Boomtown 2026 review: Surely the best party in the world
Boomtown 2026 review and star rating: ★★★★★
Pirates are squaring up to one another, clenching their jaws as they prepare to strike blows. Hundreds are jeering around the ring, where the crowd have been whipped into a feverish mob. Villagers are peering from the rooftops to get a glimpse of the fight.
But before long, the anger is tempered by a matronly lady who draws the stand-off to a close by inviting the locals into the ring for an Irish jig. The atmosphere has gone from intense to joyous and soon I’m one of the villagers throwing shapes.
Strangers, including the men from the fight, grab me by the arm for a dance.
I’m in a Medieval village with higgeldy-piggeldy houses tumbling down the road. Outside each of them, bizarre characters tout contraband, jewels, and tip-offs for who will win the next fight.
This is Boomtown, perhaps the world’s best immersive theatre show. The music is mostly electronic and DJs often play drum ‘n’ bass, house and bassline, but Vengaboys, Scissor Sisters and rapper Shaggy were some of the more mainstream acts.
Boomtown 2026: an astonishing feat
To watch the fight and participate in the jig I was in the Old Town, which is one of a handful of districts, each touting a unique vibe.
One area Metropolis is dedicated to corporate satire. It rips into the likes of Elon Musk, inviting ticketholders to become recruits to take a trip into space. To ascertain whether I was up to the mission of space travel, I had to visit an immersive shop themed like Aldi where I visited a cobbler to have my soul interpreted. Area 404 is some sort of dystopian wasteland with abandoned technology strewn around.
Together the districts comprise the fictional destination of Boomtown. Lots of festivals have loose immersive storytelling, but the level of immersive engagement at Boomtown is astonishing.
The festival goes so much further, with hundreds of actors sending ticketholders on quests that tie into one ultimate narrative. The story follows an evil corporate space company who are exhausting the earth of its natural resources. Residents try to usurp the overlords and regain the planet. The festival has a team of year-round writers who work on threading the storytelling into every aspect of the experience.
Hole-in-the-wall experiences at every turn
There are hole-in-the-wall immersive venues at every turn, encasing you in the action 18 hours per day. I’d have spent the whole weekend crawling through weird tunnels, squirting passers-by with water pistols and coming up with fake business plans, but the 30-plus degree heat, enormous hills, dust clouds and music programming forced me to take breaks. I only saw a tenth of the theatre, no one could possibly see more, but you sense it everywhere you go.
It’s best to take the messaging at face value and not think too much about the intracies. One minute the Boomtown storyline is telling us to break free from our silos, the next it is chastising the wealthy, which doesn’t sound much like a grown up conversation to me. There is also a branded San Miguel stage in the Metropolis area, which is essentially a huge take down of corporations, and the festival is part-owned by Live Nation, but as I say, best not to think too much about the contradictions and just have a nice time.
Instead of getting into the weeds, buy into the genuinely wholesome overall feeling. Through on-stage compares and push-notifications on the official app, the festival spreads a message of sustainability, and it is heartening to see teens and twenty-somethings collecting rubbish for the reward of £20 return from the ticket price, and the general “leave no trace” messaging cuts through: the site is fairly clean for a big festival (around 75,000 attend) and surely that is a good lesson for young people (and us all). “Vibe check” notifications coming through on the app about hydrating at 2AM add to the sense of care.
Ferocious pyrotechnics
Beginning as a small independent gathering of a few thousand in 2009, the festival grew to 65,000 capacity in the 2010s, the stages spanning both the lower bowl and upper echelons of the Matterley Estate. The epic Lion’s Den stage has ferociously good pyrotechnics and an thrilling amphitheatre feel, although the stair case up to it, ascending a couple of hundred metres, is back-breaking after a few pints. After scaling down post-pandemic, 2026 earmarks a “radical redesign,” bringing the biggest site to date.
Boomtown gets a bad reputation – or, at least, judged – because of its music and the audience it attracts, who tend to be younger and intensely into partying. Those judgements aren’t fair: firstly, the festival has done a lot to work on its branding, and the audience is more diverse now (possibly because of those preventative £400 tickets) but mainly, it’s a mistake to write this off as young people partying too hard in a field when actually this is the most expansive and impressive adult playground in the world. Nowhere is this fun. It would be a cliche to call it an adult Disneyland, so I’ll do just that.
Like a rocket ship, surely Boomtown’s projection is stratospheric.
Boomtown returns in 2026; go to boomtownfair.co.uk