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“I think they’re a bunch of gentrifiers who have come in and think they’re entitled to spaces that they shouldn’t be entitled to,” says one festival-goer in a TikTok vox pop titled ‘Exploring Local Sentiments to Wide Awake Festival.’ In the next shot of the video, which is filmed inside the grounds of the festival, another attendee shrugs: “It’s just music. Who is it hurting? More power to the people.” These might be off-the-cuff comments captured in the throes of a day festival. Still, they’re typical of a narrative unfolding around London’s festival scene: that young people’s right to gather and celebrate is being stifled by a vocal minority of local residents who question the commercialisation of public parks.
At the centre of the debate sits a High Court ruling, which cast uncertainty over South London’s Wide Awake festival just a week before it was set to welcome 20,000 attendees to Brockwell Park. Wide Awake is the first event in the Brockwell Live summer festival series, which takes place from late May to early June every year and includes a range of day festivals like The Mighty Hoopla, Cross The Tracks, Field Day, and more. As crews completed site preparations, a local residents’ group under the campaign Protect Brockwell Park won a legal challenge against Lambeth Council. The court found the council had breached planning regulations by closing off parts of the park for 37 days—exceeding the 28-day limit for temporary commercial use without full planning consent.
For a brief moment, the fate of the entire festival series hung in the balance. That was until Lambeth granted fresh planning permission hours before Wide Awake opened its gates, and performances from Kneecap, CMAT, and English Teacher went ahead as planned. The Lambeth Country Show, on the 7th and 8th of June, concluded the festival series for another year, but the dispute between Lambeth Council and local residents appears far from over. With tickets already on sale for next year’s festivals, Protect Brockwell Park is poised to launch a fresh legal challenge against the council.
“I haven’t met a single person in the local area who thinks the issue is overblown,” says Jack Cooper Stimpson, a resident who has lived in the area since 1996. “Everyone thinks this campaign acknowledges an obvious issue, and they’re using it as an outlet to express an opinion finally.” For years, local residents have bemoaned the construction of a three-foot steel wall that encloses around a third of their local park during the festival season each summer. Arguing that this shuts out local residents — the majority of whom live in flats without private outdoor space — the wall has become emblematic of the commercialisation of their public park. Festival organisers have tried to ease tensions by offering free local tickets and a 24-hour residents’ phone hotline. But this hasn’t quelled the sense that their park is being stolen away from residents during the best months of the year. This year, graffiti scrawled across the wall reads: ‘Whose Park? Our Park’ and ‘F*CK LAMBETH.’
While the wall eventually comes down, the park itself takes longer to recover. Torrential rain during the 2024 festival series left large swathes of the park without grass for the following year. “When the green fences came down last year, the ground was totally trashed. It was just mud. Other fences went up immediately, cordoning off the area in an attempt to reinstate the ground,” says Lucy Akill, one of the founders of the Protect Brockwell Park group. “It still hadn’t recovered before the HGVs (Heavy Goods Vehicle) trucks returned for this year’s build.”
Akill adds that repeated soil compaction from consecutive festivals has rendered a local charity’s football pitch unusable since 2023. The St Matthews Project, which runs free football sessions for young people, has had to partially relocate to Clapham. “But that’s not an option for every family,” says Akill. “Mothers tell me, ‘We’ve had to drop out—we can’t afford the bus fare,’ or ‘I’ve got a toddler and can’t make the journey.’ That pitch was their home ground. It’s a big loss.”
The High Court sparked alarm across the music and events industry, raising broader questions about the future of urban festivals. The Night Time Industries Association (NTIA), which represents nightclubs and music venues across the UK, condemned the ruling as a blow to the cultural sector. In a strongly worded statement, the NTIA described the outcome as a “dark day for culture, workers, and community,” arguing that the case brought by Protect Brockwell Park (PBP) was less about “protecting parks” and more about “stifling culture.” The organisation drew a direct link between the decision and what it described as a “worrying trend” of music venues being framed as public nuisances and denied licenses.
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Such comments reflect a now familiar narrative: that objections to festivals are primarily driven by the personal inconvenience of a privileged few to the detriment of a struggling cultural sector. This viewpoint is not without basis: the NTIA reports that music venues have been shutting at a rate of two per week in the years since the pandemic, and licensing reviews triggered by noise complaints are central to this story. Festivals are crucial for the economic health of the music industry, and polling by More In Common found that Londoners broadly support festivals in parks — 67% said festivals are good for the local community by bringing jobs, income, and entertainment to the area.
