Southport Christmas Lights 2026: Switch-On Date Not Out Yet

On 3 September 2026 there is no announced date for Southport’s town-centre Christmas launch. Southport BID, which funds and organises it, says on its own Christmas page: “Keep an eye out for updates on 2026 Christmas events in Southport.” (Your Southport)

That is normal for early September. On the BID’s four-year record the announcement lands in the second half of October. What follows is what the record actually says, and the one 2026 date that is already fixed.

The one confirmed date: The Grand, Saturday 7 November

The Grand on Lord Street has its own Christmas light switch-on, and for 2026 it is Saturday 7 November, from 7pm, headlined by a Rat Pack tribute act billed as The Wack Pack. (The Grand)

Two changes worth knowing if you went last year. In 2025 The Grand’s switch-on was free, outdoors and from 4pm, running on the same day as the BID’s town event and billed as somewhere to go afterwards. The 2026 version is a ticketed evening with a one-course seasonal meal, starting at 7pm, and it is on a different Saturday from anything the BID has announced. The venue also warns that tables of fewer than ten may be asked to share, and that tickets are non-refundable and non-transferable.

When the town’s own Christmas launch has happened, year by year

All five rows come from Southport BID’s own news archive.

Stated as an inference, not a fact: on that record the 2026 announcement is due between mid-October and the end of October, and the event itself on a Saturday in the middle of November. Nobody at the BID or at Sefton Council has said this. Pencil it in; do not book travel on it.

There has not been a traditional switch-on since 2019

If you are searching for a stage on Lord Street, a countdown and a celebrity pulling a lever, that format ended. The last one Southport BID promoted was in 2019, when Peter Andre headlined. The BID’s position, reported at the time it dropped the event, was that it had to make sure “the investment of our local business community is used in the most effective way” and that it was “focusing our resources on a month-long Christmas programme which will attract local residents and visitors to come to Southport on multiple occasions and also to stay for longer”.

What replaced it is a daytime family event: the Festive Fun Day for three years, then the rebranded Christmas Spectacular in 2025, which put Peppa Pig, Bluey and Bingo, a K-Pop Demons show and local dance schools on a stage in Town Hall Gardens between 11am and 4pm, with a character zone, a giant snow globe and face painting, and finished with the first of the new musical shows on the LED tree. (Southport BID, 15 October 2025)

The open question for 2026: where it goes

The 2025 event was built around Town Hall Gardens. Those gardens are now the site of a £10m regeneration into a permanent open-air events space, funded by £5m from central government and £2.5m each from Sefton Council and the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority. The project was initiated by the families of Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar and Bebe King.

Preparation work started in the gardens in January 2026, when the council removed the temporary planters and permanently relocated the perimeter benches, and it said at the time that this “precedes the long-term redevelopment of the Town Hall Gardens as a multi-use family friendly events space”. (Sefton Council, 27 January 2026) Site works were aimed at starting during 2026 with completion in 2027.

Neither the council nor the BID has said what that means for a November event on the same ground, or for the 60ft tree that normally stands there. It is the first thing to watch for in the announcement.

The lights themselves, which do not depend on an event

Southport’s festive lighting is funded by BID businesses and goes up regardless of what happens on the stage. Your Southport gives the display period as 15 November to 5 January. What is in it:

• The 60ft LED Christmas tree in Town Hall Gardens outside The Atkinson, lit by 20,000 colour LED pixels. It was re-lamped for 2025 with more than two kilometres of new lighting by local firm Moonlight Events.
• The Bear and The Reindeer, the two giant illuminated characters that first appeared in 2023. The Bear stands by the Lord Street Bandstand, the Reindeer outside Sainsbury’s in Lord Street Gardens.
• The Boulevard of Light, a mile of tree lights along Lord Street, and the Canopy of Light over Scarisbrick Avenue. Both of those are lit year-round, not just at Christmas.
• 87 lamppost motifs, nine overhead welcome signs, and stars and sail lights on the roundabouts at each end of Lord Street.
• Around 200,000 additional festive lights in total.

One inconsistency in the BID’s own material, in case you are counting: its Christmas page says there are “five further illuminated trees across the town centre”, while its 2025 initiatives post and its lights page both say eight.

Musical Light Shows premiered on the tree in 2025: four shows, five minutes each, playing at 20 minute intervals on selected dates through to New Year’s Eve. Whether they return in 2026 has not been stated.

What else is already on the 2026 festive calendar

• Two pantomimes. Cinderella at The Atkinson, 4 to 31 December, with every date and price already published, and Dick Whittington at the Little Theatre from 18 December to 3 January.
• Santa’s Grotto at Wayfarers Arcade and a run of party nights at The Grand and The Bold through late November and December, listed on Visit Southport’s Christmas page.

Southport also had a second light event this year that was nothing to do with Christmas: Lightport, a free walk-through light art trail along a 400 metre stretch of Lord Street, ran 14 to 16 February 2026 from 5pm to 9pm and used Town Hall Gardens as its centrepiece. It has not been announced for a second year.

Getting into town for it

Whatever date lands, the town centre fills. Our Southport parking page has every Sefton tariff including the free bays, and roadworks and travel covers anything closed on the approach. We will update this page as soon as the BID publishes the 2026 date.