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This year’s Secret Garden Party to be the last
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 2 March 2017
Organisers of the Secret Garden Party have announced that this year’s event will be its last. The final instalment will take place from 20-23 Jul.
Recalling the original event fifteen years ago, as a party for a few hundreds friends, founder Freddie Fellowes says: “Much has changed since our first Garden Party, when there was nothing else like it in the UK: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter had yet to be invented and no one knew what a boutique festival was, let alone glamping. Since then the Garden Party has defined and redefined outdoor events in the UK; we have done so as a collective of truly independent outsiders”.
He goes on: “We have never compromised our principles and we never will. SGP has always been a beacon of what you can do within those terms and, as imitation – being the sincerest form of flattery – proves, it has set the bar for everyone else going forward. But it is exactly because of those principles, and the love of those who have made the Garden Party what it is, that we are committing this senseless act of beauty”.
Fellowes concludes: “What better way to honour the love that has been given to this project and wholly demonstrate this principle than finishing now? This isn’t some principled self-immolation: this is opening it up for the future. So this summer will be the almighty send-off that the Garden Party deserves and whilst that is going to cause some tears to be shed, think of it more as ‘Dylan goes electric’ than our Altamont. Because after all you can’t be avant-garde from within an institution and lest we forget: the frontier always moves”.