‘Meet me at the dancing dogs tent!’ What’s behind Britain’s festival frenzy?

It’s 7pm on the first day of Gala festival in Peckham Rye park and dry ice drifts into the trees as grime MC Novelist, born just miles away, raps about a south London bus. “Four eight four! Going on raw on the 484,” he spits with a grin, bouncing like the sweaty moshpit in front of him. There are already hands in the air for this hyperlocal elegy when the DJ teases the next instrumental, Skream’s unmistakable Midnight Request Line – dubstep’s greatest ever anthem.

Gala is one of the first festivals of the now overflowing British summer season. That same weekend, Black Water County kicked off the Cursus cider and music festival in Dorset, Fatboy Slim headlined the Radio 1 Big Weekend in Sunderland, and scores more fizzed into action, from Elderflower Fields in East Sussex to Devauden in south Wales, Slam Dunk in Hertfordshire, Dot to Dot in Nottingham, as well as Sidmouth jazz and blues festival and Chippenham folk festival.

In the last two decades, music festivals have become one of Britain’s major economic success stories, a bona fide national phenomenon, a cornerstone of our identity, a teenage rite of passage, a legitimate family holiday, a huge tourism boost and, at a time when much else about this country feels scarred with loathing and decline, a testament to the fact it is still a culture-industry superpower.

Glastonbury alone, which would normally have taken place at the weekend were it not having a fallow year, has become part of the official canon and calendar of British life: a national treasure like Wimbledon, Bond or Strictly. When I was a teenager in the 90s, it was a gathering largely of crusties, hippies, punks, ravers and grebos: a subcultural event, not something you’d expect members of the royal family to attend – as Charles, Harry and others have since 2000.

With this dramatic expansion have come growing pains: dire warnings that the festival industry is a precarious bubble. There has been dismay at overwhelmingly male lineups, corporate owners that invest in occupied West Bank settlements and a persistent sense that music fans are being ripped off. Councils, residents’ groups and festival operators have frequently argued over the part-privatisation of urban parks. At the fat end of this wedge, £10bn entertainment behemoth AEG has announced that it wishes to cordon off a third of London’s Victoria park for 75 days every summer – ie pretty much all of it. Victoria park was opened in 1845 as “the people’s park”, satisfying local demand for year-round healthy outdoor spaces for all. This, perhaps, is not what they had in mind.

And there is a much broader reason to feel uneasy about Britain’s 21st-century role as a festival boom nation. What fools we must be, that our deep-rooted human desires to dance, sing, dress up, get wasted, meet friends, escape work drudgery and have a bloody good time have been sold back to us by profiteers, private equity firms and exploitative monopolies. The arch-sceptic view is that these gargantuan live entertainment companies have not so much paved paradise as erected a 12ft steel fence around it, charged us £100 per day to get in, searched our pockets and left us with tepid lineups, depressing “brand activations” and a DJ set by someone who was on Made in Chelsea.

But, whether you’re a celebrator or a sceptic, one thing is clear: Britain has gone festival mad in the 21st century.

How did our festival culture suddenly explode and industrialise in such a dramatic way? There are seeds of its expansion in the 90s: televising Reading 1993 and Glastonbury 1994 created the first major sales pitch to the festival-uninitiated masses, building interest through the 1990s – long before Instagram and TikTok became user-generated, summer-long festival hype machines.

It is no coincidence that the mainstreaming of festival culture, and the experience economy in general, perfectly tracks the rise of streaming platforms and how much of life we spend online. Attending Reading 1996 as a 15-year-old cost me £70 of paper-round money for a weekend camping ticket; the same ticket for Reading 2026 costs £325. But back then it also cost me £13.99 to buy headliners Rage Against the Machine’s debut album on CD; these days, assuming I had an internet connection, I could listen to it for free, endlessly. Streaming has massively broadened listeners’ tastes – and pushed us out of the house in search of a more tangible way of engaging with music.

Comparing Reading 96 with this year’s iteration is also a good barometer of how festival culture and taste have changed. Thirty years ago, Reading was a hairy rock festival – almost all bands, almost all white, almost all male. This year, Fontaines DC and perhaps Florence + the Machine are the only headliners that might have made it into an old-school Reading lineup – accompanied by pop stars and rappers: Charli xcx, Chase & Status, Dave and Raye. At Reading and its sister festival Leeds last year, pop star Chappell Roan pulled a vast sea of pink cowboy hats. It’s hard not to imagine her being bottled off at an earlier iteration, as Daphne and Celeste were in 2000. The internet has diffused many of the past’s tribal youth subcultures into a melting pot. The plus side for promoters is that broader tastes are easier to cater to.

And far from the mass riots and burning toilets I observed when I last went to Leeds festival in 2002, UK festivals have subsequently become fun for all the family. The landscape changed dramatically with the advent of so-called “boutique” festivals – when promoters realised they didn’t have to compete directly with 90s mainstays Glastonbury, Reading, T in the Park, V, Monsters of Rock or Creamfields. The arrival of Green Man (2003), Latitude and End of the Road (2006) and HowTheLightGetsIn (2008) heralded a much more diverse range of entertainments, demographics and levels of debauchery. Music stages increasingly come accompanied not just by the usual comedy tent, but talks about politics, science, books and ideas; kids’ play areas, performing arts, activism, workshops, wellness.

The vast festival expansion of the last two decades has allowed some promoters to get even more specific. South London one-dayer Piano People in the Park celebrates the South African dance music amapiano; Surrey’s Boogietown is devoted to disco and soul. Love Trails implausibly promises to unite music with “trail running and hiking”. And then there is CarFest at Silverstone, which is presented in association with BP – and features Tom Jones, Jessie J, Gok Wan, Prue Leith, Richard Hammond and Tom Kerridge.

