Boomtown (festival)
Boomtown (also known as Boomtown Fair) is a British music festival held annually on the Matterley Estate in South Downs National Park, near Winchester, Hampshire. It was first held in 2009 and has been held at its current site since 2011. Its diverse line-up of bands, DJs and speakers perform on many different stages each a part of a district with its own individual theme. Each yearly event is known as a Chapter and expands on the story line from the previous year, told through the sets, live actors and many forms of alternate reality games. The festival site is split into several districts, and the narrative is reflected in the design of the districts, streets and venues, which are populated by hundreds of actors to play the role of inhabitants. The large scale of the sets and infrastructure require six weeks of construction, and a month of disassembly. The event is centered around a set of common beliefs and principles, mainly supporting the progressive ideas of environmentalism and social equality, as set out in its vision code, The Six Pillars of Boomtown. The festival is run by Boomtown Festival UK Limited, partially owned by Live Nation UK (18%), and originally founded by company directors Chris Rutherford and Luke Marcus 'Lak' Mitchell, both from Bristol. In July 2019, the organizers were granted a capacity increase by Winchester City Council, bringing the total number of people allowed to 76,999, consisting of 58,000 ticket holders, 17,999 crew, artists, traders and guests, plus 1,000 local residents with day tickets. The increase was to come into effect from 2020, but the event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After the rebooted 2021 event, and a smaller-scale event known as 'Boom Village', were both cancelled due to the pandemic - citing a lack of insurance support from the British government, the festival returned in 2022. History 2000s Boomtown Fair was created when Rutherford and Mitchell, who had grown up in the festival scene, decided that music festivals lacked atmosphere, and that many genres were being overlooked. The first chapter, Boomtown Begins, took place on 7 August 2009 and was held at the Speech House Hotel, Coleford, Gloucestershire. The second event saw the festival move to the Stowe Landscape Gardens in Buckingham, Buckinghamshire and the third festival was relocated to the Matterley Estate in Winchester, where it has remained. 2010s The seventh chapter, in 2015, saw the introduction of Psychedelic Forest, the second psychedelic trance stage (the first was Tribe of Frog). The 2016 fair saw further expansion with Sector 6, introduced as a way to even the spread of bass-heavy music across the site, and Whistler's Green green fields area over the hill between the Lion's Den and Downtown areas, mostly secluded from the rest of the site. The tenth chapter, in 2018, brought the new districts Disorder Alley, Paradise Heights (in place of Mayfair), and Copper County (in place of the Wild West). The same year, festival organizers hoped to increase the capacity