But framing the issue as a clash between cultural vibrancy and close-minded NIMBYism seems to misrepresent the core of local opposition. “It’s very difficult because it feels like the rhetoric is that we’re anti-festival,” says Cooper Stimpson, who works in the cultural sector as a filmmaker himself. “But the campaign isn’t anti-festival. It’s anti-Lambeth Council and how they’ve gone about planning the festival series. They’ve not consulted with local residents, and they’ve ignored the High Court ruling.”
In a statement released after the court ruling, Lambeth Council (which was approached for comment) defended the Brockwell Live festival series, stating that the events offer entertainment ‘particularly for younger people,’ boost local small businesses, and are ‘strongly backed’ by the Borough’s ‘diverse communities.’ Beyond this, commercial activities in public parks are an essential revenue stream in the face of ongoing austerity. Severe cuts to local government funding over the past decade have forced councils across the UK to seek alternative sources of income, with many turning to public parks to plug growing budget gaps. “It’s not coincidental that there’s been a rise in day festivals in London parks,” says Ben Cross, co-founder of Cloud X, an independent music label and events company from South London. “Of course, councils want to support culture, but we’ve also had 15 years of austerity — councils clearly are having to take their prized assets and rent them to generate funding.”
This shift towards the partial enclosure of public space is not unique to Lambeth. According to research by the Financial Times, there are a cumulative total of 140 days of ticketed music festivals and concerts planned across London’s parks in 2025, up nearly 14% from last year. In North London, residents have been engaged in a years-long battle against Haringey Council’s use of Finsbury Park as a venue for concerts and festivals throughout the summer. In neighbouring Enfield, the council recently approved a controversial plan to lease 60% of Whitewebbs Park to Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, which intends to build a women’s football academy on the site.
While the commercialisation of public parks is often framed as a financial necessity, questions persist about how much of the revenue from these events actually flows into local communities. Lambeth Council has declined to release a detailed financial breakdown, but it is understood that income from Brockwell Park’s ticketed festivals is used to offset the costs of hosting the free-to-attend Lambeth Country Show. The council has stated that this arrangement saves around £700,000 per year in event costs, with the additional revenue being directed toward essential park maintenance. Yet, for some residents, these benefits remain invisible. “Lambeth Council haven’t actively acknowledged where the money goes,” says Cooper Stimpson. “I go to the park every day, and it’s obvious to me that things are closing down or getting worse rather than getting any better.”
Many argue that the real beneficiaries of London’s festival economy aren’t local councils or communities but the opaque corporate structures behind the events themselves. Superstruct Entertainment — the company that owns many of the events within the Brockwell Live series, including Mighty Hoopla, Field Day, and Cross the Tracks — is owned by private equity giant KKR. The firm has come under increasing scrutiny for its investment portfolio, which includes stakes in arms manufacturers and real estate firms involved in constructing Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. In recent months, calls to boycott KKR-backed events have intensified. A total of 15 acts withdrew from the Field Day festival in solidarity with Palestine, citing concerns over the event’s financial ties.
Cross argues that both the live music industry and public parks are suffering under the same economic pressures. “For me, the two aren’t divorced,” he says. “I’m not opposed to festivals receiving corporate financial backing, but it feels like gaps in public funding in the UK arts have forced festival owners to seek financial backing elsewhere, creating a situation where profits from the UK festival scene are siphoned away from local communities and artists, and absorbed into global financial systems.” He believes that this broader story of austerity and chronic underfunding has been largely absent from the public debate surrounding the legal challenge to Brockwell Live. To address the issue, he calls for increased public investment in independent, grassroots music operators who are rooted in the communities they serve.
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Others have proposed more practical adjustments, such as instituting fallow years to allow parks to recover, capping the number of event days, or scaling down the size and footprint of festivals. For Akill, the responsibility for finding more sustainable models for future festivals in public spaces lies squarely with the council: “Councils hold parks in trust for the community. Surely, the primary responsibility is to put the health and wealth of that park at the heart of any policy.”
At the very least, local communities argue they deserve a voice. Despite months of petitioning and collecting testimonies, Protect Brockwell Park was excluded from formal consultations around this year’s Brockwell Live — and has yet to hear from the council following the High Court ruling. More concerning, Akill and fellow campaigner Rebekah Shaman received legal letters at their home addresses from Summer Events Limited, the company behind Brockwell Live. The group says these resemble SLAPP tactics — strategic lawsuits against public participation — designed to intimidate activists with the threat of costly, drawn-out litigation.
“We’ve been called NIMBYs by the press, sent intimidating letters by promoters, and ignored by the council,” says Akill. “But Brockwell Park isn’t my backyard. It’s everybody’s backyard.” As the legal battle continues, the campaign to Protect Brockwell Park has come to represent something bigger: the right for ordinary people to challenge the creeping commercialisation of public parks.
