Boomtown’s radical redesign is a watershed moment for festivals everywhere

Lead photography by Giulia Spadafora Boomtown has come to be known as the UK’s wildest festival. With this year’s transformation, the vibe is very much so-wild-it-just-might-work, as ambitious green energy policies and welfare initiatives hopefully become a gold standard for the wider industry. “When you’re introducing a new technology for the first time, you don’t have the benefit of previous case studies and data to work with, so testing this concept on a smaller scale last year gave us the confidence to pull it off and go big with it.” That’s Poppy Handy, Boomtown’s operations director, who’s talking me through the expansion of their hydrogen generator usage. The new Hydro XL stage will run exclusively on the chemical element you learnt all about in school, and emit only water vapour – rather than contribute to the fossil fuel emissions that are slowly killing us all. This technology is uber-new to the festival market, and Boomtown are braving uncharted waters in the hope that others will follow. “Unless the bigger festivals that have more resources take these risks to step forward, then it just stays stuck, the industry.” That’s Luke Mitchell, Boomtown’s co-founder. “The idea i...