In 2017 I went to my 6th Secret Garden Party, which was supposedly The Last Ever Secret Garden Party. At that time, Head Gardener Freddie Fellowes (founder of the festival) decided he wanted to close it down, supposedly forever.
This year, we all received the exciting news that SGP was back and ready to blow our minds once again. Of course, us legacy Gardeners were SO EXCITED! We told all our friends that had never been before, that this was the big one, the most incredible, the most immersive, and that they had to buy tickets. They’d all heard people talk about SGP and were excited they were actually going to be able to attend this festival that had quite frankly written itself into the legendary festival history books.
The tickets were released at 6am on a Sunday morning, and you could only buy two per registration link. So the logistics of organising a group of 45 of us to buy tickets were incredible. But we did it, and we were all bursting with anticipation and eagerness to get back in that garden, most of the group for the first time.
In the run up to The Secret Garden Party, we were told they were not going to release the line up until we were at the festival itself. Interesting tactic, but it added to the excitement. They kept lots of things secret until the last minute. However in the two weeks leading up to the festival, they released confusing comms on their Facebook page and website. Backtracking on different rules (you can/can’t bring plastic bottles, you can/can’t bring stoves, etc) Needless to say, paying ticket holders were getting frustrated with the confusing and contradicting comms from the festival.
Official “The Secret Garden Party” accounts being rude to customers on social media
Then two days before the festival, a map was leaked on Reddit. This had been posted by someone who claimed they had been sent the map in an email from SGP, because they were an Accessibility customer so they got to see a map to get their bearings. Alarmingly, on the map, there were very few water points showing, only one in the whole of the two general campsites, and that comparatively boutique camping had 4 water points. Boutique camping itself looked massive, and took up the whole north shore of the lake. Us legacy Gardeners immediately spotted that this would mean a whole section of the festival was missing, and that we wouldn’t be able to walk the whole way around the lake as in previous Garden Parties. It was the first indication that this festival was all about money grabbing, and less about everything that had previously made it magical.
The map was shared to Facebook, where of course lots of people were understandably concerned. When these concerns were voiced, the festival replied from their official account in really snarky ways. I was told “We’ve been doing festivals for 20 years, we know what we’re doing. There are a fuck tonne of water points.” Yes, they officially said “fuck tonne”. They were sassy and rude to anyone who dared to ask questions. And they claimed that the map was ‘unofficial’ and that we shouldn’t believe it to be true, we should trust them and wait to see the garden for ourselves.
When we actually made it to the festival
So! In mid July 2022, our group of 45 made it to the secret site near Huntingdon. We queued from 10am in the carparks, and the campsites opened at midday. We got in, and grabbed a camp space a little further back in North Camping, as a number of our crew were arriving by train and would still be a couple of hours, we wanted to make sure there was still space for them.
We donned our glad rags and headed in to the festival.
It’s here I’d like to take a pause and say first and foremost – we all had a brilliant time at Secret Garden Party. We made some amazing memories, tried new things, stayed up til dawn, and laughed so hard we cried. But the reason we had a good time, is because we are an incredible group of people, smaller friendship groups coming together to form one incredibly fun, supportive, wonderful campsite gang. I will later in this blog talk about some of our best bits and what they were.
However, as you might have gathered from the title of this blog and the build up so far, I have to first talk about the absolutely awful organisation at this festival. Genuinely the worst I have ever had at any festival. It was just shocking how much they got the bare minimum basics wrong. So without further ado:
What did The Secret Garden Party get wrong in 2022?
🚰 The toilets were the plastic cabin type, not compost, and were almost never emptied. They were an actual welfare issue. I’ve never seen anything like it. Piled high in mountains when you open the doors all day every day from Thursday evening. Because of this people were going to the toilet any where they could… the woods, behind vans… it was awful. SGP’s response was that ‘they didn’t get the toilet service they wanted’ – I feel this is because they left it too late/spent too little money on actually hiring them and the accompanying cleaning/emptying services.
🧼 There was no soap or hand sanitiser anywhere on site at all. I understand not having soap but there was never hand sanitiser in the cubicles or outside them. In a post- (/mid-!) COVID world this felt crazy to me.
