Crowning the best music festival in the UK is highly contentious stuff. Some love an all-guns-blazing, ginormous feast of music like Glastonbury. Others opt for more wholesome, well-put-together affairs like Latitude, and others still prefer festivals that focus on specific genres or scenes like Download, Outbreak, Wireless or End of the Road. How can you crown the ‘best’ from all that?
Every year the UK Festival Awards set out to celebrate British live music festivals, awarding prizes for stuff like production and lineup quality. The most coveted prize of all, however, is ‘best large festival’, which recognises high-quality events exceeding 40,000 attendees per day.
And this year the big gong went to… Isle of Wight festival! The south coast fest has been running for 22 years – 25 if you include its original iteration – and has hosted everyone from David Bowie and the Rolling Stones to the Black Eyed Peas and Florence and the Machine.
Isle of Wight fest recently announced that Sting, Stereophonics and Justin Timberlake will be headlining next year (find out more and get tickets here). IOW beat a shortlist that included Boomtown, Download, Reading and Leeds, TRNSMT and Victorious.
Commenting on the win, IOW organiser and promoter John Giddings said: ‘Coming from the festival goers themselves, it means the world.
‘We love what we do, we love the artists who come and play and we truly appreciate those people who make their way over to dance in a field and celebrate that which unites us all – music.’
Other fests to pick up prizes at the 2024 UK Festival Awards include Manchester Punk Festival (best small festival), 2000Trees (best medium-sized festival), Bearded Theory (best lineup) and Boomtown (best festival production).
Looking for more top music festivals to book for 2025? Here at Time Out we’ve put together a list of the UK’s best fests (in chronological order).
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