Boomtown founder Luke Mitchell on the festival’s 2026 Radical Redesign, world-building, and finding magic in the age of AI
Luke Mitchell is standing in the middle of a scorching Hampshire construction site, and he sounds like a man living a dream he built himself. “Right now it’s beautiful being out here in the sun,” the Boomtown co-founder says. “Building really cool things with my mates, knowing tens of thousands of people will come through here in just a few days and have the time of their lives.”
In a few days, that construction site becomes Boomtown, the sprawling, story-driven parallel city that swallows the Matterley Estate every August. This year’s edition, Chapter Five: Radical Redesign, runs August 12 to 16, and it is pushing the festival’s ambitions further than ever.
Mitchell has been world-building his whole life. First sandcastles (“My parents would come back and be like, Luke, are you still here?”), then carpentry, then speakers, then parties, then the decorations for those parties, until the whole thing snowballed into what is now one of the most spectacular live events on Earth. The fantasy runs deep in his DNA. He cites Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, and Tolkien as touchstones, along with a neurodiverse mind he says he harnesses to visualise entire worlds, plus 5am meditation sessions where he can “vanish into these worlds and wander around them.”
A City Rebuilt From the Ground Up
The 2026 redesign is a genuine structural shift. After the post-Covid crunch compressed Boomtown around its Downtown core, this year’s Radical Redesign pushes the city back out into the surrounding hills, valleys, and woodland, with the mighty Lion’s Den stage returning among a raft of surprises.
Founded in 2009 by Mitchell and Chris Rutherford as a tiny independent party for a few thousand people, Boomtown has grown into a fully coherent metropolis of themed districts with a capacity now approaching 77,000, routinely mentioned in the same breath as Glastonbury.
What separates it is the density of detail. Mitchell describes a layered creative hierarchy, a story team that inspires the district team, which feeds the street-venue team, which feeds ground-level theatrical teams, all the way down to a clue hidden inside a single window installation. “To the point that I personally don’t have a clue,” he laughs. “That’s what I love about it.”
Attendees, he says, fall into three types: skimmers, dippers, and divers, with some spending an entire weekend bartering with actors to unlock secret spaces. His advice to newcomers is simple. “If you see a door while you’re on your way to a big artist, just go through that door and check it out.” Those moments, he insists, often outshine the headliners.
Music, Magic, and the Age of AI
For all the theatre, music remains the engine, and Mitchell’s own tastes run to reggae, punk, ska, and techno. He hands programming duties to James Cousins now, whom he praises as an artist in his own right, but he lights up over this year’s bookings. Chief among them is Scooter, a booking twelve years in the making.
My kids have wanted me to book Scooter for 12 years,” he says. He is also excited for Ren, Kneecap, and techno heavyweights like 999999999 and Brutalismus 3000, though he urges punters toward the hidden street venues “where new music comes through straight from the underground”
The festival has always run parallel to the real world, and this year’s story theme, essentially “can anarchists govern?”, holds a mirror to Boomtown’s own evolution. Mitchell is candid about the pivotal moment during Covid when they sold a portion of the festival to Live Nation. “We wouldn’t change it for the world, because we wouldn’t be here without them,” he says, insisting the company lets them do whatever they want. Now, he says, this is the most “mature” Boomtown yet, richer in the in-between spaces where strangers meet.
Asked finally whether he believes in magic, Mitchell doesn’t flinch.
I certainly believe there’s more than the concrete physical being,” he says. “With AI taking so much, I think we’ll need to find something far deeper than what we’ve ever touched before.” For a man who conjures a city from a field every summer, it is not a stretch at all. “And I believe there’s some magic there”
