Timescape Festival 2026

If you’d told us back in March 2026 when we launched Acid Drop Design that we’d somehow end up as both the official merch supplier and part of the decor team for Timescape Festival, we’d probably have laughed.

Actually, no. We probably would have said, “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Because apparently this is what happens when two women running a ravewear business keep saying yes to things.

And so began one of the most chaotic, exhausting, hilarious and genuinely brilliant weekends we’ve ever had.

It Started With a Car Full of Aliens

Timescape officially ran from Friday to Sunday, but for us the weekend really started on Thursday.

As well as supplying the official merch, myself and Sarah — the other half of Acid Drop Design — had somehow managed to get ourselves onto the decor team for one of the two woodland stages Barkside.

The theme for the festival was Out of this World, and we’d decided to go with a sort of Pandora-from-Avatar feel for the stage and surrounding woodland.

Naturally, this required mannequins.

Months earlier, Sarah and I had visited a place called Mannequin Manor in Grantham, which is every bit as bizarre as it sounds.

You pay £50, get given a massive cart, and then essentially get let loose amongst mountains of mannequin body parts and told to fill it.

It’s like Supermarket Sweep, but with torsos.

We did our best to assemble roughly correct human beings, although Sarah ended up with children possessing two right arms, an extra hand and various other anatomical issues, and one of ours didn’t quite fit together properly at the hips.

Close enough.

We sanded them, painted one black and the others silver, and because their blank mannequin faces clearly weren’t creepy enough, I created eye sockets using putty and made huge eyeballs out of the mouldable builder gel I use for my nails.

They were painted, shiny and glow-in-the-dark.

Obviously.

The two standing female aliens were named Phil and Grant, while our seated alien was named Betty. We never named the children. Possibly subconsciously so as not to become too attached to them. 

On Thursday, myself, Sarah, my partner Adam and our friend Cherylann loaded the aliens into the car along with all the decor.

It is probably for the best that we didn’t have a crash, because explaining the assortment of silver body parts packed into the vehicle may have been awkward.

Also coming with us was our trinket swap station.

This had started life as an old display cabinet from my daughter’s bedroom that had been sitting in the garden waiting to go to the tip. I rescued it, painted it with a galaxy effect, added lights and a sign, and turned it into a swap station where festival-goers could leave a small trinket and take another.

We spent Thursday decorating Barkside alongside Matty, who we'd been working with to plan the stage despite living miles away in Scotland and who we were meeting in person for the first time.

It was really nice finally putting a face to somebody we’d only spoken to online.

We covered the area in flower garlands, placed the aliens amongst the trees and generally tried to make the place look as strange and otherworldly as possible.

One of the mannequins was supposed to be secured using a metal stake through its feet, but myself and Cherylann couldn’t hammer the stake far enough into the ground.

The end result?

A levitating alien.

Completely accidental.

Completely perfect.

Betty, meanwhile, was positioned on a tree stump right in the middle of the Barkside dancefloor and secured using fishing wire and tent pegs.

This would later prove to be wildly insufficient protection.

The Tree of Souls That Refused to Live

One of the things I’d been most excited about was our attempt at creating a Tree of Souls-style installation.

I’d bought 800 two-metre strands of fibre optics and two light sources, with the idea of suspending them from a tree so they cascaded down like a glowing willow.

We got the entire thing into place.

And then it didn’t work.

Something went wrong with the electrics and despite all that effort, the giant glowing fibre-optic alien tree that existed so beautifully in my head never quite came to life.

That was probably our biggest decor disaster of the weekend.

But considering the level of potential chaos involved in building an alien forest out of mannequins, fibre optics and garden rescue projects, we got off pretty lightly.

Before we left on Thursday, we also managed to put up the Acid Drop Design gazebo.

Our position turned out to be perfect.

We were near Sunset Hollow, the entrance to Barkside and the Prize Cock — a wooden mobile pub-style hut — in an area filled with picnic benches, sofas and places where people naturally stopped to sit, chat and recover.

For a merch stand, we honestly couldn’t have asked for a better spot.

And Then People Actually Turned Up

Friday morning was all about getting the stand fully set up and the stock out.

