The “Battle of Brockwell Park” isn’t over.
This year's festivals may have gone ahead, but between boycotts, lawsuits, insider discontent and publications shutting down their own reporting, the underlying issues aren't going away.
Hi, hope you’re well, and thanks for reading.
A few weeks ago, I was hired to write about the various disputes involving London festivals Field Day, Cross The Tracks, Mighty Hoopla, Wide Awake and City Splash, the so-called “Battle of Brockwell Park”: a story which also involves Palestinian-led calls to boycott the first three of those events over their owners Superstruct and KKR, and the decision by several artists to pull out of Field Day shortly before it took place.
That piece ended up being cancelled at the beginning of this week by the outlet which commissioned it: not over any factual disagreements, but because of wider business concerns about the article potentially being seen as critical of Superstruct or festival organisers, and the risk of legal action.
As a result, I’ve decided to publish it in full below. I have several thoughts about this, but I’m keeping them to one side for the time being, so as not to distract from the article itself.
I will say that I don’t have any hard feelings towards the publication in question, or the editors I worked with, who’ve handled a difficult situation in good faith: sometimes a story just isn’t the right fit for a particular platform. But I also find the wider implications troubling: clearly, there are still substantial barriers to us having honest conversations about the increasingly visible issues with private equity-funded club culture, or acknowledging the growing numbers of people disillusioned with that business model.
In the article, I argue that “financial demands have forced good people to make uncomfortable compromises, building up pressures which ultimately threaten the long-term viability of the festivals themselves.” I think it’s a shame that a piece written to explore those themes should itself fall victim to precisely the same forces.
The text below has been edited and expanded from the draft I submitted, to better reflect how it would have looked when published, to include material originally cut for word-count purposes, and to include responses to requests for comment.
If you were one of the thousands of music fans flocking to Brockwell Park this weekend for festivals like Field Day, Wide Awake or Cross The Tracks, you might not have noticed that anything was amiss. The gates opened on time, headline sets from acts like Peggy Gou, Ezra Collective and Kneecap went off without a hitch, and the sun mostly kept shining. It was perhaps only the graffiti scrawled on the fence surrounding the site - WHOSE PARK? OUR PARK on one set of panels, FUCK LAMBETH on another - that indicated how close these events came to not happening at all.
From legal challenges against Lambeth Council to boycott calls from Palestinian-led campaign groups, increasingly fractious debates over public green space and the commercialisation of the UK festival sector have dominated headlines in recent weeks. Most coverage of the “Battle of Brockwell Park” has framed the story as a straightforward conflict between ravers and local residents. But its roots run deeper, with implications which threaten to upend not just this leafy corner of south London but the entire festival industry.
Brockwell Park itself has a rich history of outdoor raving: in 1978, 120,000 people gathered here to watch Elvis Costello and Aswad perform for Rock Against Racism; in 1994, General Levy’s debut live performance of “Incredible” - the first ever jungle tune to break into the UK Top 10 - took place at the Lambeth Country Show, a free community event held in the park since the 1970s. In 2002 Big Narstie, Dot Rotten and others could be found freestyling among the fairground rides and Chucklehead Cider stands.
In the 2010s, however, all that changed. With local government budgets crippled by austerity, cash-strapped councils had to find new sources of funding. In Lambeth, as in other boroughs, this meant monetising public parks: free open-access events like Rock Against Racism or the pro-cannabis Cultural Herb Festival were out; in came ticketed events for paying customers, with Lambeth charging promoters hefty fees for the privilege.
Initial attempts went smoothly, with 2016’s Sunfall seeing Moodymann and Ben Klock playing to blissed-out Brockwell crowds, but a second edition in 2017 was a disaster. Issues with ticket checks saw ravers queuing for upwards of four hours to get in, forced to use hedgerows as toilets in full view of local dog walkers, with reports of fights and panic attacks breaking out in the crowd. During the de-rig, contractors ripped out several of the park’s memorial benches, and put its beloved model railway out of action: arguably the moment when local scepticism hardened into full-on, curtain-twitching outrage. Sunfall wasn’t allowed back, and indeed no longer exists.
Rather than rethink, Lambeth doubled down: in 2018, they announced that Field Day and Lovebox would be coming to Brockwell Park, each twice the size of Sunfall. Locals responded with incredulity, mounting a legal challenge which, foreshadowing the events of 2025, saw Lambeth forced to admit fault and resubmit their paperwork. Days before a final licensing decision was due, Lovebox relocated to Gunnersbury Park, then threatened to sue the Guardian over their reporting of events.
