This week, OnTheWight will be sharing the visions of four Isle of Wight towns that have entered the competition to become UK Town of Culture 2028. They are among more than 200 towns across the UK vying for the title. The winner will receive £3,000,000 to celebrate their town and help to create a lasting cultural legacy.
OnTheWight is sharing each town’s vision in the order we received them.
Up first: Sandown
Sandown’s push to become UK Town of Culture 2028 rests on a foundation of genuine community engagement, with residents, businesses and local organisations all playing a part in shaping the town’s submission.
Organisers held several community meetings as part of the process and those sessions gave rise to a new body – Sandown New Action for Regeneration and Kinship, or SNARK – which formed as a delivery partner for the bid. SNARK brings together representatives from business, family, council, ecology, education, tourism and regeneration sectors.
An active WhatsApp group connected local people throughout the process, and directly inspired a flash fiction story and users of Facebook Group, Sandown Hub, also contributed valuable community feedback to the bid.
Ambition in the face of negative headlines
The bid team say their motivation goes beyond the competition itself – they want to demonstrate Sandown’s ambition and capacity for creative and cultural thinking. They point to a more progressive council and several significant ideas already on the horizon, including a sea pool and a Biosphere School.
The town has faced persistent negative coverage in recent years, with the Daily Mail branding Sandown a “ghost town” in June 2025, and a viral video labelling it the “worst place on the Isle of Wight” accumulating more than 516,000 views.
The bid team acknowledge that picture of coastal decline is far from unique to Sandown, but see it as precisely the kind of challenge a successful culture bid could help to address.
Our Shunderful Town
Sandown’s UK Town of Culture 2028 vision
Sandown is a town crafted by the sea. Tides constantly shape the dramatic Cretaceous cliffs and sandy beaches of our spectacular Bay. Ebb and flow are part of our human history too. Our identity was forged by the restorative air that lured the Victorian elite and the seaside fun that drew in the Bucket and Spaders.
These contrasting eras of Pierrots, promenades, pink candy floss and arcades made our hearts and coffers sing. When they vanished, and the tourism tide ebbed, Sandown did not disappear; we simply turned inward. Sandownians developed resilience in bright bucketfuls.
Our character and culture evolved as we became volunteers, carnival participants, cold-water swimmers, Regatta hat paraders, Hullabalooers, Canoe-lake-carp-savers and Sandown Clowners.
Amalgamating the words shabby and wonderful in the style of Lewis Carroll, a famous visitor to our town, Sandown is a shunderful paradox as you’re never more than 500 metres from crumbling dereliction and the natural beauty of the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. But rather than being defined by decay, we plan to turn the tide.
In 2028, we will prove we are the Tide Turners, revivifying Sandown’s sense of place and future-proofing its economy. Our programme, comprising placemaking projects, fieldwork residencies, hands-on science, and performance, is rooted in passionate community involvement.
Launching early in the year, it will culminate in the Tide Turner Festival, featuring four thematic pavilions that explore origin, ecology, wellbeing, and imagination.
- Origin: Unearthing roots, from the footprints of dinosaurs via Darwin’s momentous writings, penned initially in Sandown, to the manufacture of habitat-creating vertipools, we reveal that our town has always been a place of discovery.
- Curiosity: Using science and art to explore nature and imagination, showcasing innovative artist and academic partnerships in work responding to our place.
- Wonder: Recognising our deep carnival heritage, where everyone’s a participant, we’ll celebrate the diverse voices that gain expression through community arts.
- Adaptation: Engineering recovery through creativity, an innovative partnership with marine sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor will create a lasting body of work.
We will build the Tide Turner: a new engine of change reconnecting culture, environment, health, and education. We celebrate Sandown’s power of assembly, where land, sea, people, and nature meet. This is the birth of a tenacious cultural programme rooted in wellbeing, creativity, and future possibilities. As Darwin wrote:
“From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful are being evolved.”
We Are The Bomb Squad
Listen to a flash fiction story by Anmarie Bowler, inspired by the Sandown Town of Culture WhatsApp Group 2026.
