The history of the Field Day Festival

Summer is just around the corner, if the weather wants to cooperate or not, it's still coming. This time of the year also brings a lot of great festivals right in the heart of London, one of the main ones being Field Day. With great line-ups throughout to fill every music taste. As always the day of the festival is the most important but with all the social media hype you can barely wait to get there, bloggers, graphic designers, and more doing everything they can to get you to go to it, and they clearly know what they're doing as it’s sold out every single year. I’ll be covering some of the history, and internet hype of this legendary festival.

With various types of music but predominantly alternative rock, it’s been going for just over ten years now with their first festival being August 2007. The original capacity was only 6,000 which was quickly brought up to 10,000 just before the event for how popular it had been. Now every single year they sell out 20,000 spaces. With the likes of Erykah Badu, Nao, and Boy Pablo in the huge lineup this year, there is sure to be something that caters to your music needs.

Not only in 2008 did they bring the capacity up to 20,000 but they also introduced a village fete called ‘Village Mentality’, with a whole variety of traditional games and competitions to play such as a sack race, tug of war, and an egg and space race. The first year of this was so successful they extended the area to have its own musical line-up.

Considering how popular the festival had been over the 5 years in 2012 they then decided to record exclusive radio sessions with the artists in the line-up to broadcast before the festival to bring more people in. This was shown to be highly successful, especially since the date was changed to June because of the 2012 London Olympics. Field day then stayed within the month of June every year, all the way to this year, with it being on June 1st and 2nd.

This year they have also brought in different events that solely revolve around one topic. On the Saturday of this year's festival, they have a theme called ‘Bikes and Bloomers’ which tells the story of how women forged new mobile public lives through cycle wear. Using the cycle-wear they protested the very restrictive ideas of how they should act and move in public. There is also a traveling exhibition which displays radical, DIY music posters from the 1980’s and 90’s. They have created themes like this every year for people to participate in and view.

In conclusion, this festival has been a very popular one for over ten years now, supporting smaller and larger artists, and bringing in activities besides music. It’s an all-around enjoyable event that caters to so many. If you decide to grab tickets before they sell out you know you’ll have an amazing time.