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Festival Weddings

Festival Theme Weddings

Let us help you hold the ultimate Festival Wedding.

We love talking about the festival theme for weddings just as much as we love helping people celebrate their wedding in a unique way.
We are not just saying it, our love of festivals runs deep in our veins as both a family and a company, you could say we’re married to the theme.
Our best weekends of the summer are spent with our friends at our favourite events, usually whilst running the children’s area.
We work really hard as entertainers during the days, but we always make time to enjoy the nice cool breeze in the evenings.
We don’t do summer holidays; instead, we do festivals!

What’s your favourite festival and why is it special to you?

We grew with Glastonbury, Guilfest, Womad and the Bracknell festivals, became besotted with Bestival and are shamelessly Shambala super fans. As well as many more beautiful festivals that we hold dear to our hearts but couldn’t think of a good alliteration for! We’re a festival family in more ways than one. These days we love helping people create authentic festival weddings that are themed to perfection, and our experience in this field has helped a whole host of couples create their dream festy wedding. Getting the right atmosphere to feel like your private festival takes input from yourselves and a lot of hard graft on both sides. We can’t wait to collaborate with you and are excited to help you make unique memories on your special day.

A festival wedding performer
Lucas and Amy marriage proposal

Can you beat this Festival wedding marriage proposal?

Lucas is so mad about festivals he proposed to his now wife during Fatboy Slim’s headline set at Camp Bestival. Norman Cook even helped with personalised visuals to accompany the moment which you can see further down on this page. How did you propose? Was it a festival proposal that’s inspired your theme?

Over the years we’ve been part of some truly special festival theme weddings big and small, that made us realise the power of authentic atmosphere. It’s a beautiful theme for many, because it gives you as the couple so much freedom to express yourselves and take it in different directions.

Wedding guests outside a circus tent
Our BigTopMania 4x4

Imagine a stripped-back outdoor vibe in a farmer's field with a hand-fasting ceremony on the land, kegs of local cider, a mouth-watering street-food vendor and a small big-top to host the late-night dancing once the sun goes down. If you’re smiling right now just by thinking about it, you know you are in the right place.

We’ve been lucky enough to play a big part in two separate weddings on Glastonbury's Worthy Farm!
Unfortunately, we don’t have the power to get you that venue but we can do everything else to bring the festival to you.
Hint; peak weekend dates are often booked a couple of years in advance so be an early bird, give us a call and get more information today.

A wedding table within a circus tent

Incredible drone footage of one of our largest festival weddings ever!

One of our largest festival weddings was a legitimate festival in of itself, using a 'Tens Licence' with hundreds of friends gathering to celebrate their friend's coming together. It even included a full weekend program of live music, workshops, play and camping.

How cool is that? You might have so much fun you would want to get married twice…

These options can compliment your wedding (and save you time)

Marquee hire accessories and finishing touches.
You are probably here because you are looking for beautiful marquees or big tops as outdoor wedding venue solutions. While that’s exactly what we focus on as a company, we also want to save you lots of time. So most of our customers don’t just hire the tent. They also take flooring, lighting, dance floor and heating from us, which are all optional. We often also provide catering tents and additional marquees to fulfil your event logistics requirements.

A wedding party
A wedding table within a marquee

Furniture hire options

We tend to recommend a local furniture hire supplier for your table and chairs as you will have a much broader choice of tastes this way and we don’t have the warehouse space to store this. We do keep a stock of basic chairs and tables if you’re going for a more laid back feel and just need some seating.

To get our premium list of recommended Furniture Hire suppliers, contacts us. We love helping you out.

Make it your own - decorate your tent

The colourful tents look fantastic on their own without the extra touches but often our tents act as the backdrop for you to throw your creativity at, this is your opportunity to make your wedding yours. Sometimes that’s a craft project collaboration of an engineer groom and a macrame master bride to make a suspension bridge of planters and sometimes it’s hundreds of metres of bunting that has been lovingly sewn together by your mother in law for the last 6 months. This is your chance to make your festival wedding an event everyone talks about and remembers. Years from now when you show the pictures to your kids they will be able to envision how breathtaking the special day was.

