Wilder Fields festival cancels 2027 as costs rise 34% in two years

Wilder Fields, the 18,000-capacity music festival held on a farm near Ledbury in Herefordshire for the past 14 years, will not take place in 2027, its organisers announced on Monday, becoming the 11th mid-sized festival in Britain to cancel or close this year.

The festival, which has built a reputation for booking folk, electronic and world music acts before they become arena headliners, sold 16,400 tickets this year, down from a 2023 peak of 18,000, but its directors said the loss was not primarily about demand. In a statement they said production costs had risen 34% since 2024, that their public liability insurance premium had nearly trebled, and that a new policing charge levied by the local force for the first time this year added £140,000 to a budget of £3.9m.

“We made £82,000 last year and we lost £310,000 this year, on almost the same ticket sales,” said Harriet Lusk, who co-founded the festival with her brother in 2012. “Every supplier we have is passing on their own costs, which we understand, but there is no one left for us to pass them on to. Our ticket is £215. The people who buy it are teachers and nurses. We cannot charge £280 and look them in the eye.”

Lusk said the festival had also been hurt by what she called a “broken” ticket market in which an increasing share of customers waited until the final fortnight to buy, leaving organisers to commit to artists and infrastructure in January without knowing whether they would sell. This year 41% of tickets were sold in the final three weeks, against 18% in 2019.

The Association of Independent Festivals, which represents around 150 events, said 11 festivals had been cancelled or permanently closed in 2026, following 78 across 2023 and 2024. Its chief executive said the losses were “no longer a story about a bad summer, but about a business model that cannot carry the cost of being a public event in Britain”. The association has called for a reduction in VAT on festival tickets from 20% to 5%, in line with several European countries.

West Mercia police said its new charging policy reflected “the actual cost to the public purse of policing a private commercial event” and had been introduced after consultation. The council’s cabinet member for the economy said the festival was worth an estimated £6m a year to the county and that the authority would “look at any way we can help it return”.

Lusk said the family had not sold the land and the festival was “paused, not dead”. Ticket holders for 2027, of whom there were 2,100 through an early-bird scheme, will be refunded in full by the end of the month.