Since then, Brockwell Live has expanded to include five festivals over two weekends: Field Day, Wide Awake, Cross The Tracks and City Splash over the late May Bank Holiday, followed by the two-day Mighty Hoopla a week later. Even their most hardened critics have had to accept that these events are superbly organised, with community initiatives including free local tickets, a 24 hour residents’ phone hotline for any issues, and late-night cleanup teams. Carefully-curated lineups and industry-leading production have seen Wide Awake and Cross The Tracks establish themselves as essential fixtures on the festival circuit, while Mighty Hoopla’s queer-led pop extravaganza has been a cultural revelation. Most events sell out every year, Sunfall-esque disasters have been avoided, and simmering local discontent largely kept at bay.
“I take a bunch of teenagers, and for some of them it’s their only chance to hear proper, good live music,” says Tamora, one local resident who’s a strong supporter of Cross The Tracks in particular. “It’s safe, it’s a daytime event, when most night-time gigs are over 18s only now, and it’s affordable.”
This delicate truce held until last summer, when torrential rain turned the festival site into a mudbath and caused unprecedented damage to the park itself. Brockwell Bounce, a free family-focused event put on by Brockwell Live in the week between the festivals, was cancelled; several areas of the park remained bare of grass a year later, as ravers returned for this week’s events.
This seems to have been a turning point for many locals: a lowkey coup saw the volunteer-led Friends of Brockwell Park taken over by more stridently anti-festival voices, while other groups reorganised as Protect Brockwell Park, raised £30,000 in legal costs, and told Lambeth they’d see them in court.
When judges ruled for the protestors days before the festivals opened, deeming Lambeth’s approach to planning permission both “unlawful” and “irrational”, it seemed to catch the council, festival organisers and music fans by surprise. But perhaps it shouldn’t have: when she’s not campaigning for Protect Brockwell Park, their spokesperson Jen Hawkins is a qualified solicitor specialising in planning law, while the current Chair of the Friends of Brockwell Park is an architect with a specific background in ecological conservation. Somehow, Lambeth have managed to piss off precisely the wrong people: not just local residents, but experts in the relevant legal fields.
“We’ve been desperately trying to reach some kind of compromise with Lambeth Council over the last year,” says Hawkins. “We’ve been asking them since last October to apply for full planning permission, listen to us, engage with us, and let’s find a lawful way for these events to go ahead.” Protect Brockwell Park’s position is that the cultural and economic benefits of the festivals don’t justify the environmental damage they cause, or the privatisation of vital green space for weeks on end, in a borough where 60% of households don’t have access to a garden.
More worryingly, they claim that Lambeth’s attempts to avoid public scrutiny have seen them repeatedly break the law. These alleged infractions include unlawfully granting Brockwell Live fast-track planning rights (the grounds on which Protect Brockwell Park won their recent court case), changing the rules on how much of the park can be fenced off for events, and allowing last year’s Lambeth Country Show to go ahead without any planning permission at all, which would perhaps have made it the first ever illegal rave to be organised directly by a local authority. According to Protect Brockwell Park, the legal loophole used by Lambeth to ensure that last weekend’s events went ahead was itself also unlawful, raising the prospect of yet more courtroom drama to come.
Long a one-party borough, with over 90% of its elected seats held by Labour, a recent by-election in Herne Hill ward (which borders the park, and is a hotbed of anti-festival sentiment) saw the Greens snatch the seat on a 20% swing. Meanwhile, the Friends of Finsbury Park in north London, who’ve been locked in a long-running battle with Islington Council over Wireless Festival, have said they’re “very excited” by the High Court judgment, suggesting that Protect Brockwell Park’s legal tactics may soon be deployed elsewhere. Anyone hoping that last weekend’s festivals might mark the end of the dispute is likely to be disappointed.
Despite this, Lambeth’s reliance on the funds generated by Brockwell Live means that they have little room to manoeuvre. Under the terms of its acquisition by the London County Council in 1892, Brockwell Park is held in trust for the public, with Lambeth prohibited from using it to generate profits. To get around this, all of the income they receive from Brockwell Live is funnelled straight back into the Lambeth Country Show - including payments made back to Brockwell Live to re-use their stages, fencing and other infrastructure. Lambeth have consistently refused to release specific figures, citing commercial confidentiality, but claim that this saves them somewhere in the region of £900,000 a year in event costs. Once you deduct the amounts paid back to Brockwell Live, the remainder should theoretically be freed up from Lambeth’s event budget to be spent on other essential services like bin collections and social care.
“All councils are constantly in a mode of asset disposal,” explains Fraser Dahdouh, a Labour councillor in the Gloucestershire town of Stroud, who also organises underground raves in London as part of the Seasoning crew. “Having a park in London is the hot ticket for local authorities to finally get this massive revenue stream. But because London’s partitioned into smaller boroughs, they all end up bidding against each other.” This dynamic is further complicated when independent festivals team up, or are bought up by larger operators, enabling them to negotiate collectively. Lambeth are no doubt acutely aware that adopting the sort of proposals suggested by Protect Brockwell Park, like smaller festival capacities or regular fallow years, could see Brockwell Live relocate entirely and leave the council with nothing.
