Bristol's Summer Festival Calendar
Posted on: 17 Jan 2017We challenge you to find a better place to be in the sun than in Bristol. With Blue Monday successfully seen off, we can now turn our eyes towards the warmer prospects of another summer in the city - and with the festival calendar already taking firm shape, it’s looking likely to be a sizzler. Get ahead on your party plans with the help of this handy guide we’ve assembled below.
VegFestUK - 20th-21st May, Lloyds Amphitheatre
Kicking things off is VegFest, a veritable vegetable paradise which brings informative talks, music and (most importantly) food to the waterfront for a weekend in May. Now in its 15th year, this Bristol leg of the festival is the largest vegan festival in the country and is expected to attract 14,000 visitors.
For tickets head over to their website.
Dot To Dot Festival - 27th May, Various Venues
A holistic festival which spreads its line-up across myriad city centre stages, Dot To Dot has been a favourite for years. Come the 27th May, Bristol’s best central venues, including Thekla, The Small Horse, The Fleece and The Exchange, will be brimming with the best indie-pop around. Last year's alumni include Mystery Jets (pictured), Spring King and Dua Lipa.
Grab early bird tickets here.
Love Saves The Day - 27th-28th May, Eastville Park
Love, actually, is all around. Love Saves The Day returns to Eastville Park to celebrate its sixth birthday and its position as the undisputed big daddy of Bristol’s festival calendar. Fat Freddy’s Drop have already been announced as Sunday’s headliner, with past form suggesting that the rest of the line-up will be of a similar calibre.
Second release tickets are available here.
Let’s Rock Bristol - 2nd-4th June, Ashton Court
The line-up for this year’s installment of Let’s Rock Bristol reads like it has been curated by the DJs who play to the top floor of Pryzm. No, really: Gloria Gaynor, Kim Wilde, Village People (pictured), Tiffany, Toploader, Atomic Kitten, Technotronic and B*Witched are all set to play, with Happy Mondays and The Lightning Seeds adding a touch of bagginess to proceedings. Vintage!
Tickets can be bought here.
Grillstock Festival - 1st-2nd July, Lloyds Amphitheatre
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Rock, ‘Stock and two (dozen) smoking char-grills: Bristol’s tastiest festival will bring its idiosyncratic symbiosis of meat and music back to the Harbourside for the opening weekend of July. Pedaling the food sold in their Triangle restaurant against a stage of accompanying live music, there is just as much to feast your ears on as to sink your teeth into.
Early bird tickets are on sale here.
Dinema + Bristol Summer Independents Fete - 14th-16th July, Memorial Stadium
The Bristol Summer Independents Fete is a real celebration of the food, drink and crafts being cooked, poured and made Bristol. A plethora of tasty treats and of stalls at which to quench your thirst will fill the Memorial Stadium carpark between the 14th and 16th July, where there will also be live music to help you get into the summer spirit with some amazing bands already confirmed for the daytime. In the evenings, things take a turn for the filmic as Dinema, the alfresco dining cinema, launches. Showing The Blues Brothers, Grease and Wayne's World on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday resepectively, with fine street food accompanying the on-screen entertainment - schwing!
Tickets are available through Tikk.
Bristol Harbour Festival - 21st-23rd July, Harbourside
The multi-faceted, multi-venue Bristol Harbour Festival returns to the banks of the river for three days of nautical-themed japery, art and music. Participating locations, which will host the likes of Echo and the Bunnymen, include the Amphitheatre Stage, Thekla, the Grain Barge and the SS Great Britain.
Find more at their website.
UpFest - 29th-31st July, Bedminster
Bristol is justifiably renowned for its street art, with testament to that the living graffiti galleries that pop up all over the city. It is therefore a sensible choice to host UpFest - the Urban Paint Festival - which sees thousands of artists from over 50 countries descend on North Street to paint live on 20,000sqft of surfaces. An array of musical accompaniment will be on hand to help visitors paint the town in a more figurative sense.
For more information about this free event, visit their Facebook page.
Bristol International Balloon Fiesta - 10th-13th August, Ashton Court
The third of Bristol’s three main ‘B’s (alongside ‘Bridges’ and ‘Banksy’) is ‘Balloons’, with one of the city’s defining images indubitably a blue sky bursting with a bounty of the hot-aircraft. With thousands of balloons populating the airways at both dawn and nightfall, family-friendly activities will take place at Ashton Court’s ground level as part of the free festival which has been a summer highlight since 1979.
For more information, visit the event’s Facebook page.
Tokyo World - 23rd-24th September, Eastville Park
The folk behind Tokyo World, the Bristol dance extravaganza, has announced their plan to expand to a two-day festival, taking place in Eastville Park on the 23rd and 24th September – and have revealed the list of acts to populate it. Packing out Eastville Park, the field approximately 6,000 miles west of the Japanese capital, will be names like Basement Jaxx, Jungle, Âme, Mr G and many, many more.
For tickets, go here.
Have we missed anything? Shoot us an email at sam@365bristol.co.uk.
Article by:
An ardent Geordie minus the accent, Sam seemingly strove to get as far away from the Toon as possible, as soon as university beckoned. Three undergraduate years at UoB were more than ample time for Bristol (as it inevitably does) to get under his skin, and so here he remains: reporting, as Assistant Editor, on the cultural happenings which so infatuated him with the city. Catch him at sam@365bristol.com.
