Nottingham Halloween Festival

Nottingham Halloween Festival is back for its fifth year, running from Monday 26 October to Sunday 1 November across the city centre. It's a half-term fixture by now, and the whole thing is completely free.

The rooftop installations are the signature here: inflatable monsters perched on city-centre rooftops. Howler and Snapper are back, and they're joined this year by a new addition, the Rombald Rock Giant. If you want to find them all, there's a festival map to pick up at the Nottingham Tourism Centre on Smithy Row, or you can find it on the It's in Nottingham website.

There's a brand-new parade this year called The Family of Phantoms, produced by Walk the Plank. It's a theatrical procession that sends a troupe of ghosts in illuminated, flowing capes chasing the Ghost Rider to ethereal music, with performers from Nottingham College and FSD Dance. It runs on Wednesday 28 October with three separate times — 1pm, 3pm and 5pm — all starting from Nottingham Central Library. If you're out with kids, the library also hosts creepy craft sessions making ghostly stick puppets from 3-5pm on Tuesday 27 October and all day Wednesday 28 October.

Then there's the Spooky Safari on the 'It's in Nottingham Monster Bus', sponsored by trentbarton, which runs for two extra days this year. It picks up at Belward Street, in the layby outside Nottingham Bowl, from Tuesday 27 to Friday 30 October, with morning safaris at 10:00 and 11:30 and afternoon ones at 1:00 and 2:30. Alex Flint, CEO of It's in Nottingham, has talked up the free, family-friendly side of it, and that's the through-line: the monsters, the parade, the crafts and the bus are all part of the same half-term stretch.