The Victoria Park Lantern Festival

Putting the art in community & the community in art

The Victoria Park Lantern Festival is a spectacular, all-ages celebration of community in St. John’s historic West End. A participatory and volunteer-driven event, our annual Festival takes place on the Saturday of the last full weekend in July following a couple of months of public lantern-building workshops.

  • About the Friends of Victoria Park

    Formed in 1998, the Friends of Victoria Park (FOVP), are a concerned group of West End residents and community members who came together in May 1998 as a result of the closure of the swimming pool in Victoria Park. Through the summer of 1998, the Friends worked closely with the city on a number of Park projects: overseeing a successful summer recreation programme and,

  • About the Lantern Festival

    The Lantern Festival is a public project. Victoria Park is the canvas for the festival, and the festival highlights the historical and natural features of the park, including the annual daylighting of buried Bennett’s Brook with a river of glass jar lanterns. The sheer number of people who attend the festival and enjoy this vital urban space for the afternoon and after dusk is astounding.
  • Finding Victoria Park

    Victoria Park is located on Water Street (West) in the West End of St. John's, Newfoundland Labrador. The bottom edge of the park starts on Water Street (just before the turn off to Cape Spear) and runs up the steep green shaded hill all the way to Hamilton Avenue. Sudbury Street flanks the park on its west side and the back gardens of the houses on Alexander Street line the parks eastern border.
  • Pool House

    The former Victoria Park Pool House provides a multipurpose space stewarded year-round by the Friends of Victoria Park and shared by the Lantern Festival, Victoria Park Day Camp, St. John’s Juggling Club and, most recently, the Folklife Festival.