The ninth edition of the north’s favourite family festival, Deer Shed Festival 9, is shaping up to showcase its biggest ever programme of family friendly music, arts and science and we are going!
Here is what Deer Shed Festival themselves have to say about it!
Deer Shed Festival 9 – taking place in Topcliffe, North Yorkshire on 20th-22nd July – boasts a stacked music line-up of indie, electronica, rock and folk artists, featuring headliners Goldfrapp, Drenge and Field Music (with the Open Here Orchestra) at the top of the bill. Public Service Broadcasting return as very special guests after appearing on the Big Top tent back in 2013, while Gaz Coombes, Joan As Police Woman, This Is The Kit, Nadine Shah, Jane Weaver and Bill Ryder-Jones join them.
It isn’t just musicians of international fame appearing at the independent family festival. Deer Shed always showcase a multitude of emerging bands across its four live music stages. Big tips for 2018 include The Orielles, Dream Wife, Goat Girl, HMLTD, whenyoung, Blaenavon, Matt Maltese, Mush and Amaroun, among many others.
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With the promise that every member of the family’s tastes will be catered for, the music offerings are just the beginning of the Deer Shed experience. For comedy lovers, household names James Acaster, Rachel Parris and Daliso Chaponda headline the Big Top comedy club, with Justin Moorhouse, Spencer Jones, Abandoman and Kiri Pritchard-McLean among many others on a long and hilarious list of acts.
The Deer Shed team drag their kids around the best theatre and shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, so they know which ones are golden for the whole family. Spoken-word sensations Harry & Chris will perform their unique mix of comedy, melody and poetry, alongside the likes of Big Howard & Little Howard, The Kagools, Blue Planet III (yes, three), plus much else from giant sea creature puppets and jugglers via murder mysteries and bedraggled mermaids.
Deer Shed Festival 9 has recently begun to produce its own theatre, and this year Leeds-based Manic Chord Theatre have been commissioned to create a unique, immersive promenade theatre performance for the site’s woodland belt aka The Wilderwild, which also contains a green and traditional craft area. The show, Our Time, will feature Lewis Carroll inspired characters of time, who embark on an interactive journey alongside Deer Shedders to save Father Time.
Rock music icon Chris Difford of the band Squeeze will appear on Deer Shed’s new Buckends stage to talk about his recent memoir Some Fantastic Place. Cosey Fanni Tutti will also speak about how she became one of Britain’s leading avant-garde artists with Hull-based band Throbbing Gristle in addition to a host of many other fantastic authors, poets, storytellers, philosophers, activists and musicians on the literary and spoken word line-up.
The theme of Deer Shed changes each year: 2018 is the year of ‘Making Waves’, with many aspects of the programme being informed by both water and sound waves. Art installations like artist-in-residence Johnny White’s ‘Good Vibrations’, Dan Fox’s ‘Sound Garden’ and Pif-Paf Theatre’s ‘Celestial Sound Cloud’ all feature interactive sonic sculptures. Modular synthesis, music production, marine forensics and a virtual reality voyage to the Arctic with Greenpeace are among the wavy science tent highlights.
Kids can design fish out of old book pages, make their own deep-sea diving helmet, build a boat or upcycle waste materials such as plastic bottles to make lovely art creations with Sarah Turner in the festival’s arts & craft workshops. Renowned names of the arts world like The Royal Shakespeare Company, Northern Ballet, 201 Dance Company and York Theatre Royal will also lead various specialist workshops. A brand-new wellbeing area – The Hideaway – will be filled with all sorts of yoga you wouldn’t even know existed, making it the ideal place to downshift and recharge.
With the support and guidance of WasteAid UK – the official charity partner of Deer Shed Festival 9 – Deer Shed is getting #DrasticOnPlastic by banning the sale of single-use plastic bottles and straws for 2018, heavily investing in further recycling infrastructure, and pledging to become completely single-use plastic free festival by 2021.
