UK’s Creative Cities Convention Reveals 2027 Location

The UK’s Creative Cities Convention (CCC), a rival to the relocating TV Festival, has revealed its 2027 host city.

As the TV Festival moves down south from Scotland after 50 years, the CCC will take place in the Scottish city of Glasgow, backed by Screen Scotland. This will come a few months before a different new event launches in Edinburgh, which has been backed by the likes of Richard Gadd.

The CCC has expanded to two full days in May. Mobeen Azhar is returning to host and lauded BBC broadcaster Kirsty Wark will be a guest interviewer in her home country. The Creative Skills Summit is back for its third year alongside the main convention and is hosted by presenter and journalist Jameel Shariff.

More details will be announced in due course but the CCC is taking place at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall on May 19 and 20, posing the question: “If British commissioners are buying less, who else is buying?”

The CCC takes place in a different city each year. It was supposed to take place in Glasgow in 2020 but was cancelled due to the pandemic. Last year’s event in Liverpool featured the likes of Channel 4 boss Priya Dogra and Sony international productions chief Wayne Garvie.

CCC Creative Director Sarah Wood said: “Scotland makes and sells world-class work in every genre – drama, unscripted, digital, and a games industry that gave us Grand Theft Auto. We should have brought CCC to Glasgow in 2020, and the pandemic took it away. In 2027 we get to put that right, and we’re going bigger than we ever have.”

Screen Scotland interim exec director David Smith added: “Bringing our industry together in Glasgow provides an opportunity to showcase the strength of Scotland’s screen and media sectors, to build new relationships and explore how we can create more opportunities for production businesses from across the UK to develop, grow and succeed.”