Each day we’d arrive, unlock everything, put the displays back together and open up.

Our friend Cherylann was helping us on the stand too, which meant Sarah and I could occasionally escape.

In theory.

Because Friday got very busy, very quickly.

Far busier than we had expected.

I’d assumed there would be plenty of time to zip up the front, wander around the festival, see sets and generally behave like an actual attendee.

There wasn’t.

Which, from a business point of view, was a very nice problem to have.

We adapted the layout over the first couple of days as we worked out what worked best, but the response to Acid Drop Design was incredible.

People recognised the brand.

People came over specifically to find us.

People loved the designs.

And one of the nicest things was seeing people buy something from us during the day and then spot them hours later wearing it around the festival.

There is something very strange and very lovely about seeing something you designed and made walking past you on somebody else’s body.

Every time it happened, Sarah and I had that same little moment of, “That’s ours.”

What Actually Sold?

Deciding what to take had been difficult.

Timescape had pre-purchased the official merch from us, so we were very conscious that we didn’t want the organisers left with piles of stock they’d paid for but couldn’t sell.

We also didn’t want to overdo the alien theme.

Anything too specific to that year’s theme would be harder to carry over into future events, so we mainly took generic Timescape branding with a smaller number of alien-themed pieces.

One of those alien pieces turned out to be one of the biggest hits.

Our Join Us full-print T-shirts sold out.

We’d also launched a range of neon UV-reactive pieces, both in Timescape branding and Acid Drop designs, and because there was so much UV lighting around the site, they looked brilliant at night.

A lot of our Acid Drop designs were inspired by DJs playing across the weekend.

We never use a DJ, event or brand logo without permission, so instead I’d created tribute designs based around song names or lyrics connected to the artists.

One crossover design was for Jason Nawty.

I’d used his name as part of a “Nawty Nawty Very Nawty” design — a play both on Jason’s name and the lyric from The Shamen’s Ebeneezer Goode.

Jason had given us permission, and the whole thing worked perfectly.

The other unexpected winners?

Bum bags and earrings.

We took some along almost as an extra and they absolutely flew out.

We’d designed a selection of very rude, very inappropriate earrings and bum bags featuring swear words and other things that probably aren’t suitable for most craft fairs.

Naturally, the Timescape crowd loved them.

They were popular enough that we’re now restocking them to launch on the website properly.

Apparently what the world really needed was offensive jewellery.

The Little Freebie Table That Became a Thing

We also had a small table filled with little trinkets and bits and pieces.

Anyone who bought from us could choose something for free.

There were lollipops, kandi bracelets, keyrings, pens, tiny pairs of alien socks and all sorts of random little things.

People absolutely loved it.

In fact, they liked some of the pieces so much that they started asking if they could buy extras, so we ended up selling bits for next to nothing as well.

The separate trinket swap station over at Barkside also became far more popular than we expected.

People had seen it mentioned online and were coming over asking where they could find it.

Throughout the weekend, all sorts of strange and brilliant things appeared on its shelves as people swapped items in and out.

It was one of those little ideas that ended up becoming part of the festival for people, which was really lovely to see.

The People Make Timescape

One of the best things about the weekend was finally meeting people we’d known for months through the Timescape Facebook and WhatsApp groups.

There were so many people whose names we already knew, whose messages we’d read and who we’d chatted to online, but had never actually stood in front of.

By the end of the weekend, it felt like we’d made an entire new group of friends.

One girl in particular became one of those bizarre small-world moments.

She came to the stand several times, loved the trinket table and kept popping back for other bits.

She was just one of those people with a brilliant energy.

Afterwards, we connected on Facebook and I noticed she was from a town only a few minutes from where I live.

So I messaged her.

It turned out she didn’t just live nearby.

She lived in the same village.

We had travelled to a festival, met completely by chance, got on brilliantly and then discovered we practically lived around the corner from each other.

DJs, Dresses and Abandoned Tank Tops

We also got to meet some of the DJs we’d made pieces for.

Amber D came over to collect a special T-shirt we’d designed to celebrate her 25 years as a DJ.

Her reaction was genuinely lovely.

She was really touched by it — almost emotional — which made all the work that had gone into it feel completely worthwhile.

