Free festival

Free festivals are a combination of music, arts and cultural activities for which, often, no admission is charged, but involvement is preferred. They are identifiable by being multi-day events connected by a camping community without centralised control. The Free festival movement being the associated pioneering movement starting in UK during the 1970s.

The first truly free festival was the 1972 to 1974 Windsor Free Festival, squatted on Royal land. The 'organisation' was mostly Ubi Dwyer distributing thousands of leaflets and asking people, and bands, to bring their own equipment and create their own environment - Bring what you expect to find.

"Free festivals are practical demonstrations of what society could be like all the time: miniature utopias of joy and communal awareness rising for a few days from a grey morass of mundane, inhibited, paranoid and repressive everyday existence…The most lively [young people] escape geographically and physically to the ‘Never Never Land’ of a free festival where they become citizens, indeed rulers, in a new reality." Anonymous leaflet from 1980, quoted in George McKay’s Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties.

Historical

• Windsor Free Festival, 1972 to 1974 and People's Free Festivals at Watchfield 1975, Seasalter 1976 and Caesar's Camp 1978
• Stonehenge Free Festival, 1972 to 1984
• Elephant Fayre, 1981–86
• Castlemorton Common Festival, 1992

Contemporary

• CzechTek
• Leamington Spa Peace Festival
• Dragon Festival
• Przystanek Woodstock

See also

• Free party
• New age travellers
• Alternative society
• Teknival
• Free Edinburgh Fringe Festival
• Free Fringe
• DIY culture
• Battle of the Beanfield
• Woodstock Festival, 1969

External links

• The Free Festivals 1969-1990 - ukrockfestivals.com
• George McKay - Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties:Free Festivals