Wilderness festival review: silliness and beauty combine to offer five-star escapism
Around a quarter of the people who attended Wilderness festival this year glamped, swerving the surely horrifying idea of pitching their own tent, and they quaffed champagne at banquet feasts and from lakeside hot tubs. There is no getting around it: Wilderness attracts what the festival likes to call a “bouji” crowd (bosses don’t like the P-word), but those wealthy guests help bankroll a festival with so much more than its aristo leanings.
This site of extraordinary beauty is the shimmering true headliner of this festival that offers more of a whimsical weekend in the countryside than a traditional line-up focused on just music. Rowboats skim the pretty lake filled with wild swimmers and by night, production values surpass the competition. Trees are luminescent in red and green washes of light, and great big disco balls seem shinier and more disco bally than ever (it sounds stupid but it’s true). Every natural landmark has been given a glow up with something fabulously decorative and excessive; you could spend the whole weekend wandering and getting fabulously lost. Glastonbury could put up the same decorations, but everyone is too busy rushing to stop and properly take notice.
At 30,000 capacity, Wilderness festival, which celebrates its 15th birthday next year, prioritises play and adventure. “We tried to build a festival which feels like it’s VIP everywhere,” organiser Rory Bett tells me, before explaining why he dislikes the festival’s bouji reputation. “We do have some wealthy people for sure, but there are a lot of people who aren’t and I think it slightly denigrates those people from having the opportunity to come to a show that celebrates them for themselves not for their wealth.”
Inside Wilderness festival: lakeside hot tubs, wild swimming and a village fête vibe
Connections are easy to forge. I bumped into some fifty-something swimmers in the campsite and later at a late-night rave in the Don Julio Hacienda stage, and some strangers I feasted with (yes, I leaned into the one percent lifestyle) were tagging me in Instagram posts by the time we finished eating. “We want people to arrive and feel like it’s always been there,” Bett tells me of the feasting tent. “It’s that well-oiled.”
You can do sock wrestling, there is a naked cricket match, and secret passageways lead to private dance floors. The new Riddle nightlife area asks you to put a sticker over your phone so you prioritise dancing and connection over selfies. It’s a teensy bit try-hard, borrowing from the dance floor culture of Berlin where such stickers offer people in sex-positive clubs the privacy they genuinely need (no one at Wilderness festival was romping mid dance floor, though that would have been very aristo) but it’s true that there is just oodles to do. As Bett tells me, “we’re giving the crowd what they don’t know they want yet. Take them up, take them down, feed them different things, make them laugh, God’s Jukebox will definitely make them cry…”
Orbital, Wet Leg, Supergrass and The Bootleg Beatles express the diversity of the music programming on offer, and this year a new blackbox indie stage responded to punter demand. But the festival feels as if it isn’t particularly about music. “I think that’s fair,” Bett tells me. You might have worthwhile sonic experiences but it’s the rest that stands out: a beautiful dinner in the Audi stage envisioned by Monica Galleti was a highlight, as was Angela Hartnett resting her arm on my shoulder while she was asking me how I enjoyed her food (this is before I told her I was a journalist there to write about it).
The festival industry has been struggling following Covid and the cost of living crisis, with hundreds going out of business as the upfront costs have become too much. But for Bett, who believes “festival culture is totally ingrained in the psyche of this country,” their resurgence is inevitable – even if Oasis gigs may have stalled festival ticket sales somewhat this year. “There have been some extraordinary stadium and arena acts coming through which have been a little bit of a distraction, I guess, from festival culture,” he says. Still, he likes to have the competition. “For a show that’s been going 14 years, it’s really important that it feels fresh every year.” Next year’s anniversary is sure to be wondrous.
Wilderness festival returns in 2026; wildernessfestival.com