The Arts Centre has set out its Christchurch Heritage Festival programme, giving the city's October heritage season a central-city anchor around walks, tours, exhibitions and family activities.

The festival runs from 16 to 26 October, with the 2026 theme described by Christchurch City Libraries as Connections. The Arts Centre says its programme will explore how the place we live in continues to change and how connections shape the future.

Events at the Arts Centre include guided tours, observatory and exhibition tours, heritage games, an Anna Pavlova centennial lecture, walking tours, hidden Gothic architecture, sketching at Turanga, Teece Museum family activities and big-band events.

That range is important because heritage can easily become a locked cabinet of old buildings. The better version is more active: people walking through spaces, learning who used them, understanding how the city expanded, and seeing how culture, education, science and performance sit in the same precinct.

The Arts Centre is especially suited to that job because it is both a preserved place and a working one. Its buildings carry the weight of old institutions, but its current programme depends on audiences, artists, visitors, guides and families still using the site.

For Christchurch, the connections theme is also timely. The city's heritage story is no longer only about repair after earthquakes. It is about how restored spaces earn their place in daily life after the scaffolding has gone.

The practical opportunity for residents is simple: use the programme to choose one part of the city they usually walk past and see it with a guide, a story or a different purpose attached.