A wedding table within a marquee
Wedding Brochure

24 pages of stunning wedding tent solutions, including pricing

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Bigtopmania marquee  hire price list Brochure front page.

Most wonderful Venue

These guys have made our wedding just perfect by providing us with the most wonderful venue - a circus tent!..

Laura Graversen

Fantastic additon to our wedding

The bigtop was a fantastic addition to our wedding, the guys setting up and taking down were fantastic!

Steve Cubbit-Rayer

Made our wedding day

The BigTopMania tent really made our wedding day and we got loads of compliments for it.

Joshua Smith

5 tips to put the fun into your festival-wedding

1. Lawn games for weddings

Keep things ticking along nicely whilst photographs are happening with interactive games and challenges.It makes sure the kids and the big kids are amused and will no doubt give you some golden moments to look back on. You can hire these as additional items from us or you can go DIY by making traditional games like ring toss, having a box of circus skills for people to try is popular and goes with the theme nicely.  We recently saw an incredible homemade axe throwing station. It was a real crowd pleaser and kept guests entertained for the entire afternoon both watching and participating. Remember to play safe, put the axe away later in the day!

LOVE wedding sign
A festival childrens workshop

2. Get creative with your sign-making

Pallets can be your friend here, it’s extremely satisfying making your own signs and final touches to keep your guests happy. They can be as pretty or as basic as you like.

During the lead up to our wedding, we found that we started very pretty and then gradually realised how many we would need so quality control dipped a little towards the end. Some blackboard paint and chalk pens will take your sign writing up a notch.

If you’re lucky enough to have creative friends then maybe this could be their wedding present to you? We think as long as you spread the favours out around enough people then it’s a sensible suggestion.

3. Live Music

Live Music can add loads of atmosphere to your wedding - possibly not the most original of suggestions but hear us out, think beyond wedding bands for evening dancing. We loved seeing this piano left in the middle of the field for Abbie and Kaj’s amazing festival wedding. Live jam sessions can add so much organic fun to your festivities and can act as free entertainment, particularly the day after when everyone’s a little big fragile and you just need something to sit back and smile to. One of our favourite smaller festival venues is the People’s Front Room, it always gives off a vibe like a volunteer has just sat at a piano and started throwing out hits and it goes off!

Wedding couple playing a piano
Wedding couple at photobooth with props

4. DIY Photo Frames

Wooden frames encourage fun group pictures. With all the automatic filters and photo apps that are flying around these days it’s more important than ever to take it back a notch every now and then. Grab yourself a pallet or raid your local charity shop then let your friends do the rest. Interesting photos and icebreakers all round.

5. Entertain your guests with more than just music!

There’s some fantastic festival bands out there of course and whether it’s a band or a DJ, music will play a huge part in your special day. Thinking beyond music for a second. Just after speeches when everyone’s dance confidence isn’t quite running high enough. How about a swing dance lesson en masse? A combination of demos and following along with a routine is a great way to get the dancefloor filled without the awkward slow start. You could wow your guests with a circus show. The show can be geared towards the whole wedding rather than just kids and a nice focal point to throw something unexpected at your guests.

Dancers in a circus tent

Don't take our word for it...

Alice & George

Alice & George's autumnal "Wedfest" celebrations

Continue Reading...

Aileen & Rob

a coastal festival wedding celebration, AKA "Snugfest"

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Abbie & Kieran

a "Wed-Fest" where giant LOVE letters are delivered at this beautiful festival wedding

Continue Reading...

Reasons to have a festival wedding!

We’re going to assume that if you’ve made this far down the page that you’re probably a fan of festivals, we certainly are. One of the most important things and hardest thing for a festival to control as it gets more popular is it’s audience. You can’t control who buys a ticket so some times as the years go by the crowd changes and the festival loses its spark. So now imagine you have control of who buys the tickets to your private festival. Ask yourself what type of festivals you enjoy most? Do you prefer the small festivals where everything is within a 10 minute walk of each other but it’s just big enough to feel free, or do you prefer massive festivals?

