Community Festival

Before it became a huge crowd facing a main stage in Finsbury Park, Community was a much more fragmented idea. In November 2015, Festival Republic and Live Nation spread emerging artists across Shoreditch and Hoxton, using established clubs alongside basements, shops and unconventional neighbourhood spaces. The purpose was discovery: catch music before the names became large enough for major festival posters. Two years later, that experiment returned in dramatically different form as a single summer day for tens of thousands of people in a north London park. The scale had changed, the musical focus had narrowed towards British guitar bands, but the instinct to place rising artists beside established favourites remained the thread connecting the two versions.

Melvin Benn and Festival Republic originally described Community as an urban multi-venue emerging-talent event. Vince Staples, Blonde, Petite Meller, Rat Boy, Clean Cut Kid, Hacktivist and dozens of other acts appeared across eleven East London venues, with hip hop, grime, indie, rock and electro-pop sharing the programme. Some shows took place in recognised rooms such as Village Underground and XOYO, while free fringe activity reached shops and other businesses. It was not yet the indie-rock day out people would later associate with the name. The first Community was closer to a city-wide showcase, shaped by Shoreditch itself and by the idea that audiences might discover the next important act before the rest of the industry caught up.

There was no equivalent edition in 2016. When Community returned on July 1, 2017, Festival Republic presented the Finsbury Park event as a new one-day festival, while contemporary coverage explicitly linked it back to the 2015 Shoreditch project. The transformation was enormous. Instead of moving through eleven venues, audiences gathered inside one of London’s best-known outdoor concert parks. Catfish and the Bottlemen headlined, joined by The Wombats, Slaves —later renamed Soft Play—, Nothing But Thieves, The Hunna, Fickle Friends and Darlia. The musical language had become much clearer. Guitar music, youthful indie crowds and bands moving rapidly through Britain’s live circuit now sat at the centre.

Finsbury Park suited the idea because Community was deliberately not a camping festival. Gates opened in the morning, music ran through the day and tens of thousands of people could leave the park that night and return to ordinary London. There was no need to build an elaborate temporary settlement around the music. The event worked as an intensive urban excursion: arrive early, spend hours moving between a main stage and a smaller platform for newer artists, then head back into the city. Relatively low ticket prices were also significant. Community positioned itself as a major outdoor experience accessible to younger listeners who might not yet be paying the much higher cost of a full weekend festival.

The 2018 edition became particularly revealing in retrospect. Two Door Cinema Club headlined with The Vaccines and You Me At Six, while Circa Waves, Sundara Karma, Marmozets and Rat Boy reinforced the main-stage guitar focus. The N4 Stage carried Tom Grennan, Pale Waves, Sam Fender and Yungblud. Years later, that smaller stage reads like a snapshot taken immediately before several careers changed scale. Sam Fender had not yet become a stadium-level British headliner, and Yungblud had not built his later international following. Community’s commitment to emerging acts was therefore more than branding. The festival repeatedly gave significant outdoor exposure to artists who were still somewhere between club touring and major recognition.

By 2019, Community had found the form most people would remember. The Kooks headlined above Blossoms, Don Broco, The Hunna, Kate Nash, Gerry Cinnamon and Sea Girls. The Amazons, Vistas, The Academic and BLOXX helped maintain the new-music element. Promotional language openly described the festival as a defining summer celebration for a generation of indie fans. It did not need an elaborate thematic story. The appeal was direct: a concentrated day of songs that large young crowds could sing together, guitar bands at different stages of their careers and enough emerging material to make arrival before the headliners worthwhile. Simplicity became part of the identity rather than evidence of limited ambition.

Covid interrupted that momentum in 2020 and 2021. The return on July 16, 2022 therefore carried a different emotional weight. Around 45,000 people came back to Finsbury Park for a full-capacity edition led by Two Door Cinema Club and The Wombats, with Nothing But Thieves, Circa Waves and Pale Waves reinforcing the familiar indie core. Alfie Templeman, Crawlers, Courting, Bears in Trees and other younger acts filled the lower reaches. After two years in which British live music had repeatedly stopped, postponed and restarted, Community’s basic proposition —one park, one day, thousands of voices — felt unusually powerful. The festival did not require a reinvention to justify its return; simply existing at full scale was enough.

The reinvention came the following year. On July 7, 2023, Community moved south to Crystal Palace Park and appeared as Community Presents rather than the familiar Finsbury Park festival. Two Door Cinema Club and The Wombats co-headlined, with The Vaccines, Sea Girls and Baby Queen making up the entire compact bill. The event therefore resembled a large curated outdoor concert more than the two-stage Community structure of previous years. Festival Republic itself lists it historically as Community Presents. It makes sense to treat the day as a continuation of the same brand, but also as a reduced special format rather than pretending nothing had changed. Once again, Community had altered its shape.

Nothing followed in 2024, 2025 or 2026. Festival Republic’s recent event histories contain no new Community date, while the official Community website currently exists only as a holding page inviting newsletter subscriptions. Ticketmaster keeps the old listing and asks visitors to check back, but there is no confirmed festival, lineup or return date. That is not enough evidence to declare the project permanently dead, yet it is far too long an absence to call it normally active. Community now sits in uncertain territory: born as a Shoreditch discovery festival, reborn as one of London’s most concentrated indie-rock days, and last seen as a smaller Crystal Palace show. If it returns, changing form would hardly be unprecedented. Reinvention has been part of the brand from the beginning.