🪧 The water points were not signposted and there were so few of them. Stewards and security had no idea where the nearest water point was on the multiple times I asked during the weekend. It was a dusty place all weekend and it was impossible to feel clean.
💸 It was advertised as a “Cashless festival” so most attendees brought little if any cash with them – but they didn’t provide decent skylink Wi-Fi for their traders, meaning huge queues at food places while they tried to take payments with patchy 3G. Lots of us attendees then resorted to taking cash out at their machines (costing £2.95 each time) but they ran out of cash !! – You couldn’t make it up.
🤑Price hikes due to cash only – Traders were not prepared for cash payments, they did not bring coins for a float for change, and the festival did not provide. SGP told the traders when they had to switch to cash (because the wifi they provided for traders wasn’t up to scratch), to “round up” their prices to the nearest £5/10 to avoid the issue of having to give change they didn’t have. Price gouging because of their lack of infrastructure.
🗑The litter pickers did their best but there were so few of them, and the bins were almost never emptied. Both arena and campsite consistently looked like a trash tip.
🎪Boutique camping, though we didn’t camp there, we spoke to many people, who said it had been oversold, and they had to rush off and buy 150 more tents and squeeze them in. They still did not have enough water and their toilets were also full and filthy. Not what you pay for in boutique!
♻️ They claimed to be a sustainable festival and pushed their eco credentials online everywhere before the festival, but were serving drinks in single use plastic cups at many bars, and didn’t give out bin bags on entry. We even went to info points to ask for waste and recycling bags, to be met with blank stares. Eventually after visiting 3 different locations we found some. However the Eco Bond return points (to receive your £20 refund back that you paid up front with the ticket) were closed on Sunday, when many people left.
🎵The ‘secret’ line up left much to be desired. Headliners were Kae Tempest, London Grammar, and Metronomy. All good artists, but not headliner-deserving. The rest of the line up was mediocre at best. A few gems in there but in general, nothing exciting or special that the build up to the secret deserved. I totally understand that SGP is all about launching new artists, but there was no consistency on the stages, so it wasn’t like each stage/venue had a genre/vibe that even if you didn’t know who was on stage, you knew it was your kind of thing. And releasing the line up as people were arriving on site meant we didn’t even have time to research some of the lesser known names before the festival.
🪄 the “Magic of SGP” wasn’t nearly as prevalent as before. So many well-loved favourites bits were missing. As mentioned, they had replaced the whole north shore of the lake with boutique camping so you couldn’t walk all the way around the lake – this was the area they used to host all the workshops, and there would be walkabouts and fun things to do. It really did feel like a huge part of the festival was missing.
🏰Missing key venues – some of the SGP favourites were missing, including the Collo-silly-um, the Temple of Boom, and the Dance Off.
All in all, there were so many cut backs to the things that made SGP what it used to be. They didn’t spend enough money on basic infrastructure which meant we were all surviving in filth (toilets, water, bins). Boutique had trebled in size, was still oversold, and took up half the old arena space.
Everything pointed to the clear fact that SGP had been revived not for the love of partying and ways of old, but purely as a huge cash grab for the organisers who did just above the bare minimum for their attendees enjoyment and welfare.
What bits did we enjoy?
The two main things I want to shout out here were
- The Saturday lunchtime we spent in the Bathing Under The Sky hot tubs – which was an old tradition of ours – but we went as a group of 33 this time and it was just as amazing. Such a gorgeous way to start the day, two whole hours in a hot tub with pals and Prosecco. The staff are lovely, we had 4 tubs between us, and we also made use of the cool pool and sauna. We could then have a lovely shower afterwards and feel fresh again.
- The as-epic-as-previously Saturday Spectacular. This is when they burn the stage on the lake, and set off the most incredible fireworks I have seen. The show was just phenomenal, lasted around 20 minutes, set to music, and was beautiful. There was a slight sour note in our minds though that money that could have been used for toilets was literally being blown up/set on fire in front of our faces.
Music wise, we had some great times dancing to Brass Funkeys, Mr Bruce, Eats Everything, Mø, David Rodigan… etc. It was a very hot weekend so we had to take regular shade breaks in Chai Wallahs in the woods, but this was also a wonderful refuge, with yummy iced coffee and cocktails, and artist highlights from there included JFB, Lazy Habits, KOG, and Broken Brass.