The small private festival is in essence what a festival wedding is. You take all the fun of your favourite festival and get to enjoy it with your nearest and dearest, all your best friends, all your families dancing away the weekend with the sole purpose of giving you the most beautiful weekend of your lives.

A group wedding photo

A huge reason to love festival weddings is the potential to enjoy the whole weekend rather than just the one day. If your weddings on theSaturday you can invite your inner circle to arrive from Thursday to help with decor and signs, Thursday night you can let all the excitement come out without worrying about having to be on tip top form the day after. Friday is for final touches like setting the tables and you’ll probably be constantly having mini catch ups with people as they arrive. Saturday it all comes together and will fly by before you know it and then the best bit is you have Sunday to chillout, wind down and reminisce.

Turning your wedding into a mini festival spreads out all the fun and the best day of your lives becomes the best 4 days of your lives. That’s what we found anyway. It meant you had quality time to spend with all your different groups of people who have sometimes travelled a really long way.

Important things to consider when planning an outdoor festival wedding.

Your guests

  • Make sure your guests are prepared with flats in their bag, stilettos and fields do not mix well, you could grab yourself some wedding wellies if you want to be super on theme.
  • Gather camping numbers aspart of RSVP so you can prepare enough space.
  • Consider including a camping checklist but hopefully if they’re up for camping then your friends are familiar with being prepared for camping in the UK.

Choice of venue

(Field, campsite, farm, garden, rugby club etc)

  • Power - if you’re going down the rent a farmers field route you will most likely have to rent a generator. Talk to all your suppliers about what power they require, it’s great if the caterers can operate mainly on gas. Gather this information then feel free to double check with us what size generator to hire. It’s important to get this right or the power could go at the worst time.
  • Toilets and Facilities - Check that your venue save on costs by finding a venue with toilets included and make sure there's an adequate amount of toilets for your numbers. Try Compost -loos for an eco-alternative.
  • Make sure the venue is appropriate for a marquee and ensure the owner is aware of any underground services.
  • Consider the event layout as a whole, from campsite arrangements, local amenities for those that aren’t camping, access for elderley people, best use of any views.
  • When Lucas and Amy got married we opted for a Glamping site; they gave us the freedom to put up our own structures but we rented all the yurts and cabins off them. We then treated it like an onsite hotel for our guests and gave it as an accommodation option to some of our closest friends and family. It was a good way to offset costs and provide great comfort to our friends.
  • Ask the landowner to cut and collect the grass as short as possible for the marquee area. It helps us get the carpet as smooth as possible which is difficult to achieve if grass is left long.

Catering

  • Outdoor and Festival weddings offer tonnes of flexibility on food choices. You could opt for something super simple like a fish and chip van. Who doesn’t love fish and chips and it’s all done for you with no worries on crockery or anything. So many great street food options to tie in with your festival theme. If you are keeping the food as a sit down meal consider the following.
  • Are you going to do some form of communal food the day before or after? BBQs are great, fried egg sandwiches the day after always go down well.
  • Does your caterer require a separate structure to work in or do they provide their own. We can provide separate marquees that join onto our main one and match our colours nicely helping to create a great event landscape.
  • How will you serve your food? If you’re not using a large catering company it’s possible they will just be focusing on prepping the food and not providing waiting staff. You could opt for family style and have everything in the middle of each table. We were planning this until the day before our wedding when we realised the tables were too small to fit flowers and food and people so we asked our groomsmen to serve.

Waste and Recycling

  • Be as eco-friendly as possible! Tread lightly and minimise your impact.
  • Have a clear and well organised recycling system, it will save you later. If you can, consider having a trailer on hand to load sorted recycling into and take to the local recycling centre.
  • If you’re renting a field the farmer might take the food waste for the pigs, it’s worth an ask.

Just in case you’re feeling nostalgic about your festival marriage proposal...

Here’s our team member Lucas proposing to now wife Amy at Camp Bestival back in 2016.

As seen on...

We're proud to have been featured on many wedding websites and blogs.

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