SLIPSHOD GATHERING 2026: REVIEW

With the tragic death of Balter festival last year, and the slow commercialization of many other British festivals held dear by free-party heads and ravers, 2026 has seen a bunch of small, independent festivals popping up and garnering substantial crowds. 

This summer, we've had Anexperience festival championing world-music and jungle haven in Cambridgeshire, Ground Rules setting new standards for grass-roots legal parties, and foundations fest coming later this summer with Faktion and Odyssey showcasing some impressive looking rig. 

Recently, Slipshod Gathering, on its second year, is certainly up there with these other independent festivals that have started to make a name for themselves.

Slipshod has no corporate backing, coming straight from the free party scene, and their stated ethos of ‘communal effort’ was certainly apparent. People helped out when needed, bringing gazebos to stages when the heat proved too much, interacting with the strange and interesting audio/visual pieces, and participants continued to create art installations and new nooks and crannies throughout the festival. 

The Maw, the mainstage, provided impressive decor and the massive Resonant Sounds soundsystem playing a lot of hardcore in the evenings and displaying its heavyweight bass with some dub during the day. 

Then the Help Desk, tucked away in the woods, had the Frequencies soundsystem, a really impressive looking and sounding rig with interactive decor, including TV screens that punters could control, and some miscellaneous buttons and knobs you could twist and push while dancing, which provided endless entertainment. 

The New Age Faire, a travelling stage and soundsystem, looked like something out of a hobbit film, if those little fellas were into jungle and dub, and everyone there seemed to be able to twist a fire stick round their heads with ease. 

Slipshod was everything a small festival should be: easy to find your way around, enough stages to be entertained, small enough to find your mates and friendly enough to make a bunch of new ones. It did really well at packing a couple of surprises into this small-ish space. 

There was a secret stage in the woods, which actually was quite secret (I didn’t find my way in there until Saturday afternoon at the earliest), a cinema tent with a nice soundsystem that showed Hot Fuzz and David Attenborough docs after the tunes turned off, and loads of impressive circus acts dotted around the site.

Also, the stalls were cool and interesting! Too often festivals only have the usual tie-dye t-shirts, bucket hats and heart-shaped sunglasses stalls. No shade to these stalls, they have their place, but it is a shame when every vendor is selling the same colourful plastic tat that's surely either discarded by buyers after the weekend or goes on the shelf until next year. But this festival had some very creative stuff, one stall selling taxidermy rodents which were arranged in dollshouses as well as amazing handmade children's toys, another with creative and impressive jewellery and cool patches - all of which had obviously been carefully crafted by artists. 

The festival really did have a free party, DIY sense about it, which is something that’s difficult to replicate in a legal and ultimately monetary environment. It wasn't too strict, there was constantly a pretty good range of different genres being played (tekno, hardcore, jungle, hardtrance and acid-tekno mostly), and it definitely felt like a more of a free party crowd than that of a classic festival. The site was clean when we rolled out on Monday morning and I’d never seen people putting their cigarette ends in the bin as much at any other UK festival that I've been to.