The First Year We Didn’t Do Leeds Festival

This year, for the first time in more years than we can actually put an exact number on, we didn’t do Leeds Festival.

We’ve done every single one. Before it was even called Leeds Festival — back when the site was still V Festival at Temple Newsam Park, and we parked on the M1 before it had even opened to get there — we were there. We watched it become Leeds Festival in 1999. We watched it move to Bramham Park in 2003, after things at the old site got so bad one year that we’re still not entirely sure how nobody died.

The first year was dead. Quiet enough that we ran three stalls with four staff and lost money on it — nowhere near the footfall to justify that many people. So the second year we scaled right back: just one stall, a couple of us, expecting more of the same. Instead it was bonkers busy. That’s the year of the riot.

That’s not an exaggeration. Security on site that night was police — helicopters overhead, the full works. The toilets exploded. Someone burned the cider tent and the burger bar down. Driving out on the Sunday evening, just before the riot really took hold, we went through the police mustering point — a copper was just putting his phone away, so we asked if that was the wife, joking about what you’d actually say knowing what your night was about to become. Sandwiches nice? How’s the kids? He told us they’d already pulled the dogs out, pulled the fire brigade out, and that anyone left in the field now was liable for arrest. We got onto the newly-opened M1 and you could see the whole field on fire behind us. Driving out afterwards we picked up a lad who stank, from Leyland, pushing a shopping trolley full of Carling — he’d found it after the riot broke into the artic that had been carrying the beer. I was over at the other end of the site, away from most of it, and decided there and then — if it’s like this, we set the stall up outside and leave on the Sunday once trouble starts. About four of us actually did it; most of the other traders weren’t up for it. We did it every year after anyway. The trader pitched next to us that year was living out of an old fire engine, drinking Valpolicella like it was going out of fashion.

The riot starts.

The arena empties outside the stall.

The aftermath.

The drive out, past the burned-out cider tent.

That same night, festival management actually asked us to keep the sound system going — turn it up, if anything. Seems to be where the whole little-raves-everywhere thing started: organisers ended up putting on loads of them that night trying to calm things down.

By the time the festival moved to Bramham Park in 2003, that had become part of the culture. A different world — genuinely stunning place. Half the campsite had a sound system going most nights — proper little rave fields between the tents, kids DJing, the traders’ after-party regularly outdoing the actual festival. We weren’t just selling papers and pipes. We were part of the furniture.

One night at Bramham Park, years after the original Temple Newsam riot, the fencing came down again — this time it was less about people fighting and more festoon lighting, fires and explosions everywhere, like the whole campsite was alight. That was the night we ended up ringing for help at 4am because we were trapped.

The stock moved with the times too. We sold beer bongs until they got banned. Then herbal smoking blends, until those got banned as well. Even Rave horns got banned lol.

There are decades of stories from those years. One festival we sold out of bongs completely — not low on stock, properly out. So we borrowed a Seat Toledo off someone on site, sent Big Steve driving back to Preston in it, and he came back with the entire car filled with bongs, boot to windscreen. Another year we came back to the van to find a couple mid-**** right next to it, and I just sat there for a good while waiting for them to notice me and clock the hint.

30th birthday montage.

One year the Sunday crowd was so wired and annoying — half of them clearly off their faces — that we grabbed a load of black lipstick and seeling stuff for double the price unless they had a badly drawn cat face. Word got round fast. We must have painted hundreds of cat faces that day; people were buying stuff just to get one. Even the charity collector who did the rounds of every festival got a cat face done before we’d give him a donation.

Uncle Robin — Bopper gave him that name, because he was everyone’s daft uncle — was one of the funniest people we ever had on the crew, a hundred stories, a hundred late nights. . Getting back there properly is still on the list. We lost Eggy too — Eggy Briggs, big up the Briggs — another one taken far too soon, We lost him far too young, at twenty-five. Some of his ashes went to Glastonbury, into the middle of a stone circle, with a toast raised over the fire for him, missed at every one of these since.

Monday, waiting to be let off site 

So why stop now, after all that?

We used to do more than just Leeds — V Festival, Boomtown, others. They dropped off one by one. Boomtown’s its own story for another day, but two of our last years there we weren’t even allowed to open for two full days of the festival, no reason given, told to take our signs down and just wait. V Festival doesn’t exist anymore. One by one, we cut back to just Leeds, because trying to stock and staff more than one festival properly, as a small company, stops making sense once the fun goes out of the other ones.

And Leeds was always the good one. We always enjoyed Leeds. But even there, we noticed fewer traders every year we turned up. The fun and the chaos we’d known for decades was quietly going. Then it went cashless — properly cashless, everywhere, and that shift really landed after the pandemic. It changed for everybody, not just us: renting their card machines, handing over a percentage, then another 10% once you passed a threshold, then 20% VAT on every sale on top of that. Layer on layer, eating into a weekend that used to just be about turning up and having a laugh with people who came back to see us every year.

Then last year, 2025, we went to Leeds and it was dead. The campsite was maybe a quarter full. They’d moved the gate, so the footfall past the traders just wasn’t there anymore. We lost thousands. Properly lost money, not just had a quiet weekend. Normally if one festival has a bad year, doing two or three others means you pick up the slack elsewhere — but we were down to just Leeds by then, so there was no slack to pick up. Leeds had always been the one that never let us down. That was the shock of it.

Normally the trader application lands before Christmas, sometimes just after, and you pay up by June. This year we heard nothing — not a word — until mid-June. Then two weeks to confirm, no mention of the gate, no mention of ticket sales, nothing about whether anything had changed since the year that cost us thousands. They already knew what 2025 had done to traders like us. We still had unsold stock sitting from that year.

We didn’t reply straight away. What was there to say — after everything, another email full of “it’ll be better this year,” like the last one hadn’t happened? So we left it. Two weeks later, a chaser landed: forms not filled in, blah blah blah. That was it, really. We wrote back, short and straight: we’ve had enough, thank you for the time, it’s genuinely been amazing, all the best for the future.

Nobody replied. Not a word. Twenty-odd years, and it ended on an email nobody could be bothered to answer.

That, more than the fees or the VAT or the empty campsite, is probably what sums it up.

We’re not really sad about it. Just done watching something that used to run on chaos and community slowly turn into a spreadsheet that doesn’t add up for us anymore.

Thanks for having us all those years, Leeds.

Some of the nights that stuck

A random faces from over the years — more on our Facebook

Big Des and everyone at Leeds on the Sunday — the funniest festival times.

A mate of mine termed it best: festivals are like going to war, we just use beer and drugs as ammunition. Thanks, Leeds, for the memories.