A spot of tea and a lamginton signalled the end of Napier's Art Deco Festival on Sunday.

The annual Gatsby Picnic was one of the last fixtures in a tightly packed schedule of 250 events spread from February 17 to 21.

Hundreds of people brought their gazebo, tea pots and best china to the Sound Shell lawn for the afternoon picnic which included live bands and a roaming barbershop quartet.

EVA BRADLEY Art Deco weekend is done and dusted for 2016

Early that weekend thousands lined the city's streets to watch the vintage car parade on Saturday, lead by a 1908 Silver Ghost Rolls Royce.

The vehicles driving one Napier street were people powered on Sunday with children racing home made carts down Tennyson Street on Sunday morning as part of the Soap Box Derby.

Flying displays which included Tiger Moth planes and the Warbird Display team captured visitor's attention from the sky on Saturday and Sunday as they performed above the Sound Shell.

The festival was first held in 1988 and involved about four events, five vintage cars, and a dozen people having a Gatsby Picnic on a stage in the Municipal Theatre.

Lou Mathieson was one of these original attendees.

She owned a store on Karangahape Rd called Deco Echo and a group of 30 people travelled from Auckland for the event.

Mathieson and husband Brent make an pilgrimage to festival every year.

Vintage cars are the main attraction for Brent and previously the pair made the trip in their 1935 Auburn 851 vintage car which took up to 11 hours.

Their trips to the region became so frequent the Takapuna pair purchased a house in Napier three years ago where the old car now lives.

And the weekend is also their wedding anniversary – in 2005 they married as part of a public double wedding in Napier's St John's Cathedral.

"We had the cars and costumes, it was as authentic as we could be for 2005," Lou said.