I’ll finish off with a few more photos from our weekend.
Final thoughts: I used to absolutely love the old SGP. It was incredible. But this was not the same. Unless the festival outright apologise for the basics they got wrong, and put in place a plan for the next one, then I won’t be returning. Most of my friends feel the same.
If it can return to some of it’s former glory, hell even if they can just get the toilets, water, soap, and litter/eco right, I would consider once again venturing into the Secret Garden Party. At the moment, for 2023, I’ll be visiting other festivals.
Spot on with all the wrongs and the rights. This year it was more of a “make your own fun” which is fine but wasn’t as magical as before. I’m still waiting for a proper reply of my email I sent to them on the Sunday we left about the toilets, bins, eco bond and general lack of organisation. Think they will lose a lot of older gardeners for the years to come.
Thanks Claire, I completely agree. Hopefully they will take on all the criticism and sort it out for 2023 but who knows.
I think they’ve already lost the oldest gardeners..
Thanks for your review. I feel the same on all the fronts. Going to a 4 day festival is a large investment in time and money. There are many options these days!
Exactly N S! With so much choice out there now, you really do have to get the basics right to keep your customers, and then have a distinct USP or distinct Line Up that sets you apart from the rest. SGP this year got not of this right.
Thank you for this and articulating so much of what upset up. I also hate the fact that on social, following the event, I felt like our complaints were dismissed as ‘people who didn’t have the right vibe’. Nothing can be further from the truth! This was our first SGP but I’ve been to multiple festivals over many decades. I know how to party! I felt so bad for my boyfriend, because this was his first ever festival. He was valiant in his attempts to enjoy (and he and I can have fun pretty much anywhere) but he quietly said to me ‘there doesn’t seem to be much to do?’ Which I had to agree with. The fact that I hadn’t heard of the bands didn’t matter but it massively mattered that we had no idea if they were a band / a dj and what genre they were! I’m sure we missed so much live music which I’m gutted about just because it was impossible to know where to be. We wandered about aimlessly but just never really gelled with what we were hearing. We too paid for Bathing under the Sky and Lost Horizons so we got hot showers albeit with huge queues, but we basically spent almost £800 including fuel and food for a massively disappointing experience.
Heya. Didn’t the festival apologise for the loos first thing on Monday straight after the festival? Explaining the company they paid to do them messed up and that further action was being taken, or the like? I don’t think any festival empties their own loos. Hahaha. On the map thing, they answered everybody’s comments, and that example in your review was only one of the responses so that’s pretty selective. Everybody was raging that there was only like one water point for the festival on the map and they said about 100 times that map was bogus, unofficial, and there was loads but y’all didn’t want to listen. Honestly there’s about 100 replies saying the map was bulls**t and there was loads and loads of water points, but the comments kept coming. I dont blame them giving an HONEST reply. They’re real people, they talk like real people. they’re not McDonalds. SGP isn’t run by a massive promoter who outsource customer service, that was probably the main dude himself. Some of your points are very valid here, but seems like you were in a bad mood before you even turned up to be honest if you’re literally having a go at internet comments. We had an amazing time, and yeah – we found a f*ck tonne of water points. LOL. There was one literally next to the dancefloors, like next to the balloon stage there was a water point where people were dancing. That was genius. I’ve never seen a festival do that before, only ever in the treelines. But, hey, maybe not good enough. I’ve been loads of times, and yeah this was felt different but it’s been 5 years I’m probably different as well. I loved being in the woods, swimming in the lake with my mates, watching Self Esteem, finding the new little stages like Vibrary or whatever it was called 🙂 Loads going on. The bus thing with Eddy Temple Morris was sick. Dancing on them podiums. Wasn’t what it was 5 years ago but it didnt claim to be. Really cool seeing He-She-They and Crossbreed, and Femme Freche and all the massive gay nights working with the festival. But yeah, maybe that;s not for you. Not everything is for you. LOOOL. We had a blast, not because of who we were with but because it’s a weird one of a kind festival that did nearly everything right. The loos were bad though. but i guess they’ve already said they’ll make those better.
