Celebrating the best of our town centre

Darlington is being assessed for Purple Flag status, a standard awarded to towns and cities across the UK that offer safe and enjoyable nights out.

The council, along with the police and other organisations and businesses from across the town centre, worked together to submit the application and the assessment took place between 5pm on Friday (6 December) and 3am Saturday.  

The Purple Flag standard is an accreditation process similar to the Green Flag award for parks and the Blue Flag for beaches.

It helps people to quickly identify town and city centres that offer an entertaining, varied, safe and enjoyable night out.  

As part of the process the assessors have been out and about in the town centre to assess what’s on offer on an evening in Darlington.

They were specifically looking at how safe and welcoming the town feels, how easy it is to move around the town and to get home safely, how good the range of leisure and entertainment venues are in terms of choice and how the town generally looks and feels.

The assessors received a warm welcome from Darlington Hippodrome, The Forum, Vue Cinema and the Tapas Bar on Bondgate to name just a few of the town centre venues visited during assessment evening.

Darlington’s application for Purple Flag status is now being assessed by an expert panel who will then decide if the town meets all of the necessary criteria to be awarded the Purple Flag status. We hope to find out if we are awarded the status early in the New Year.