Christopher BarrettMulti-venue showcase festival Wild Paths is set to return this year having been on hiatus since 2022, while the event’s organiser has said its award-winning sister event, the Wild Fields Festival, has been postponed.
Wild Paths will return to Norwich from 14-18 October, with a lineup of artists from a broad range of ethnicities and backgrounds performing across 15 local venues and at pop-up spaces in the city.
The two-day Wild Fields Festival took place at Earlham Park in Norwich in August last year with headliners including Ezra Collective (pictured), Kae Tempest and SBTRKT. It went on to win Best New Festival at the UK Festival Awards.
Wild Field Festival’s founder Ben Street had originally planned Wild Fields in partnership with the ATC Group as a four-day, 10,000-capacity, camping festival with more than 100 bands playing across six stages.
Discussing the reason for postponing Wild Fields this year, Street told AAA that he is keen to bring the event back next year: “The long term goal is to run both Wild Paths and Wild Fields at different points in the year, they both have their own distinct character and bring something unique to the city and the region. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the cost and mammoth workload that comes with running an independent outdoor festival wasn’t a factor this year – it’s a real struggle to balance increasing production, talent and staffing costs with an accessible ticket price right now. I’m hoping that by 2026 the landscape might look a little different but we’re a tenacious bunch so I’m confident we’ll be back either way.”
On the return of Wild Paths, Street said it felt like the right time to reprise it: “There’s a real buzz in the city at the moment, lots of great new bands popping up, a couple of new indie venues and a council who are receptive to working with us and supporting what we do. We only really took a break to launch Wild Fields. It took a while to find the right site and all of our efforts and resources were being poured into that.”