The impact of Britain’s 21st-century festival mania stretches even further than the stages and the front gates. Things that are not really festivals have begun to take on their attributes. Academics speak of the “festivalisation” of British cultural and social life, via the events economy, in the arts, sport and beyond: the street food markets, political demos, fan conventions and celebrations backed by local authorities and religious or diasporic communities. We must grapple with the fact that even Liz Truss’s forthcoming CPAC UK could be considered a festival – Nigel Farage is, after all, “headlining”. There really is a festival for everyone now, and promoters are ever happier to carve out a niche.

Meanwhile, the fashion world has permanently consecrated “festival season” as a supplement to the four whose rhythms we had previously moved to quite happily. The “festival edit”, as clothes retailers call them, walks and quacks like cynical consumer capitalist nonsense: “Float from stage to stage in outfits that feel like you – but cranked up a notch,” runs a typical bit of blurb. The idea being to find a maximally functional outfit for a day sweating in the sunshine with minimal access to running water, chairs and mirrors, when it might also rain – and also, the same outfit must be glittery, sexy, adorned with sequins, angel wings and other such practical accoutrements.

The archetypal three-day rock festival in a big field has its roots in 1950s jazz and folk festivals, evolving with the pop and youth culture revolutions of the 60s, Hyde Park and Isle of Wight; then Knebworth and the birth of the free festival movement in the 1970s, leading into the free party scene and rave in the 1980s. But the postwar invention of the modern festival wasn’t a new dawn, but a significant renaissance. The festival frenzy we are living through now is arguably a revival of how we lived for centuries – until the Reformation, mass urbanisation and the disciplinary hand of industrial capitalism abolished our countless rites, rituals, fairs and other traditions of collective joy.

The 18th and 19th centuries were, in Max Weber’s famous phrase, a period in which “asceticism descended like a frost on the life of ‘Merrie Old England’.” Between the 17th and 20th centuries, there were “literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to eliminate carnival and popular festivity from European life,” observed academics Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. One such was the Fairs Act of 1871, a piece of legislation designed solely to enable magistrates and the government to abolish local festivities without discussion or debate, because they were “the cause of grievous immorality” and “very injurious to the inhabitants” of hosting towns. In the decade that followed, more than 700 fairs (festivals, really) were banned.

And old England, or Britain, was very merrie, with a folk calendar that stretched across the year. Through the centuries, morris dances, feasts, plays, football and stoolball matches, skittles, bowls and bull-baiting, skimmingtons, church ales, mop fairs, parish wakes, processions, Whitsuntide and May festivities and saints’ days brought joy to the masses. The very expanse of grass on which Novelist delivered his bus bars was for centuries the site of the annual Peckham fair, a rambunctious event staged on Peckham Rye common, which became ever more extravagant and debauched until eventually it was three weeks long.

The attractions at Peckham fair in 1787 included “bears, monkeys, dancing dogs, a learned pig”, and Mr Lane, “first performer to the king”, who played off his “snip-snap, rip-rap, crick-crack and thunder tricks”. This annual display of collective exuberance alarmed society’s self-appointed guardians. “Such institutions were intended to be marts for trade and not sources of dissipation and riot,” harrumphed Camberwell Vestry. With opprobrium mounting, in 1827, Peckham fair was banned for good. Since 2016 Gala has been putting that right.

Our booming festival culture mirrors the geographic spread – the local orientation – of pre-Reformation British social life. Look beyond those 90s stalwarts, Glastonbury and Reading, and what is notable about festivals in 2026 is how every region, town or neighbourhood now seems to have one. From Boardmasters in Newquay to Belsonic in Belfast, and Bloodstock in Derbyshire to Belladrum near Inverness, every region is covered – whether the emphasis is on classical music, wellness, family fun, African music or heavy metal.

The principles are the same now as they were then: a suspension of social norms and hierarchies in a temporary autonomous zone, a range of entertainments and the thrill of social exuberance and transgression. Even the concept of festival clothing echoes the long history of carnivalesque public revelry that was smothered by the British ruling classes. What anthropologists call “costuming” is as innate a part of early human festive rituals as the music, socialising, dancing and intoxicants. So, sure, buy the tiara and the Dayglo dinosaur suit and uphold a fine tradition: 2026’s glitter-adorned revellers have just swapped a cup of mead for a peach Jubel and a wristband.

Modern festivals are sometimes dismissed as “licensed transgression” by academics: pressure-release valves allowing revellers a manageable – and managed – temporary taste of true freedom before playtime is over and they return to being compliant drones. But measuring everything by whether it is immediately liable to begin a revolution is daft and boring. At Gala, I was reminded that festival crowds are sometimes, if not often, more interested in getting up to tipsy japes in the sun than they are in locking in to the acts they have paid to see. Because being there is the entire point of attending a festival; seeing all the bands, DJs or former Top Gear presenters is not. For all the nihilism and division in this country, we display a striking compulsion to gather – not just peacefully but exuberantly – in fields, parks and town squares with strangers. How else do you explain the fact that so many festivals sell out before the lineups are even announced?

This is a renaissance, undeniably, involving millions of people every year, large enough to support a substantial and multifaceted industry, and seeping out into popular culture long after the headliners have left the stage. The modern festival is typically gated, surveilled, expensively ticketed and sponsored by any number of unsavoury corporate partners. Even if you set aside the politics, these impositions can really suffocate the vibe.

But a renaissance is a renaissance, driven by our long-suppressed impulse to conviviality – a repairing of the broken thread between Peckham fair’s 18th-century cattle-drovers enjoying the dancing dogs and Gala’s sea of glittery ravers rapping along with Giggs. Even if it comes at a cost, our lives are richer for having found our way back into the habit of gathering in Britain’s alternately dusty or muddy fields to sing, dance and make merry.