up to Bloody Sunday and its subsequent impact.
Across the water, over the Peace Bridge, the Turner Prize show is housed in a building that is part of the Ebrington Barracks - a contested site transformed. But compared to the other art and culture on offer in the city it seems parachuted-in and lacking in a sense of place.
The poet Seamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland. He wrote of the meaning of important places. All these places I have visited in the past week have significance and can tell stories that reach beyond their city walls. Culture helps them do that.
The journey was to see a projection across the front of Ebrington Barracks, part of the Lumiere festival in Derry-Londonderry.
In the past seven days I have been to Cardiff, Hull, Leeds and Derry. Each of these cities has made me think about the importance of place.
In Cardiff I saw the Peter Blake show at National Museum Wales, his own personal tribute to Under Milk Wood. The show is part of the Dylan Thomas centenary. In the play the inhabitants of Llareggub, a fictional Welsh village, muse and dream about relationships, place and belonging.
In Hull I watched the city's video bid for the 2017 City of Culture. It opens with a Philip Larkin quote: "A place cannot produce poems: it can only not prevent them."
The film shows a diverse cross-section of Hull residents explaining what is special about their city and what it means to them. They insist: "This city belongs to everyone."
David Hockney's Biggar Trees explores place and was painted close to Hull. When the paintings were shown at the Ferens Art Gallery last year locals queued around the block to see them.
Hockney's return to Yorkshire after years in California has been warmly received. Worrying then, that he has had to step into the row about Bradford councillors proposing to sell works from the city art collection to make ends meet.
Hockney threatened to turn his back on the town if it went ahead with the sale. But is it right to shun the place of your birth?
After Hull I went to the place of my birth, Leeds, for the opening of the Tetley contemporary art space.
At the height of production in the 1960s the brewery employed over 1,000 people; now the art deco headquarters is a gallery employing 30.
At the opening, former brewery workers who would not have normally entered the office spaces looked slightly uneasy in the artsy crowd.
But better an art gallery than another boutique hotel. Cultural regeneration won't win former brewery workers their jobs back but at least the project has preserved a memory of the city that will enhance its sense of place.
The neon sign that blazed across the top of the gallery with the legend "The Home of Tetley's" was immediately brought to mind when I arrived in Derry for the final night of the Lumiere light festival, part of its City of Culture programme.
Atop the BT building on the waterfront another neon sign shone out the Undertones' lyric, "A Teenage Dreams So Hard To Beat", while in the distance above another former industrial space, the Rosemount shirt factory, "A Stitch In Time" was lit up in neon.
The City Factory Gallery, also a former shirt factory, has been converted to exhibtion space and houses the show of local boy, Willie Doherty.
His brutal and beautiful photography and video capture the spaces and places of his native Bogside and the sites of the tribal rituals of kneecapping and punishment killings.
Away from the main City of Culture programme, the Museum of Free Derry provides a context for how some residents feel about the place that they live in. It's a hard hitting community-view of the events running up to Bloody Sunday and its subsequent impact.
Across the water, over the Peace Bridge, the Turner Prize show is housed in a building that is part of the Ebrington Barracks - a contested site transformed. But compared to the other art and culture on offer in the city it seems parachuted-in and lacking in a sense of place.
The poet Seamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland. He wrote of the meaning of important places. All these places I have visited in the past week have significance and can tell stories that reach beyond their city walls. Culture helps them do that.