The Wilderness Festival descends every year on the Cornbury Park estate in the Cotswolds. The festival brings with it splashes of intense colour, sound and smells designed to enchant the music seekers. This hub of creativity arrives each summer and delivers a vibrant boost to this small rural community.
Wilderness festival
Music festivals allow for an intense concentration of creative talent and this collaboration reconfigures the small spatial configuration of the area. Gibson, 2007 describes their impact “‘Cultural festivals are a vibrant part of societies everywhere’. This vibrancy helps to deliver an intense cultural hub to small often rural communities. The festival can be made up of a huge range of creative industries, from artisan food and drinks, local crafts (including homemade hula hoops), small music bands, artwork, dramatic groups and even dance performances. These hubs are a great platform for the diffusion of genres to a specialist market.
“A place where art, intellectualism and fantastic gastronomy share equal billing with music” The Guardian
Wilderness festival markets itself as a cultural blend of music, intellectual and gastronomical delights. The mix of genres involved has allowed for an incredibly diverse audience, ranging from teenagers, to pensioners, rockers and even Bear Grylls . The new movement of “posh stock”festivals can revitalise an economy. The Association of Independent festivals estimate that they contributed £130million into the economy in 2011 and £12 million of this will go directly into the local small business of the area. As a creative hub it puts Oxfordshire on the map and allows for a concentrated wonderland of intellectual debate, theatre and music all set in an idyllic woodland with deer and shimmering lakes.
As well as the obvious cultural benefits the festival brings, the mass of people who descend upon the Cotswolds during this time provide a significant economic boost which allows Wilderness to grow year on year. If this symbiotic relationship continues to flourish, the area and the festival goers will both continue to enjoy the benefits for many years to come. The coming together of divergent people and the swapping of ideas and creative atmosphere of the festival can be nothing but a positive force for the burgeoning UK arts scene. No matter what your interests may be you certainly won’t find yourself left in the wilderness at this brilliantly all inclusive festival.
References
Festivals, A. (2015). Home – The Association of Independent Festivals. [online] The Association of Independent Festivals. Available at: http://aiforg.com/ [Accessed 9 Mar. 2015].
Gibson, C. (2007) Music Festivals: Transformations in Non-metropolitan Places, and in Creative Work. Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy. 123 pp.65-81.
Creativity in action 