Thanks for you comment, glad you had a great time. As I said at the beginning, we had a great time too. As you might tell from this blog, I go to a ‘fuck tonne’ of festivals, between 8 and 10 a year. I’ve done near enough 100 camping festivals at this point, including 6 of the ‘old’ SGPs. All this blog was written for was to say, for a festival of their size and experience, they made a silly amount of mistakes, they messed up the basics. If you are a business your comms should be professional, theirs wasn’t. Yes there were more water points than the map, but still not enough, not signposted at all, and staff did not know where they were.
Yeh but like I said I feel like youve been really selective in picking out one comment when the other 1,000 replies to people have been totally standard. Classic fake-news-ing that one I think making something out of nothing because it fits a story. I also don’t think a swear word is that bad, because I’m not 12 years old. To be honest am surprised they even bothered replying to most people over and over again, especially about that stupid map that was to a car park or something and people got all eggy about it. They said like 100 times it wasn’t a proper map and people in the comments just wouldn’t drop it. Absolute mob scenes from people. Shocking behaviour I think from loads of people about SGP this year all round. Real entitlement showing. Just me though. It definitely wasn’t the biggest or best SGP, but it didn’t say it was gonna be did it? It was about half the capacity, and tickets were about the same price as in 2017. Pints were cheap too. I wasn’t expecting it to be bigger, was just happy it was back, and I still felt the magic when I was there. I think you get out of it what you put in. Loos were bad but so much was excellent in my opinion. If it comes back next year, if they can be bothered, I’ll be there and look forward to any new stuff they bring like they did this time. I won’t be going on about stuff that wasn’t there and sobbing into my nostalgia. Life’s too short.
Found Freddie
Wow! Well done with your reply SGP 😂😂😂
Adam you enjoy your messed up festival of twisted souls. Old Freddy clearly sold his soul ove the past five years, god forbid I don’t want to know what happened to him. Clearly got mixed up with the wrong people. Take my word ,,, NEVER GO TO THAT TOXIC FESTIVAL. SHOULD BE SHIT DOWN FOR EVER !!!!!
sorry but you all look like people who complain about anything. just enjoy it! and try and make the best of things. I m sure after covid it was not easy to come back.
Looks like we keep finding SGP staff commenting on this! My friends have been to more festivals than we can count. We had an amazing time at SGP, but that was on us, we made it amazing. We will not return until they sort out the BASICS that festival goers rely on. So many actual basics they fucked up and have refused to apologise about. Their social media posts since reek of victimhood, gaslighting, and desperation as they clearly haven’t had many registrations.
Excellent write up, spot on! I’m reading in anticipation of returning soon. I hope they get it right this year. Like you say…. The basics! Toilets, water, paying for stuff and hygiene.
There were far too many queues for everything. Showers, coffee, a snack for goodness sake. I was so fortunate I had a car I could get off the site in the day time. I shouldn’t have to leave to get a coffee though!
Line up looks great this year and they’ve extended the pagoda stage.
Looks like the colly-silly-um is still missing! Give the people what they want ffs!
All in all we did have a great time but it wasn’t easy to plan (didn’t release line ups), it wasn’t easy to eat and drink (poor infrastructure) and it wasn’t easy to go to the toilet (if you know you know).
Anyways…. PMA. Let’s have it 2023!!!
Veteran gardener hoping for improvements this year!
The last truly excellent SGP was probably 2011. The majority of the team that made it so (especially 2007-10), switched focus to Wilderness and in 2013, the Head Gardener forced the other three Directors out, taking with them the entirety of Secret Productions and all their expertise. SGP was then in a slow decline until eventually being pulled entirely. Despite that, it still had its moments (honourable mention to 2014) and there was still a lot of good will and mythos from the glory days. So the reboot was a high-risk/high-reward gamble. The fact that, given this, so little care and attention was given to the audience tells you everything you need to know. It should never have happened. As you say, it had written itself into the legendary festival history books. Now that’s all been obliterated. It’s extremely sad. The moral of the story – know when to move on.
Really interesting reading this review! I’m keen to know if you’re going back this year? Supposedly “back to its roots” 👀
I’ll be a first time gardener so here’s hoping! 🤞🏼
So sorry I missed this comment! How was it? I’ve heard really great feedback from friends and people I know who’ve gone to SGP in the last year or two. I think they’ve pulled themselves together after this slightly disastrous year that I reviewed! I’m thinking I’ll check it out next year and write an update 🙂