In theory, local authorities should be an impartial arbiter of residents’ competing cultural, economic and environmental needs. In practice, their relationship with promoters has long been conspicuously cosy. Jack Hopkins, the senior Councillor who oversaw Lambeth’s introduction of profit-making festivals in the 2010s, left his Cabinet post in 2017 to become CEO of dance music lobby group the Night Time Industries Association, whose members include several festivals with interests in Brockwell Park, before quitting a year later to become Leader of the entire Council. Hopkin’s juggling of these responsibilities mirrors the career of Sacha Lord, who for several years combined his political role as Manchester’s Night Time Economy Adviser with his ownership of Parklife festival and The Warehouse Project, before resigning last year over £400,000 of improperly-awarded Covid relief funds.
Concerns about economic and political priorities overlapping are unlikely to be assuaged by witnessing the machinery of local government up close. At a planning hearing for the Lambeth Country Show in the basement of Lambeth Town Hall earlier this month, campaigners from Protect Brockwell Park put forward a series of rigorously-evidenced arguments that the Council was breaking the law: the same evidence which would convince a High Court judge to side with them a few days later. Rather than displaying curiosity over these extremely serious allegations, the elected Councillors seemed wholly unmoved by them, before unanimously approving the proposals. Any sense of meaningful scrutiny, or the process being more than a rubber-stamping exercise, was conspicuous by its absence. When contacted to request an interview, Lambeth instead pointed to their existing public statements.
Field Day’s presence in Brockwell Park is itself a reflection of the same complex flows of money and power. Founded in 2007, they spent a decade in east London’s Victoria Park before their contract with Tower Hamlets came to an end and they were replaced by All Points East, the first UK festival from US mega-promoters AEG. Evicted from their original home, Field Day moved to Brockwell Park in 2018, then Meridian Water a year later, then returned to Victoria Park in a co-promotion with All Points East, before heading south of the river again in 2025.
This somewhat nomadic existence has been accompanied by Field Day’s ownership passing between a succession of different corporate entities. Despite presenting itself as independently-founded, it actually secured venture capital investment from a company called Ingenious Live a month before its first event in 2007. In 2013 it was bought by Impresario Festivals, who sold it three years later to Global Media, the radio and events conglomerate which also owns Smooth FM and LBC. In 2019, Global sold most of their festival portfolio to Superstruct, the world’s second-largest event promoter; in 2023 Superstruct also acquired Cross The Tracks and Mighty Hoopla, in a deal which will reportedly earn Hoopla’s founders a £1.2m bonus if the event’s still running in 2027. Founded in 2017 by former Cream impresario James Barton, Superstruct was itself originally owned by Providence Equity Partners, before being sold in July 2024 to KKR, the second-wealthiest private equity firm in the world, for £1.1bn. Through Superstruct, KKR now owns roughly 80 festivals across the UK and Europe, including Field Day, Cross The Tracks, Mighty Hoopla, Lost Village and Sónar, as well as the streaming platform Boiler Room.
Despite this being merely one chapter in the festival industry’s constantly-evolving relationship with corporate finance, KKR’s other investments in Israeli tech and surveillance companies, US and German weapons manufacturers, and a host of fossil fuel projects including the Coastal GasLink pipeline in Canada have hit a nerve with artists and audiences. Calls to boycott KKR-owned events have grown in visibility and volume over recent months, including interventions from the organisers of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and the Palestinian-led academic and cultural boycott of Israel.
“At the time, we were obviously overjoyed to be booked,” say Sisu Crew, a collective of female and non-binary DJs and artists who agreed to play at Field Day in late 2024. After being made aware of the event’s connections to KKR, and discussing the situation with campaigners, they reached out to festival organisers.
“We tried to get in touch for two months, and sent repeated emails, because we wanted to be in dialogue with them, and help them get ahead of what we knew was coming, the feeling amongst our community that we don’t want our events co-opted,” they explain. “We were attempting to work with the Field Day team to meet BDS guidelines, given the unique qualities of the festival, and the complicated position they were in. We wanted to act as a bridge for accountability to their community, and to Palestine.”
When an open letter coordinated by Sisu started picking up press attention after it was signed by Brian Eno, Midland and Massive Attack, Field Day agreed to a meeting, then cancelled it with 30 minutes’ notice. This ultimately convinced Sisu Crew to withdraw from the festival, triggering a wave of other cancellations: by the time the gates opened last Saturday a significant proportion of the advertised lineup had dropped out, including James Blake, Mala, Mall Grab, Midland, Spray, Rosa Terenzi, VTSS and Yung Singh.
