We’re festival veterans we are. We’ve taken the kids to festivals for the last three years so when Nozstock invited us to their summer festival in Bromyard, Herefordshire, we jumped at the chance. It’s a boutique festival, attracting 5,000 visitors over the weekend. We rolled up on Friday afternoon, and were impressed with how the stewards had things under control. We were in a queue of 4 cars. The camp site had opened at 9am, which helped things enormously.
The impression of good organisation continued as we lugged our gear into the camping area. We passed through the quiet area to the family camping. The family camping was policed by a gaggle of stewards who were only letting people with kids through. Speaking as someone who camped at the Wilderness festival next to 20 university students in the FAMILY CAMPING AREA, I think this should be applauded.
So we pitched our tent, had a cup of tea, and then went exploring. The festival site is pretty compact but not crowded. There’s a craft area, that had willow weaving classes and loads of other stuff but it was the willow weaving that stuck in my mind because of this:
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| wicker dalek |
This sort of summed up the ethos of the festival well. It was full of alternative takes on mainstream things. Danger did manage to fall asleep during the Computers but that wasn’t really indicative of the festival at all. The boy took me to the rave tent one night and it was a proper flashback to the 90’s- lots of skinny lads with whistles. Equally we saw some stonking folk and plenty of guitar bands.
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| 32 degrees and he’s wearing a woolly hat |
The festival is well priced. Adult early bird tickets are £70 and kids go free. Normal prices are only £95 too. The good prices don’t stop there either, the food and drink was blessedly affordable once we got inside too. £3 for a Herefordshire beef burger, and the same for a good sized bacon bap or sausage inna bun. The cider was particularly nice on a hot day too. Hic.
I think out of all the festivals we’ve taken the kids to in the last year, Nozstock is the one I’m most inclined to return to. It might lack quite the focused kids area that Wilderness has but there was plenty for them to do and see around the kids area. Fifi even made a kite which she spent about an hour flying. Much to our joy. The circus shows for kids were good and if some of the theatre was a bit out there and auteur, it didn’t stop the kids being fascinated by it all.