Camp Bestival

There is a point during Camp Bestival when it becomes difficult to decide who the festival is really for. A children’s television favourite might be finishing in one part of Lulworth Castle while parents who first discovered club music decades before having children begin manoeuvring towards a DJ set. Nearby, somebody is learning circus skills, another family is building something in a workshop and teenagers are negotiating a little independence from everyone else. That uncertainty is the event’s greatest achievement. Camp Bestival was never simply an adult music festival with a fenced-off children’s area. It was designed from the beginning around the idea that different generations could use the same weekend in completely different ways.

Rob and Josie da Bank reached that idea through their own changing lives. They had launched Bestival in 2004 as a colourful, eccentric and notably hedonistic party, then began having children while the event was growing. Rather than treating parenthood as a temporary exit from festival culture, they wondered whether the experience could be rebuilt around families. Lulworth Castle provided the setting, and Camp Bestival opened in July 2008. Chuck Berry, The Flaming Lips, Kate Nash and Billy Bragg gave the inaugural programme immediate musical credibility. Wayne Coyne rolling from the castle steps across the crowd inside The Flaming Lips’ giant transparent ball supplied one of those early images that made the new festival feel playful rather than merely practical.

Much of its identity developed away from the headline stage. Camp Bestival borrowed consciously from the idea of a British holiday camp: several days of communal activity, camping and entertainment rather than a sequence of concerts with sleep in between. Circus, theatre, comedy, science, bushcraft, sport, crafts, family raves, food, wellbeing and children’s television gradually became embedded in the programme. The organisers call the result a “festi-holiday,” which sounds frivolous but accurately describes how the weekend works. A family does not need to spend every waking hour chasing bands. Children can spend a morning exploring activities while their parents gradually shift towards the live-music and nightlife side as the day changes.

Lulworth Castle prevents that abundance from feeling like a portable theme park. Open fields, wooded corners and the castle itself give the site a strong visual hierarchy, while camping keeps families inside the same temporary community for four days. The Dorset Jurassic Coast sits beyond the estate, although the programme is dense enough that many visitors barely need to leave. Different areas acquire distinct rhythms: quieter activities under trees, food and wellbeing zones, performances aimed directly at younger audiences and finally the Castle Stage, where a day can move from family entertainment to a major pop act or electronic headliner without requiring the crowd to inhabit a completely different festival.

Musically, Camp Bestival has always been much broader than its family positioning might imply. Chic, Madness, Calvin Harris, Basement Jaxx, PJ Harvey, Underworld, Kaiser Chiefs, Brian Wilson, Fatboy Slim, Groove Armada, Sugababes and Tom Jones belong to very different traditions. The common thread is partly the audience itself. Parents arrive with memories of clubs, indie gigs and older pop records; children respond to current performers; teenagers begin finding their own musical territory; grandparents may recognise songs that predate everyone else’s festival experience. Camp Bestival uses that generational overlap as a programming tool. It can move from rock to pop to house because the crowd was never expected to share one age or one definition of cool.

That continuity almost broke in 2018. Severe weather forced the final day to be cancelled, compounding financial problems that eventually pushed the company behind Bestival and Camp Bestival into administration. Bestival, the older and more hedonistic sister event, did not continue as an annual festival. Camp Bestival did. A new arrangement involving Live Nation-Gaiety and SJM gave the event a different financial structure while Rob and Josie remained creatively involved. Families returned to Lulworth Castle in 2019. The entire 2020 edition was then lost to Covid, but the 2021 comeback with Fatboy Slim, Groove Armada, Becky Hill, Kelis and others demonstrated that the festival’s identity had become more durable than the business structure that originally supported it.

In 2022 the concept travelled. Camp Bestival Shropshire opened at Weston Park to serve families for whom Dorset required a long drive from the Midlands, northern England, Wales or Scotland. It lasted three editions, through 2024, before being placed on hiatus and failing to return in either 2025 or 2026. Dorset, meanwhile, reasserted itself as the spiritual home. The 2026 edition brought around 30,000 people to Lulworth and again illustrated the improbable breadth of the format. Self Esteem and Billy Ocean could share a weekend with Bastille and Example, while Sunday became a Fatboy Slim-led Castle Stage takeover featuring De La Soul and DJ Fat Tony. Mr Tumble, Blippi and Dick & Dom occupied the same event without any sense that one side needed to apologise for the other.

Camp Bestival is already booked to return from July 29 to August 1, 2027. After eighteen completed Dorset editions, it no longer needs to prove that families belong inside festival culture; in Britain, it helped make that proposition normal. The most accurate image is not necessarily a child standing obediently at a children’s stage. It is the constant exchange between generations: a parent explaining why a DJ matters, a child dragging that parent away ten minutes later towards something entirely different, then both ending beneath fireworks over Lulworth Castle. Camp Bestival began because its founders’ lives changed after having children. Its lasting trick was discovering that the party did not have to end when that happened.