Multiple sources with knowledge of the situation have alleged that lukewarm initial statements issued on 15 May by Field Day and Sónar, which didn’t mention the word “Palestine” or acknowledge the efforts of artists like Sisu Crew to engage with them, were issued at the behest of Superstruct; stronger positions adopted by Boiler Room and Mighty Hoopla were apparently published in direct defiance of similar orders from above. In that statement, Field Day assert that “our values remain unchanged,” a sentiment which feels difficult to square with suggestions that their words and actions are no longer their own.
Field Day, Sónar, Superstruct and Brockwell Live did not respond to requests for comment on these and other allegations. Five days after their initial statement, and two days before the festival itself, Field Day apologised to “the artists and audience members who expect us to amplify their voices” for their earlier comments.
“They feel powerless,” an anonymous source says of their experience working with the teams running festivals in Brockwell Park, where morale has apparently cratered. “They’ve been put under intense scrutiny by their audience, but they don’t have the power here. They bought into a deal to give themselves more security, then the first they heard about KKR was when their purchase of Superstruct was reported in the press. And yet you have companies like Live Nation, who operate in Israel and are directly able to divest, who aren’t getting the same attention.”
While the question of boycotts has largely been discussed in isolation from the debates around Protect Brockwell Park, these seemingly disparate issues can in fact be seen as two sides of the same coin. Across both situations, financial demands have forced good people to make uncomfortable compromises, building up pressures which ultimately threaten the long-term viability of the festivals themselves. Accusations of economic and class prejudice, with anti-festival locals portrayed as privileged NIMBYs and music fans as mindless hipsters, or increasingly heated rhetoric aimed at artists either choosing or refusing to boycott, miss the wider point that all of these groups are being squeezed by the same political and economic forces.
Indeed, it’s becoming harder to see whose needs are being met by the business model Brockwell Live, Superstruct and KKR embody. It’s certainly not the artists who’ve been forced to choose between their careers and their ethics, or audiences unsure the day before a festival if they’ll even be allowed in (Lambeth’s scramble to deal with the fallout from Protect Brockwell Park’s court win meant that planning permission wasn’t officially granted until 18 hours before the doors opened). Residents forced to watch their parks degrade, local politicians backed into contentious deal-making, and even the festivals themselves seem equally ill-served by the current state of affairs.
With boycott calls now focusing on other KKR events, and Protect Brockwell Park gearing up for more legal action, the future feels precarious. The day before Wide Awake, booker Keith Miller sent an impassioned email to ticket holders: “We’ve had two stagnant weeks where our ticket sales have flatlined due to all the uncertainty” he wrote - a trend confirmed by sources close to the other Brockwell Park festivals - raising the possibility that Wide Awake, or indeed Brockwell Live as a whole, may end up unable to continue in their current form. If Miller’s warnings are to be heeded, it’s going to require a fundamental change of direction, an honest engagement with the criticisms being raised on all sides, and a renewed commitment to running these events ethically, lawfully and sustainably. Despite being pitched as a battle between ravers and local residents, the Battle of Brockwell Park may end up revealing that DJs and NIMBYs have more in common than they realise.
Cyndi Handson Ellesse from Handson Family has curated a stage at Cross The Tracks since 2021: after discussion with the wider collective, she decided to perform this weekend. “I fully understand the concerns of local residents,” she says of Protect Brockwell Park’s campaign, “But it would have been absolutely insane for things to have been cancelled last minute, given the massive effect on so many different artists and promoters.” Her approach to the issue of a boycott has been similarly knotty, complicated by the fact that contracts had already been signed when discussions came into the spotlight. “It’s really difficult, we didn’t realise that Cross The Tracks was being targeted, given the profile of the people who run it,” she explains. “My politics have always stood with oppressed folks, but I also find there’s a tricky issue where those of us of colour are usually the ones being asked to do the most. There have been other events we’ve walked away from on political grounds, but we felt that if we cancelled here we’d just be sabotaging ourselves.”
At the same time, Ellesse is clear that things can’t go on as they are: a theme repeated across multiple conversations with people involved in this year’s events. “We’re also talking about the demise of club culture and venues,” she says. “Festivals took that place in the market, but now things are so saturated, and costs have risen so much, that people like KKR are able to come in and take over, and we’re forced to work under these insane and inhumane alliances.” When asked if she’ll be approaching 2026 differently, she doesn’t hesitate. “A hundred per cent, we have to,” she says. “We’ve gone with it this year, but after this we’ll be asking ourselves, and I hope others will be asking themselves too: should we be doing this again? Why would we?”