Lights switch-on hailed a success

Griff Rhys Jones with Reverend Michael Eden, Geoff Marchant and Judy Eden

Published on 07/12/2012 08:22

TV star Griff Rhys Jones and Ipswich Town legend Matt Holland were in Stowmarket on Friday to switch on the town’s spectacular Christmas lights.

The Christmas lights switch-on, organised by Stowmarket Town Centre Partnership with support from Stowmarket Town Council, saw a wealth of live music, childrens entertainment and stalls fill the town centre.

There were charity and market stalls, Santa and his sleigh and performances by the Stowmarket Salvation Army Band and Stowupland High School Jazz Band.

Town Centre Manager Sharon Brown said she had never seen the town so busy.

She said: “The church Christmas tree lights were turned on at around 6.30pm followed by the town lights at 7.15pm by Griff Rhys Jones.

“Griff and Matt Holland were both really nice people, really easy to talk to and certainly added something to the evening.

“There were more people in Stowmarket that night than I have ever seen in the town.

“It was a great evening, a real success.”

St Peter and St Mary’s Church hosted its eighth Christmas Tree Festival with an incredible 285 trees on display.

The Rev Michael Eden said the church had seen thousands of people come to view the trees.

He said: “We must have had 1,200 people in the church throughout the evening – over the entire weekend we must have a nearly 3,000.

“It was an amazing festive evening.

“Griff Rhys Jones and Matt Holland came to switch the lights on – and all the bulbs worked.

“Being a big church, a 700 year old grade one listed building, we have to have something on a grand scale.

“We have had 285 Christmas trees on display this year - 148 of them with lights.

“We are keeping the trees here until January 5 so people can come and see them – they really are magnificent.”

News

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Lights switch-on hailed a success

Top stories

News