House music in a dancing-pen: the bizarre festival experience of post-Covid Britain
We pitched up too early to The Estate Festival, a start-up boutique glamping rave 10 minutes outside Bedford. From the looks of things, maybe two weeks too early. The proposition? Socially distanced house music in the grounds of a Grade I country house estate, along with high-end camping of the kind where all you needed pack was a towel and a toothbrush.
It undeniably delivered on all these levels. Indeed, our tentative arrival on a sodden, sunless Friday afternoon, with literally zero queue, was on all fronts the socially distanced event of the year.
The Estate Festival is the brainchild of a trio of young entrepreneurs, who have seized upon a current gap in the market – for a music festival, of any kind, in the (optimistically) dying days of a worryingly extendable-looking lockdown. It’s the first thing like this to get up and running in the UK, where many larger events have run scared at least until September.
The small scale of the operation, at least in this first phase, makes it manageable and legal. It’s tiny. There’s just the one stage with distanced seating in a lovely field, and three nightly DJ sets from Thursdays through Saturdays till the end of June. Pete Tong will be headlining on the last night of the season, after a 1990s live pop throwback event a week earlier, courtesy of Atomic Kitten and however many of S Club there still even are.
All this awaits, as nights get longer and temperatures soar. Expectations are already chipper, thanks to an Instagram marketing blitz that’s paying sold-out dividends. Everyone involved gives the very definite impression of knowing what they’re doing.
More so than we did from minute one. Zipping up from London needlessly early to Bedford station, we killed three hours with a pitcher of Bloody Marys, looking in vain for the best bits of Bedford, before we dared get a taxi. Our departure the next morning was scheduled perfectly to coincide with the very moment the sun came out.
Even if no one was there till dark on the Friday, it being a drizzly anomaly of a day when you’d hardly be in a hurry to show up anywhere, everything was spic and span, and primed for the fun to start. If the weather gods had in any way smiled, the pop-up swimming pool with attached bar in the glamping area would have been quite inviting for an afternoon dip. The river running through the Turvey House grounds, a tributary of the Great Ouse, taunted us with how delightful it would surely look in a mere 24 hours, with families splashing about in it, rather than us just standing bedraggled on the bank.
Our tent was nothing if not an impeccable refuge, with an array of amenities any Glastonbury veteran could only dream of – simple, comfortable double bed, silky sheets, space to stand, free toiletries. The pre-party, with one of the night’s DJs, Deniz Menendez, doing a warm-up set in a big tent they’ve called The Boathouse, was more of a pre-pre-pre-pre party, given the circumstances. I counted seven punters including us, and then A’Whora from RuPaul’s Drag Race UK trotted in with guest. Menendez was flying off to Ibiza the next day, like the party animal he clearly was. His incoming entourage helpfully tripled numbers.
Being shown to your seats is not unlike choosing where to start in Settlers of Catan. Resources arrive using an app – stonebaked pizza, truffled mac cheese, as many beers as possible, please. A “VIP hexagon” package for two – not a full hexagonal table, but more like two chunks of a Trivial Pursuit cheese, under an umbrella, close to the stage – will set you back ￡260, with free champagne or vodka thrown in. Coming as a six, or several sixes, is probably the way to do it.
At sunset, an already shambolic stag do showed up behind us with the right idea, and everything livened up in a scattered sort of way. You’re allowed to stand up and dance in your prescribed area, but security lurked to stop any merging near the front. Maybe this will get more relaxed in time. The DJs manfully dealt with the tough ask of getting the party started without overdoing it.
A’Whora (George out of drag, secretly a sweetheart) is coming back with Tayce and Bimini for a pageant spectacular in two weeks, which is earmarked as an LGBTQ+ weekender. For him and us, this was a recce with a bleak false start. But by the Boathouse afterparty, enough insta-happy locals had been bussed in and enough vodka brought in buckets to banish any seditious whisperings of Fyre Festival: Bedford.
It became a fun mess with obvious promise. They’ve decked that particular big top out in a stylish nautical way with ropes and hanging baskets. I got thrown out for using these as a dance prop, but only for thirty seconds. Apologies to the staff, whose hospitality was flawless. I blame the Eurythmics.
