Dates Announced for Next Year's Lovebox Festival

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Organisers say 'some big changes are to be revealed'

The Lovebox festival in Gunnersbury Park is to be held between 12 – 14 June next year.

The organisers have announced the new dates and said local residents are to be given more details by mail later this month. On their web site they say ‘some big changes are to be revealed’.

The Lovebox is billed as lasting for three days which suggests the final day on Sunday will no longer be separately branded as the Citadel festival/

Gunnersbury Park CIC has signed a five year deal with the MAMA group who run the festival to hold it at the park until 2023.

Over 100,000 people attended Lovebox/Citadel in 2018 but there are some indications that tickets sales were down this year. The event has now been moved to during the school term which, it has been suggested, has been done with the intention of reviving sales.

The general feeling among residents appears to be that this year’s event, while still causing significant problems in the area, saw improvements on the previous year in terms of noise, litter and anti-social behaviour. The organisers say better placement of speakers reduced the amount of disruption in the area. In 2018 residents had described the noise as ‘unbearable’.

This year the police also instituted a Section 35 Dispersal Zone around Gunnersbury Park in order to reduce the amount of anti-social behaviour around the park after the end of the festivals. This gave uniformed officers the power to ask people to leave the area after the event was over.

The Gunnersbury Park CIC (set up to run the festival on behalf of councils in Ealing and Hounslow) argue that commercial events are necessary because of centralised funding cutbacks.