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V Festival replacement will not take place in Staffordshire this summer

By | Published on Wednesday 28 February 2018

Rize Festival

Festival Republic’s V Festival replacement Rize will not take place in Staffordshire this year, it has been confirmed. The new event will only be held at Chelmsford’s Hylands Park.

Announced earlier this week, Rize will take place on 17-18 Aug in Essex, headlined by Liam Gallagher and The Stereophonics. The event is being launched following Virgin’s decision last October to pull its sponsorship of the V Festival after 22 years.

V Festival always took place on two sites, launching at Victoria Park in Warrington and Hylands Park in Chelmsford in 1996. The more northerly edition eventually settled at the not particularly northerly Weston Park in Staffordshire.

South Staffordshire Council had said that it was expecting the V Festival replacement to go ahead at Weston Park. However, it has now been confirmed that this is not the case.

Chief Executive of the Weston Park Foundation, Colin Sweeney, told local paper the Express & Star: “We have been enormously proud to have been home to the former V Festival over the last nineteen years. The significant contribution that hosting the event has made to the charitable objectives of the Weston Park Foundation and the wider regional economy cannot be underestimated”.

He added that the foundation was “very excited” about working with the Festival Republic-allied company that actually owned the V Festival, Roseclaim, on “a future project here on the estate in 2019”.

This would suggest that the new event in Staffordshire may not be a second edition of the Rize Festival, but rather something else. Either way, Weston Park Foundation bosses have said that the unexpected lack of a major festival in the park this year will affect their finances. However, other non-music events are being planned in order to somewhat fill the gap.



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