Myself and George are the directors, brain-children, slaves-to and proud co-owners of Big Family Festival.

Back in 2015 with many years of organising dance music events and coordinating corporate trips George and I, decided that the Midlands needed a family festival. Something that may entice some of the southern folks to travel up a motorway or two themselves. As family festivals were and still are very popular down south, however a little scarce on the ground here in the West Midlands.

Notably we also realised lots of family festivals were actually just child friendly music festivals.

That’s when the idea to turn this model on its head came from, we wanted to aim and focus the entire content of our festival towards the child attendee.

All encompassing child friendly entertainment, content and workshops with the addition of great food, drinks and bands that would suit all ages from 2-102 yrs old.

Offering camping and day tickets as options to entice locals or first time festival-goers whilst having the option to camp and make a weekend of it seemed to be an obvious way forward for us.I came up with the name playing on the term BFF used by many of the younger generation, we searched for the domain and luckily it was available and BIG FAMILY FESTIVAL was born. We found a home for the event at Dunton Hall and then had to liaise with North Warwickshire Council and apply for our licence, we jumped through many hoops and crossed and re-crossed t’s and dotted multiple i’s, and were then granted our temporary event licence.

With just over two weeks to go, our then production manager pulled out and i am unable to say the company or the particular individuals name without swearing so i will not! Needless to say it added a huge amount of stress, but this is where the saying everything happens for a reason rings true. As we then met and were saved by Pacific Sound and Light and have worked with Matt and Co ever since. We have formed a great working relationship with him and also formed an even better friendship.

BFF16 was a weekend of fantastic weather, with the likes of Cook & Line, Michael De Souza joined Rastamouse and Da Easy Crew on the main stage along with some great child friendly tribute acts.

A solar powered marquee and stage played host to some amazing local acoustic acts who were joined by BGT Kieran Lai aka ‘The Tin Man’ he taught street dance workshops and there was also the science shows and Jedi Workshops take part in too.

The Den a huge teepee style tent was our creative hub with a large bespoke colouring wall from the very talented Sabina of Meraki and home to none other than The Gruffalo who popped out to meet his fans during storytime.

There was an outdoor cinema and a giant Ghetto Blaster stage with DJs playing dance music plus lots of fab street food vendors, local business owners and bars. The event was proudly sponsored by Johnsons Volkswagen who created a car forecourt on site and gave away some amazing prizes.

We decided to give campers the option to arrive and pitch up early from 3pm on the Friday, in our naive first year minds, we thought a few may take us up on this offer. So we planned to show a movie had George’s dad take charge of a bbq and opened one of the three bars. By 6pm the camping area was full and nearly all of those who had bought camping tickets had descended on us, we frantically moved fencing, with sweat dripping down our backs and Georges poor dad cooking kebabs quicker than he could say chill and lemon, family frantically working on the bar and entrance, Pat the land owner trying to re fix water piping in the dark, at 9pm Pat suggested we start an overflow campsite in the adjacent field. Which is lucky we did as the final campers arrived the next day and had an abundance of space in said field.

We learnt a lot in this first year, particularly within the first few hours! We had ordered way too much alcohol and not enough bins!! We knew however that what we had created was something very special that did exactly what we had hoped. It brought families together and children simply had none stop fun and with guests travelling to us from as far as Southampton to Spain. We knew we had to continue.