Lisa-Marie turned up wearing a dress we’d previously made for her.

Completely feral.

Exactly as she should be.

Rachael Bulmer, an amazing vocalist, also came by to collect a custom dress that we'd made for her as a congratulations on her new track 'World in your hand', as did Jason Nawty.

Jason collected his piece and immediately decided the most logical thing to do was strip off outside the stand and put it on. He loved it enough that he completely abandoned the top he had on before.

I still have it.

It has been travelling around in my car ever since, waiting for the next time I see him.

Becoming a Roving Reporter

Somewhere amongst all of this, I was also supposed to be doing some reporting.

I’d already been wandering around with the microphone asking festival-goers how they were finding Timescape, but Friday night gave me one of my favourite jobs of the weekend.

At 11pm, there was an inflatable costume race.

People appeared dressed as dinosaurs, unicorns, aliens and all sorts of ridiculous inflatable creatures, gathering near the Acid Drop stand before racing across the site towards the Wellness Illness area.

I went around doing pre-race interviews with the competitors.

Trying to conduct serious interviews with people dressed as giant inflatable dinosaurs is exactly as professional as it sounds.

By Saturday, myself and my friend Clair had decided we should probably attempt to interview some DJs.

We may also have had a little bit to drink.

So we sweet-talked our way through the side of Sunset Hollow, interviewed one of the shot girls at the bar and somehow ended up backstage.

There we found Darren Shambhala.

Darren has been DJing for years, has an enormous amount of experience and, more importantly for two women appearing with a microphone backstage, is an incredibly nice person.

We interviewed him, and then he went and got Woody Cook for us.

Woody — son of Zoe Ball and Fatboy Slim — could not have been more up for it.

At one point he climbed onto a wall of hay bales, shouted “KING OF TIMESCAPE!”, jumped off and did a forward roll.

Somehow, we caught it on camera.

We then interviewed Woody and friend and fellow DJ Griff, who were playing their first ever back-to-back set together.

One of the really interesting things about talking to Woody was discovering that when the site had previously been used for Secret Garden Party, he had actually built the very stage he was now playing on, along with the Tiki bar area.

Years later, he’d come back to DJ on it once again.

That was a pretty cool full-circle moment.

Naturally, I followed this thoughtful conversation about music and history with a question about alien anal probing.

Because we had a theme to maintain.

The question was simple: 

If aliens abducted you and threatened you with the traditional alien bum probe, but promised to let you go if you could play them one track so good that it pleased them enough to release you…

What track would you choose to save your bum?

Darren, Woody and Griff all got the question.

And their answers were brilliant.

I also managed to interview Adam Sweetman, one of the Timescape organisers.

Rick, the other organiser, was mysteriously nowhere near me whenever I had a microphone in my hand.

Convenient.

Very convenient.

I did manage to grab him for a photo at least!

The One Set I Refused to Miss

As much as I would love to give you a comprehensive review of every DJ set across the weekend, I can’t.

Because I barely saw any of them.

I desperately wanted to see Asteroid.

I wanted to see more of Anne Savage.

I wanted to see Lisa-Marie.

I wanted to see all of Jason Nawty.

But between the stand, filming, decorating, travelling back and forth and generally being absolutely shattered, a lot of them passed me by.

There was one set I was determined not to miss.

Alt1.

I’m a huge fan, so I danced at the front for his entire set.

And afterwards, I’d brought a T-shirt we’d made as a tribute for him.

This should have been a lovely interaction.

Instead, it became possibly the most awkward interaction of my life.

I caught him coming off the stage, completely sober and a bit starstruck, and basically appeared from nowhere and thrust a T-shirt at him.

I think I caught him completely by surprise.

I’m not even entirely sure he realised what I was giving him.

I had spent the entire weekend interviewing strangers with a microphone and running a busy merch stand perfectly happily.

Put me in front of one of my favourite DJs without a sniff of Jack Daniels in me?

Social skills gone.

If there is one moment from the whole weekend I could redo, it would probably be that one.

But he did play on the stage that we'd decorated right in front of Betty, Phil and Grant, so there is that.

