A few years ago, Camp Bestival felt like a charming, quietly eccentric affair, fairly small in the best sense, especially set beside the giants of the British festival calendar. Curated as ever by its founder Rob da Bank and held in the grounds of Lulworth Castle on Dorset's Jurassic Coast, it has grown into something that feels much bigger and even more beloved: a multi-award-winning family institution. But the essential character holds. This is a camping festival for extraordinary creative arts by day and a measure of hedonism by night - all done to the absolute highest standard.
The site unfolds as a series of themed fields, each one dressed to the hilt. There's the Caravanserai, Pete Bateman's higgledy-piggledy "festival within a festival", a shanty-town of old caravans, vintage waltzers, fairground booths and salvaged sixties wallpaper, part apocalyptic junkyard, part midnight cabaret, and one of the most enchanting spaces at any UK festival. Nearby, the Bollywood arena throbs into the small hours for the moonlit ravers; the brilliant Navigation Town is an explorer's world of observatories, bandstands, libraries of circus and adventure, and trapeze artists swinging overhead; and Pig's Big Ballroom tucks away a low-key parade of vintage treats.
This year's dress code was At The Seaside, and the punters rose to it: a tide of home-made mermaids, jellyfish, lobsters, sailors and swimmers washed across the fields, the effort put in nothing short of glorious. Somewhere in Caravanserai, a man in a full lobster costume danced himself giddy to Chris Payn & The Parade, The site unfolds as a series of themed fields, each one dressed to the hilt. There's the Caravanserai, Pete Bateman's higgledy-piggledy "festival within a festival", a shanty-town of old caravans, vintage waltzers, fairground booths and salvaged sixties wallpaper, part apocalyptic junkyard, part midnight cabaret, and one of the most enchanting spaces at any UK festival. Nearby, the Bollywood arena throbs into the small hours for the moonlit ravers; the brilliant Navigation Town is an explorer's world of observatories, bandstands, libraries of circus and adventure, and trapeze artists swinging overhead; and Pig's Big Ballroom tucks away a low-key parade of vintage treats. There is something to catch the eye at every turn.
By day, the programme for children is bottomless. The arts and crafts are top-notch, the children's theatre in front of the castle is excellent, and BigTopMania's circus workshops are a joy. There is an Allotment where children water the garden and build scarecrows, an Earth's Crust Bread School turning out quickfire sourdough demos, an Enchanted Cinema, a roller disco, and a Women's Institute tent baking cake to shame most high-street bakeries. At Ella Frears's Rough Trade Books takeover, a completely lovely poetry workshop built around her Poetry Fruit Machine card game, she announced, half-delighted and half-defeated, that they had run out of pencils, saying: "I hadn't expected so many people to turn up wanting to write poetry. It's very touching." Over in the Slomo Wellbeing area there are soundbaths, meditation, breathwork, mindful movement, dance, yoga and one-on-one treatments. Add the craft village, the local fossils and the sight of the Tibetan monks of Tashi Lhunpo Monastery, who opened the festival on Thursday and returned to the Castle Stage on Sunday morning, watching CBeebies between ceremonies, and the daytime is clearly, finished to the highest level.
For the very smallest revellers, the festival is a wonderland built to their scale. Mr Tumble, Blippi, Mister Maker, MC Grammar and Dan The Hat all held court, and the CBeebies Bedtime Story tent drew the usual heavy-lidded crowds, its guest readers this year including Bastille and Self Esteem (one can only hope she curbed her rudies for that slot – more on that later). My teenage daughter, unshakeable about most things, went entirely to pieces at the sight of Andy from Andy's Dinosaur Adventures.
Best of all is the accessibility. Here, inclusion feels built into the festival rather than added on afterwards. The disability provision is the best I have seen at any festival: disabled artists on the stages as musicians and DJs, the crowd taught to clap in BSL, priority access for anyone with a disability, whether visible or otherwise, accessible campsites, viewing platforms and sensory calm spaces. Access is treated as a right rather than an afterthought. In a sector that too often does the opposite, Camp Bestival sets a standard others would do well to follow.
On the main stage, Friday opened with Billy Ocean, a bona fide legend, still has it at 76. "Caribbean Queen", "Suddenly", "When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going" and "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car" rolled out one after another. On Saturday, Example warmed the stage before the headliners, "Kickstarts" landing nicely with the younger kids, and then Bastille, in their Camp Bestival headline debut, tore into it like a band thrilled to be home and out to prove they'd earned the top spot. After a touring break following 2022's Give Me the Future gave way to frontman Dan Smith's solo Ampersand project, this was among their first big festival returns. They leaned on the anthems: "Things We Lost", "Good Grief", "Save My Soul" with a split-crowd chorus singalong, "Happier", which sent Dan Smith clean over the barrier and out into the throng, bouncing along in a swell of delighted fans, and "Pompeii" to close. Best of all for the field was "Of the Night", their booming reworking of the nineties dance staples "Rhythm Is a Dancer" and "The Rhythm of the Night" and a walk-on from Bluey during "What You Gonna Do?" which sent the small people into raptures. Earlier, Smith had asked the children whether they had heard any swearing all weekend, a knowing nod to Black Grape, whose language had already drawn a profuse festival apology. The show of little hands rather answered the question.
