Free festivals are a combination of music, arts and cultural activities for which, often, no admission is charged, but involvement is preferred. They are identifiable by being multi-day events connected by a camping community without centralised control. The Free festival movement being the associated pioneering movement starting in UK during the 1970s. The first truly free festival was the 1972 to 1974 Windsor Free Festival, squatted on Royal land. The 'organisation' was mostly Ubi Dwyer distributing thousands of leaflets and asking people, and bands, to bring their own equipment and create their own environment - Bring what you expect to find.[1]
"Free festivals are practical demonstrations of what society could be like all the time: miniature utopia's of joy and communal awareness rising for a few days from a grey morass of mundane, inhibited, paranoid and repressive everyday existence…The most lively [young people] escape geographically and physically to the ‘Never Never Land’ of a free festival where they become citizens, indeed rulers, in a new reality." Anonymous leaflet from 1980, quoted in George McKay’s Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties.[2]
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