Congratulations to the Bestival team, who are probably feeling pretty pleased today, as last night they picked up a couple of awards at the UK Festival Awards ceremony.
As well as walking off with best ‘Medium Sized Festival’ for Bestival 09, their sister festival in Lulworth in Dorset, Camp Bestival, bagged ‘Best Family Festival’.
Florence and The Machine who appeared at Bestival and Camp Bestival picked up ‘Best Breakthrough Act’.
The other side of the fun
Personally, we had a couple of pretty dire experiences at Bestival this year – being subject to theft and vandalism (as did much of the site) on two consecutive nights. Talking to people around the site, we weren’t alone in having stuff from our tent pinched.
Despite this happening, we made the choice to not allow these unfortunate incidents to affect our time at this year’s fast-expanding festival, which in 2009 year had grown to around 44,000 capacity.
After years of being massive fans (and one of the most supportive publications) of the Bestival scene, this year’s experiences have certainly coloured our view, forcing us to question whether we’d ever camp there again.
The rest of the awards
Our friends over at Virtual Festivals have full details of who the other awards went to.