Sunday belonged to Fatboy Slim, and he was spectacular: everything the field needed at that moment, arriving dressed head to toe as a giant cone of chips and detonating two hours of collective delight. The staging had a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids logic, children sprawled and dancing at ground level while the adults raved above them. Norman Cook worked the crowd with a bellowed "are we having fun yet?" alongside screens of slightly unhinged AI visuals: himself, endlessly, mid-dance, alongside animated turns from David Bowie, Bill Murray and Count Binface. Musically it was a masterclass in the mashup: "The Real Slim Shady" riding "The Rockafeller Skank", "Praise You" tipping into Queen, "Born Slippy" lifting "Mr Brightside", a long run at "Jump Around", and a detour through Nirvana. It closed straight into the Castle Fireworks Spectacular, the Dorset sky lighting up over Lulworth to his final beats.
Around the headliners, the wider bill was DJ-heavy and full of pleasures: Dick and Dom's Massive Rave, a perennial favourite; De La Soul and the drum-and-bass elders Fabio and Grooverider; and Nubiyan Twist, jazzy and sun-warmed, exactly right for a Sunday afternoon on the grass. Toploader, earlier in the weekend, had the Friday-afternoon crowd in full voice for "Dancing in the Moonlight", a title the relentless sun rather argued should have read "Sunlight". Wildest and most wonderful were Fulu Miziki, the Congolese eco-punk collective from Kinshasa who build their instruments and costumes from salvaged rubbish, and Dogshow, two brothers playing genre-fluid dance music dressed head to toe as beautiful poodles. Only at Camp Bestival. The Big Top gave late-night nostalgia sets, from Leftfield to Utah Saints to Josh Wink, which traded more on warm memory than fresh momentum, though the crowds hardly seemed to mind.
For all its charms, I couldn’t help but wonder if the festival is wrestling with its own success. The site has sat at its familiar capacity of around 30,000 for years, so what has changed is not the number of bodies but the density and behaviour of them. Recent editions have sold out, and with the Shropshire sister festival taking a break in 2025, that demand has concentrated onto Dorset, so fields that once had room to breathe now feel chock-a-block, the same crowd suddenly immovable in a way it was not even a few summers ago. Almost every family now hauls a wagon, a pull-along cart for children, chairs and slurping provisions, and these have become the currency of territory. At the Castle Stage, one person's standing space quietly expands into a small encampment of five wagons and a scatter of camping chairs, a patch of ground defended for the day. Individually it is harmless; collectively it turns the main arena into gridlock. Getting out is where charm curdles into concern. During Fatboy Slim's finale there was a complete logjam behind the main stage, no through-way from one side to the other, the crowd increasingly inebriated and short-tempered. In ordinary circumstances it is an inconvenience; in an emergency it could have been actively dangerous. With camping stoves and disposable barbecues banned across the site (sensible, particularly after a recent fire at a nearby festival), a low hum of nervousness sat beside the wagon-jams. It is the one corner where a festival that prides itself on family safety might look again.
The other pause for me is the evening bill, which this year skewed mostly adult. Where Billy Ocean had shown exactly how to hold a family field, Self Esteem, booked into the same Friday slot immediately after, was pitched squarely at the grown-ups. Rebecca Lucy Taylor is a fearless, brilliant live performer, and her set travelled from Handmaid's Tale severity, bonnets and all, to something barer and more defiant. But she is not, by any measure, a children's act. "Don't insta-complain about me like they did at Latitude," Taylor told the crowd, "it's not my fault you booked me." Whilst “Mother” has useful lyrics for a cornered pen of Dads, "69" is a song that works methodically through a checklist of sexual positions, complete with calorie counts and a cheerful offer to peg the willing. Quite whose idea it was to programme that at a children's festival is a fair question. Whatever the reasoning, it felt oddly at odds with the festival around it. To be fair, the dawning awkwardness on the dads' faces, as two-year-olds bounced on their shoulders to every word, was one of my most hilarious festival moments this year. There was also the sheer lateness and length of the headline sets: two hours of Fatboy Slim is a wonderful thing, though by the encore the field was dotted with conked-out toddlers slung over shoulders.
The magic of Camp Bestival lives in its daytime: in its craft, its world-building and its extraordinary attention to families. If there is one small wish, it is that the evening programme might occasionally echo that same spirit a little more closely. This year, the balance sometimes tipped towards the adults, with later finishes and a few performances that felt better suited to a conventional festival than a family one. Yet these are questions of emphasis rather than identity. Camp Bestival remains one of the most imaginative and thoughtfully curated family festivals in the country; a place that understands, better than almost anywhere else, that children deserve culture every bit as ambitious as adults do. A little more of that philosophy after dark would make an already remarkable weekend even stronger.
