Festival Republic is the UK’s leading Festival and Event promoter. We are extremely proud to be the team behind the greatest rock shows on the planet; the Reading & Leeds Festival, the critically applauded Latitude, The Big Chill, Ireland's Electric Picnic, Hove in Norway, Berlin Festival and our new venture in Florida, Orlando Calling.
Melvin Benn, Managing Director of Festival Republic, also has operational responsibility for and is the licence holder of Glastonbury Festival.
In August 2007 we restructured our business, selling the majority of our venue portfolio and changed our name from Mean Fiddler to Festival Republic. In December 2008, the much celebrated jewels in the London venue crown, The Astoria and The Astoria 2 were issued a compulsory purchase order as part of the Crossrail project and have now been closed down.
We have added to our festival portfolio in the last few years to include Hove Festival in Arendal, Norway which prides itself in being the first carbon neutral festival in Scandinavia, Electric Picnic in Stradbally, Republic of Ireland in conjunction with Pod Concerts and The Big Chill Festival in Herefordshire and more recently our first US festival in Orlando, Florida, and Berlin Festival in Germany join our very exciting festival bill.
A brief history
Formed in 1982, we largely created the modern music festival market in the UK. Under the name of Mean Fiddler, we took shared ownership of the Reading Festival in 1989 and took sole ownership in 1993. Since then we have built Reading into the most famous Rock show on the planet and in 1999 created a parallel event in Leeds. In 2002 we took over operational management of Glastonbury Festival and in 2007 increased the capacity of the festival to 177,500. In 2006 we launched Latitude, our fledgling music and arts festival, held in the beautiful Sunrise Coast, Suffolk Latitude is doing phenomenally well; in its second year it almost doubled capacity to 20,000 visitors and has since increased to 35,000. We also produced the annual London festivals for the GLA; Rise and St Patrick’s Day until 2008. In 2009, we added Electric Picnic in Ireland and Hove Festival in Norway to our festival portfolio. In September 2009, we took majority ownership of The Big Chill Festival which takes place in the grounds of Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire. In 2010 we founded Orlando Calling, our first festival in Florida. Both The Big Chill and Orlando Calling have been cancelled for 2012 but we hope to bring them back for 2013.
Festival Republic Presents
More than half a million fans attend the festivals we own and co-produce each year. They do so because they share our passion for festivals. Festivals are in our blood and we are proud to provide the heartbeat of the summer.
