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Come festival season, Victoria Park is transformed from being one of east London’s finest green spaces into a festival arena that, over several weekends, attracts tens of thousands of music lovers. Both Field Day and All Points East – two of the capital’s biggest music festivals – are currently held in the park.
And soon Vicky Park’s music festivals will get a whole load bigger. Major events in the park will soon have a capacity of 20,000 (up from 5,000), while ‘medium sized’ events will increase in capacity from 500 to 5,000.
On top of that, the number of days per year that the park can be used for major events will also increase from 10 to 12. In other words, events at Victoria Park won’t just be getting bigger – there will be more of them.
While this might be great news for festival-goers, some locals are unhappy with the plans. According to Roman Road, community group Victoria Park Friends said that they ‘believe that increasing the size and frequency of events would be detrimental to both park users and residents.
‘Major events are noisy which causes significant distress to both park users and residents, particularly young children and older people,’ the group said..
Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman argued that the council has ‘no choice’ but to increase the capacity of festivals in Victoria Park as a way of generating income.
He said: ‘We have to squeeze as much as we can from our assets, from our contracts, from our parks and everything that we do in this borough because we have to protect our residents.’
You can find out more about the headliners announced (so far) for All Points East 2024 here.
Did you see that four London parks are about to get massive makeovers?
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