Brighton’s Beachdown Festival will Leave No Trace

A natural site for the first Beachdown Festival

Brighton’s inaugural Beachdown Festival is preparing to transform the South Downs into an area of festival revelry, stretching across the August Bank Holiday (22-25 Aug). As thousands prepare to flock to the site, festival organisers have teamed up with non-profit organisation, Leave No Trace, to ensure that once the festival is over, it does just that.

As part of the festival’s aim to be carbon neutral, organisers have locally sourced much of the food, transport – and artists, to keep its impact low.

Brighton’s Big Lemon Bus Company will get you there, running a fleet of shuttle buses on used cooking oil, from pick up points around the city. Local pubs and restaurants will keep you going, using organic ingredients to create cocktails, and sustain you with original festival fare, such as tapas, and you can even sit down to a traditional Sunday pub roast, to beat that two-day hangover and carry on into the third night of partying.

Drinks will of course be flowing, and Brighton’s Life Pure Water, will be providing the bottled water. Through its independent charity, drop4drop, it will ensure that at least the same amount of litres consumed at the festival – whether it be water, beers, cider, cocktails or chai – will be delivered to communities in Uganda and Malawi in clean drinking water, through sustainable water projects. It’s expected that the festival will raise enough funds to supply at least 100,000 litres through the projects.

Award-winning local artist James Caldicott and his team will be collecting recycled bottles throughout the festival to create the ‘Life Wave’. The recycled, solar powered structure will be visible from the entire festival and will serve as both a meeting point and a recycling drop-off.

Artists and DJ’s confirmed for this year’s event include: Jose Gonzalez, Fun Loving Criminals, De La Soul, Roisin Murphy, The Magic Numbers, Maccabees, Mr Scruff, Bonobo, Los Albertos.

A full weekend pass is £85, which includes camping for a fairly snug capacity of 10,000.