So, there you have it. Deer Shed Festival 9 promises to be another bustling weekend of magical family fun with, as usual, far too many performances, workshops and activities to choose from! And we haven’t even mentioned the extensive cinema, sports, and under 5s programmes…
Save money by purchasing better value tickets before 1st July, when prices rise by £10 per adult ticket! For more information and to delve into the deeper details of the 2018 line-up, visit: www.deershedfestival.com.
Current ticket structure – www.deershedfestival.com/tickets
Adult 16+ full weekend ticket (tier 3): £145 AVAILABLE UNTIL 1st JULY
Adult 16+ full weekend ticket (tier 4): £155 RELEASED ON 1st JULY
Child full weekend ticket (11 to 15): £50 AVAILABLE
Child full weekend ticket (6 to 10): £50 AVAILABLE
Child full weekend ticket (3 to 5): £20 AVAILABLE
Child full weekend ticket (0 to 2): FREE (ticket still required) AVAILABLE
Sunday night camping per tent or live-in vehicle: £50 (optional) AVAILABLE
Our take on family friendly festivals
We might rant on a bit here, sorry.
If you go and watch a Pixar movie with your children, everyone has a great time. Not just your kids, EVERYBODY!! We strive for this holy-grail every year.
We don’t have kid’s areas as such – they’re not zoo animals! The whole site is accessible to everyone and we will welcome you as though you were our house guests, which you essentially are.
But we are a cultural event too and you will be exposed to many new things. We like new things. You might be challenged by some of them, but we want every family member to leave Baldersby Park inspired, if that’s ok.
And finally, our music line-up, hitting you through extremely high-fidelity PA systems will be as thrilling and contemporary as you will find at any UK festival in 2018 – it’s just that you can share that thrill with your kids and feel perfectly safe at the same time.
Oh, and if you don’t have kids to bring, that’s fine too xx
Deer Shed Festival Reviews
“This is a very big statement to make but I think that Deer Shed Festival could quite possibly be the best family festival in the UK.” – Festivals For All (http://www.festivalsforall.com/article/deer-shed-festival-2016-review.)
“Deer Shed: The Ultimate Family Festival. A bold statement in the title, but one richly deserved and let me explain why…” – Subba Cultcha (http://www.subba-cultcha.com/reviews/1747.)
“Deer Shed isn’t just a marvellous festival, but THE one to attend for families and people of all ages, sitting several notches above its northern festival counterparts.” – Efestivals (http://www.efestivals.co.uk/festivals/deershed/2016/review-overview.shtml.)
“Right. Let’s get something straight right from the start. Deer Shed 2016 was essentially perfect: a wondrous box of delights for young, middle and old alike.” – There Goes The Fear (http://www.theregoesthefear.com/2016/08/deer-shed-festival-2016-review-part-1.php.)
“Just like an old friend, Deer Shed still remains reassuringly familiar, rewarding and an absolute pleasure to be around.” – God Is In The TV (http://www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk/2016/07/26/festival-report-deer-shed-festival-7/.)
And most importantly, here’s what our festival goers think: https://www.facebook.com/DeerShed.
Come for free? Join our Love Deer Shed Ambassador Scheme!
If you already rave about Deer Shed to your friends and family why not be rewarded for your enthusiasm and join our ambassador scheme!
In a nutshell, for every 8 adult tickets you sell on our behalf we will give you a FREE adult ticket plus there are all sorts of other rewards to earn!
And if you have your ticket already or if you are keen to volunteer you can still benefit by gifting your FREE ticket to a friend.
Check the scheme out here: https://deershedfestival.com/ambassador
Karen Beddow founded Mini Travellers in 2014 while doing what she loves most...going on holiday!
Mini Travellers is for parents looking for holiday ideas, destination reviews, days out and things to do with the kids. We also have family travel tips, activity ideas and all other things family holiday related. Take a look at some of our latest reviews for holidays and day trips in the UK.