A new poll suggests strong public support for breaking up concentrated media power and funding independent journalism. For small publishers trying to report the North with care, the question is not abstract. It is about whose stories are heard - and whether those telling them can afford to carry on

At Blackpool’s Winter Gardens, darts is doing far more than creating champions. It's helping children discover numbers, confidence - and a game that really can include everybody

As Andy Burnham carries a northern model of public service into Downing Street, Greater Manchester’s Festival of Libraries offers both inspiration - and a test of what his promise to return power to every postcode might mean

We went to photograph a seaside town in the middle of summer. Instead, we met dancers, pirates, treasure hunters, sisters, surfers - and two box-office stars with only one fan between them

Ember & the Vixens return to Salford this August Bank Holiday - with every ticket helping Independent Choices support people affected by domestic abuse

Ripon’s newly transformed Workhouse Museum is reopening after a £2.8 million restoration - bringing the stories of poverty, punishment and survival out from behind the museum glass and asking what they might still teach us today

How Young People are building careers in tech through hands-on learning

Ninety years after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, People’s History Museum is remembering the British volunteers, fundraisers, families and working people who saw fascism advancing across Europe - and decided that neutrality wasn't enough

A Yorkshire Dales charity has helped build a national recycling network for redundant tree shelters. But with millions of plastic guards still scattered across Britain’s woodlands, campaigners say their eventual removal must be planned - and paid for - before the first tree goes into the ground

At Yeavering, one of early medieval Britain’s most important royal centres has almost vanished back into the Northumberland landscape. This summer, archaeology, storytelling, food and communal celebration will bring it vividly into view again

The curlew’s cry remains one of the defining sounds of the Yorkshire uplands. Keeping it there will require communities, conservationists and farmers to begin working together long before next year’s mowing starts

Former Green Futures participant Willow Driscoll-Duke returns as a filmmaker with a documentary about nature, belonging and young people’s environmental hopes

Eight young people are being offered the chance to earn, learn and begin a career caring for some of the North’s most important landscapes.

The people who know Nidderdale’s rivers, becks and footpaths best are being asked to help identify invasive species before they spread further. A few minutes spent recording what we see could contribute to years of better-informed conservation work

A landmark DNA study suggests Nidderdale could be one of England’s most important strongholds for adders - and a powerful reminder that healthy landscapes are connected landscapes

Helmsley Walled Garden began life feeding great houses. Today, beneath the castle and inside old brick walls, it is doing something quieter, deeper and perhaps more necessary: feeding confidence, companionship, memory and belonging

After a lifetime shaped by rules, artist Joe Giles discovered abstract painting at 34. One remarkable year later, his work is selling, exhibitions are taking shape - and the colour is refusing to stay inside the lines

Liverpool Artists’ Network has rebuilt its digital home - but behind the new website is a decade-long attempt to make artistic life in the city less isolated and more visible

Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra, Bradford Festival Choral Society and Bradford City’s own Bantam of the Opera will join forces at St George’s Hall for an ambitious Yorkshire Day celebration

Comedy, theatre, cabaret and cult classics crammed into three magical weeks, the Morecambe Bay Fringe Festival is marking a landmark 10th edition with 70+ shows

Myth, music and the threatened North Yorkshire coast came together inside a sold-out Bluebird Bakery, as Hannah Davies, Jack Woods and PitchWitches created an evening of rare emotional power

As the Aesthetica Art Prize marks two decades, York Art Gallery prepares to host a major international exhibition exploring ecology, identity, memory, technology and the unstable business of being human

Liverpool Arab Arts Festival 2026 explores home, refuge, memory and belonging through two visual arts exhibitions in Liverpool this July

At Aviva Studios, Ai Weiwei has built an exhibition from empire, industry, migration, war and personal captivity. Monumental in scale, Button Up! asks Manchester to look again at the forces that made the modern world — but its most powerful object may be the button that once fell from a prisoner’s trousers