Meanwhile, Betty Was Having a Very Different Festival

While Sarah and I were working, Betty had apparently decided she was not going to spend the weekend quietly sitting on a tree stump.

We started seeing photos afterwards.

At some point she had been moved.

People had put a T-shirt on her.

Stickers appeared on her face.

People posed with her.

People did things to her that cannot really be described as respectful mannequin behaviour.

The lovely girl from our stand even appeared in some footage having a particularly questionable interaction with poor Phil...or maybe it was Grant?

But Betty’s biggest adventure didn’t become apparent until Sunday lunchtime.

We had just set the stand back up and I was sitting there looking over towards a gap in the hedges leading towards the lake.

And suddenly I saw Matty.

Carrying Betty.

Because Betty is permanently fixed in a seated position, he had her cradled in his arms like a baby.

He emerged through the hedge looking like David Hasselhoff in Baywatch, carrying a rescued casualty away from the sea.

I genuinely could not work out what I was looking at.

“What are you doing with Betty?!”

Apparently…

Betty had been found by the lake.

To this day, we have no idea who took her there.

We don’t know what happened to her.

We don’t know why she was by the lake.

And quite frankly, we probably don’t want to know.

Had Matty not rescued her, there is every chance Betty would still be out there somewhere, staring across the water with her enormous glowing eyeballs.

She was returned to her tree stump and, thankfully, remained there for the rest of the festival.

Betty, Phil and Grant are now living in my garden until next year.

They have seen things.

The Site Itself Is Something Special

Timescape is held on the old Secret Garden Party site, and it is genuinely perfect for this kind of festival.

There are wide grassy camping areas, woodland, a lake and lots of completely different little spaces hidden around the site.

Sunset Hollow sits, as the name suggests, in a natural hollow with grassy banks surrounding the dancefloor, meaning you can sit up on the hill and watch everything happening below.

Barkside and Lost Woods are both tucked into woodland.

Nexus Temple, the psytrance area, sits much further out towards the lake and has a completely different atmosphere again.

There’s Wellness Illness, the Prize Cock pub area, wellness activities, food vendors, even sauna and cold-plunge facilities.

And unlike some huge festivals where getting from one stage to another feels like a sponsored hike, Timescape is relatively compact.

Everything feels close enough.

The car park is nearby.

You can wander from one completely different atmosphere to another without losing half your day in the process.

Obviously, I’m biased towards Barkside.

We decorated it.

But both woodland areas are particularly special at night as the lasers through the trees are just something else! 

But honestly, I don’t think I could pick one favourite area.

Seeing the Other Side of a Festival

One of the biggest things I took away from the weekend was just how much work goes into making a festival happen.

When you attend as a customer, you see the stages, the music, the lights, the decor, the bars and the finished result.

You don’t necessarily see the days of work beforehand.

You don’t see people carrying equipment around fields.

You don’t see the last-minute fixing, organising and improvising.

You don’t see how many people have been working behind the scenes for weeks or months.

Being involved from the other side was a real eye-opener.

And for us, the work hadn’t started on Thursday.

For around four weeks before the festival, we had been absolutely flat out producing stock — cutting and pressing T-shirts, making bum bags, bucket hats and all the other pieces we were taking with us.

Then came the decor.

Then the festival itself.

Then getting in the car each night, driving home, sleeping for what felt like five minutes and getting up to do it all again.

By the end, I was finished.

I genuinely think I slept for about a week afterwards.

Would We Do It Again?

Absolutely.

There is so much I wish I’d seen.

So many sets I missed.

So many people I wanted to spend more time with.

The whole weekend went ridiculously fast and, because there was so much happening, I don’t think I properly processed half of it until afterwards.

But we learnt loads.

We sold loads.

We made friends.

We met people we’d only previously known online.

We watched DJs wear things we’d made.

We saw people walking around a festival in Acid Drop designs.

We interviewed inflatable dinosaurs.

We asked professional DJs which song they’d use to escape alien anal probing.

We built glowing aliens.

We lost one by a lake.

And somewhere amongst all of the complete chaos, Acid Drop Design suddenly felt very, very real.

Timescape, you were exhausting.

You were ridiculous.

You were brilliant.

And yes…

We’ll absolutely be back next year.