Boomtown festival builds a women-led research hub for its 2026 redesign

Boomtown's 2026 edition, running August 12 to 16 at the Matterley Estate near Winchester, has built a new women-led research hub called the Observatory into its "Chapter Five: Radical Redesign," alongside expanded green-energy and welfare initiatives. Dr. Martha Newson and Shula Rael developed the project to study how living in a temporary festival city for a weekend changes people's behavior, wellbeing and life once they go home.

"We've got 77,000 people in this collective space, and we've got so much warm data that comes at us every single year, but it leaves when the gates close," Rael, Boomtown's brand director, said. The Observatory will hold talks, workshops and panels across the weekend on subjects ranging from "Music is Medicine" to "How to Create Reality in Your Dreams."

Newson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Greenwich whose research also covers Premier League football fandom, said festivals offer a similar canvas for studying belonging and ritual. "It's about meaning, and overcoming the challenges of the weather, or friendship groups; it's doing it together that gives us meaning and purpose," she said. Workshops include a study on fear responses using ethically sourced taxidermy tarantulas after organizers vetoed live animals, a "Conspiracy Kitchen" co-hosted by four University of Kent professors, and sessions on psychedelics and female hormones and on making festivals more accessible for neurodivergent attendees.

Rael is also running a parallel initiative alongside the Observatory: digitally tracked "Changemaker" cards, including a Healer, Pioneer and Protector card, handed out across the site to people observed doing good deeds, which recipients can then pass along to others. The cards came out of a research challenge run through the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in AI for Digital Media Inclusion, a collaboration between Boomtown, the University of Surrey and Royal Holloway, University of London.

Newson called the Observatory the first project of its kind to be women-led. "We celebrate the fact that STEM has come on so far that we are leading on this," she said. The festival's electronic Hydro stage, which expands from 8,000 to 20,000 capacity this year, runs on hydrogen power, and headliners include Kneecap, Madness and Scissor Sisters, with Skrillex, Four Tet, Faithless and Floating Points also on the bill. Boomtown was granted permission earlier this year to remain at the Matterley Estate until 2030, despite objections from some local residents and environmental campaigners.

The weekend also brought an unplanned moment of collective experience: a government wildfire alert sounded on every compatible phone across England and Wales at 7pm on Friday, August 14, setting off a chorus of sirens across the Boomtown campsite that NME said prompted laughter and shouting from festivalgoers. "British humour is unmatched," read one caption on a video that spread on social media. It was the most expansive use of the UK's emergency alert system for an active incident to date, warning of "a serious risk of wildfires nationally" during a record year for wildfires in England and Wales, with more than 1,000 incidents reported and 11 major incidents declared in the 24 hours before the alert, including homes destroyed in Stourbridge in the West Midlands.