UK Black Pride Breaks Attendance Records
Event featuring more than 50 performers at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park drew crowds in excess of 25,000 people.
UK Black Pride 2022 broke records last week, becoming the largest Black Pride celebration in the world. The all-day event, held on Sunday, August 14, hosted over 25,000 people and showcased around 50 performers.
Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, who is known as Lady Phyll, one of the event’s co-founders and its current executive director, announced onstage that the Federation of Black Pride had officially recognized the event as the largest Black Pride event in the world.
Certainly, the event has grown since 2005, this year moving to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford after outgrowing other venues. Originally built for the 2012 Olympics in London, the park is celebrating its 10th year in operation and can accommodate up to 60,000 people.
“Our vision for UK Black Pride has always been to meet and exceed the expectations of the communities we represent and fight for. Each year, we consider how — through programming, protest and politics — we can create space where our identities and our cultures can be expressed safely, in partnership with councils and venues that understand how important our communities are to us,” Opoku-Gyimah wrote on UK Black Pride’s official website.
“We have been wholly impressed by the team at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and their enthusiasm to bring LGBTQI+ Black people and people of colour together for our annual event at such an iconic venue.”
Performers included Sadie Sinner, Gok Wan, and London’s collective of queer and women performers, The Harem of No One, as well as Emeli Sandé, who recently came out as a member of the LGBTQ community in April.
There were also a number of celebrities in attendance, including Yasmin Finney from the cast of Heartstopper on Netflix, clad in a black dress and fanning herself with a trans-flag-patterned handheld fan.
Opoku-Gyimah told The Northern Echo that she was “blown away” by this year’s experience.
“Every time I see this it shows even more the importance of why we need a Black Pride that our communities need to occupy places they haven’t historically occupied,” she said. “They have to take pride of place and understand that Pride is political. It’s a protest, it’s a movement and seeing this, I’m just blown away and overwhelmed.”
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