About us

Underground Fayre brings together a group of experienced festival founders who have each created, built and shaped their own events over many years.

Along the way, our paths crossed and we discovered that we shared the same approach to what makes a great festival, independence, creativity, community, great music and putting the audience experience first.

Now, for the first time, we’re bringing that collective experience, knowledge and passion together to create something entirely new.

Our roots are firmly in independent festivals. Some of us previously founded and built an award winning independent festival that became highly regarded within the industry and, more importantly, developed a loyal community of people who returned year after year.

It was an incredible journey, although over time the festival grew beyond the size we were happiest operating at. As it grew, we increasingly found that the parts we loved most were often the smaller elements, the intimate stages, quirky entertainment, independent traders, unexpected performances and those little corners of a festival that developed a character and following all of their own.

They were the places where people stopped, stayed, talked and became part of something. Often they weren’t the biggest or most expensive parts of the festival, but they were the ones that created some of its best memories.

Since our involvement in our respective events, we have watched something we created continue its own journey and inevitably change along the way. At the same time others have watched the wider festival landscape change following their decisions to cease with their own festival, with the cost of attending many festivals becoming vastly more expensive.

For us, it reinforced just how much we valued the original principles we all started with, independence, affordability, community, character and creating a festival where the experience was about far more than simply who was playing on the main stage.

Underground Fayre is an opportunity to take everything we learned from our collective journeys and start again with a blank canvas.

There is no corporate owner and no formula telling us what Underground Fayre should become. It is genuinely independent, giving us the freedom to make decisions based on the audience and the experience we want to create.

Great live music will always be at its heart, but we don’t want the weekend to simply be a series of bands on stages. Around the music you’ll find performance, art, independent traders, family activities, unusual entertainment and plenty of things happening simply because we thought they would be fun.

Our home at Cotswold Airport  is an incredible setting in which to create it. We want to use the landscape rather than simply put a festival inside it, creating different areas, characters and experiences to discover throughout the weekend.

Most importantly, we’re deliberately starting small.

We’ve already experienced the journey of growing a festival and learned that bigger isn’t necessarily better. This time, the ambition isn’t about how large Underground Fayre can become. It’s about how good we can make it while retaining the character, independence and sense of community that made us want to create festivals in the first place.

That’s what we’re setting out to create again. Independent. Unconventional. Built with experience. Starting again from the ground up.