Bristol's Festival Scene

Bristol festivals draw huge crowds year on year - from commercially run events like Tokyo World Festival in Eastville park to free (and community minded) events like Trinity Garden Party and St. Paul's carnival. There are a string of multi-venue festivals (in the style of Sonar in Barcelona) around the Stokes Croft area including Simple Things and Rave on Avon. Simple Things has expanded somewhat in the last few years and taken over the city's flagship venue, Colston Hall.

As well as music festivals, Bristol's deep historical connection to street art is celebrated in day events like Upfest. Centred around the recently created (and unofficial) street art district - North Street - you can spend the day watching apartment blocks getting a new lick of paint from head to toe. Truly a festival not to be missed!

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Our recent festival recommendations

Trinity invite you into the beating industrial heart of Jacob Wells Baths in a tantalising taste of its full arts hub resurrection. Marvel at the Victorian splendour of this iconic and underused space, utterly transformed by immersive AV visionaries Squidsoup into a vast, responsive environment of shifting lights and soothing soundscapes. An immersive light and sound experience in a repurposed Victorian swimming baths

Sell out warning! A bite-sized blast of women’s micro-fiction to warm you up for this year’s Flash Fiction Festival. East Bristol Books brings together a selection of award-winning, razor-sharp flash storytellers from across the globe – Bristol’s own Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, WA’s Gillian O’Shaughnessy and the Bay Area’s Patricia Q. Bidar. Feminist flash fiction by authors from the UK & Australia

History ends with a whimper: live-streamed, commodified, and entirely defanged. Bristol Transformed dive deep into the ruins with a group reading of Anton Jäger’s essay collection Hyperpolitics – exploring how contemporary resistance movements explode in ultravisible spectacle, only to stagnate in the void of dismantled organising infrastructure. Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences

The concert film to end all concert films: before there was Woodstock, there was 68’s Monterey Pop, immortalised in this euphoric countercultural snapshot. D. A. Pennebaker captured some of the best live performances in history, not to mention Mama Cass’ rapturous gawping while Janis Joplin howls the sky down, the multiple counts of guitar destruction / fornication / arson, the priceless cutaways to a sea of blissed-out hippies… One of the greatest concert documentaries ever made captures the spirit of the 'Summer Of Love' and immortalises a new era of rock and roll.