A choir performing at the opening ceremony of Billingham Town Centre. c1960 
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
A choir performing at the opening ceremony of Billingham Town Centre. c1960
This photo was one of the first Folklore Festivals and shows the University Choir of Seville, Spain – it is not the opening of the town centre!
I don”t know if this is the opening ceremony to the 1965 Billingham Folk Festival or not, but if it is I was there. My girlfriend at the time, Anne Marie Burns (don”t know where she is now), was elected Festival Queen for that year. I was her escort for the week and we were chauffer driven to all the events and various dinners in the evenings with high-ranking counsellors and such. Quite an adventure for two fresh-faced twenty year olds.
This photographs should be dated around 1965/67 as the West Precinct, which was completed in 1967, is under construction in the background. I”m sure that the choir is from Spain and it”s more likely to be a very early Billingham Folklore Festival which began in 1965.