New event LIDO Festival announced for London in 2025: “Celebrating music, culture and connection”

A new festival called LIDO will be arriving in London next year.

• READ MORE: Why have so many UK festivals been cancelled or postponed?

The festival, which will take place in Victoria Park in June 2025, is named after the park’s Lido Field. LIDO promises two weekends featuring “carefully curated music line-ups alongside community-driven activities during the week, all with a strong emphasis on sustainability.”

Run by AEG Presents, who also organise All Points East, BST Hyde Park and Forwards, LIDO further adds that it will “showcase the most current headliners and work closely with them to curate the line-ups, reflecting their own musical passions, with a strong focus on emerging artists.” A full-lineup is soon to be announced.

LIDO will follow the huge success of All Points East, which also takes place in Victoria Park and runs for two weekends.

Speaking about the upcoming festival, CEO of European Festivals at AEG Presents Jim King said: “LIDO Festival represents the next stage of AEG’s festival journey. Taking place at Victoria Park, one of our favourite locations in the heart of London’s creative districts, Lido Festival allows us to push our ambitions further in working with young people within the industry and those who aspire to be. Most excitingly, this centres about a new generation of artists, whether they’re headlining or performing for the first time.

“The vision of supporting the artists’ journey further develops as we program each day directly with the headliner. This delivers a show that fans know has the artists’ musical soul embedded throughout. This is one of the most exciting aspects of Lido Festival, knowing that everyone on the bill means something to the headliner closing out the show.”

In addition, LIDO will partner with East London Arts and Music (ELAM), to offer students performance opportunities, along with backstage opportunities in festival production, technology, and the wider music industry.

They will also implement and develop sustainable policies throughout the festival, including employing local food vendors, managing waste disposal and evaluating how the festival will be powered. 

The news of LIDO festival’s opening edition follows a wave of festival cancellations and postponements, which saw over 40 festivals cancelled this summer.Barn On The Farm shared that it would be taking a fallow year due to financial constraints, with co-manager Oscar Matthews telling NME: “From our perspective, the festival in 2023 itself was brilliant – it was a really successful year – but we were hit majorly on a financial level by a mix of increased production costs and a very big reduction in ticket sales,” he said. “That hit us from both angles and meant we suffered quite substantial losses, despite the actual running of the festival going so well.”

Matthews also argued that with the continued loss of grassroots music venues throughout the UK, smaller music festivals are needed to produce the headliners of major events in the future.

“It’s inevitable and it’s already started, but when you start to lose smaller festivals, events, gig spaces and venues, the opportunities disappear for new and emerging talent to get on stage and get their music heard,” he added. “They’ll suffer and that will inevitably have a knock-on effect further up the chain.”  

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