Christopher BarrettVictorious Festival has come a long way since it was launched in 2012 as a free two-day event in Portsmouth by founders Andy Marsh, James Ralls and Ben Miles. Now an 80,000-capacity event with 13 stages, Victorious is one of the UK’s largest city-based festivals. Head of operations Tiffany Gaskell outlines how the team are focused on enhancing the event experience while respecting its roots and delivering for the local community.
This year’s Victorious Festival will feature a new venue that pays homage to the Portsmouth live music pub that hosted many of the meetings and conversations that led to the event’s creation. Little Johnny Russell’s is being designed as an intimate and nostalgic venue concept at the Southsea seafront event site.
Tiffany Gaskell
Tiffany Gaskell has been involved in the event since day one and began working full time on it in 2015. She says the Victorious team has remained largely unchanged since the festival’s inception and maintains strong ties to the Portsmouth scene that first brought them together at venues including Little Johnny Russell’s.
With the festival having donated more than £920,600 to charity and contributed £159 million to the local economy since 2014, Gaskell is understandably immensely proud of the support it provides for local charities and small businesses.
This year’s Victorious Festival will run from 28-30 August with a line up including the Black Keys, Richard Ashcroft, The Streets and Scissor Sisters.
“The founders were brought up in Portsmouth and they really understand what the city wants.”
Gaskell says that while she is not involved in the talent programming, the Victorious booking team has always worked well when it comes to delivering acts that resonate with the festival demographic: “In Portsmouth we’ve got quite a distinct, innate, passion as a city. We’re very proud people, and with that comes a culture and a music taste. The founders were brought up in Portsmouth and they really understand what the city wants, and the vibe acts need to bring to the festival. Having that understanding of your audience really helps take a bit of the risk out.”
The debut of the new Little Johnny Russell’s venue at the event this year is very much a tribute to the Portsmouth music scene that led to the creation of Victorious.
“There is a real family feeling among the team because we’ve all known each other from the beginning, when we all worked in pubs across the city,” she says. “James, the director, started it with the other founders Ben and Andy. Andy’s gone on to become a booking agent at Superstruct. Ben is head of our production, Sian Kelleher started in the finance department when the event was launched and now she’s the executive director, and then as it got bigger they brought in Terri [head of community partnership development], and now Terri and James are married. My brother runs our site crew; he worked in one of the pubs that the founders owned. We are all really good friends who started working on Victorious because we had a love for events and music, and had experience of working in the hospitality industry.”
Alongside the building of the new Little Johnny Russell’s venue, which will feature a façade that replicates the original pub, other changes at Victorious this year will be a new site layout.
“For the past few years there has been work going on to develop the sea defences across the prom, and that has meant I’ve had to change the site layout every year,” says Gaskell. “We made the arena much longer and thinner for the past two years but we now have the land back so we have brought the arena back to the same size it was in 2022. It has also enabled us to incorporate the new prom. We’re opening it up so you can walk along the seafront by the castle. We are working with Portsmouth Council which has a free summer event called Live at the Bandstand that they run with local promoters. This year Portsmouth is celebrating its 100th anniversary of being given city status, so we are going to run the bandstand programme at Victorious.”
“Our site is so naturally beautiful, we’ve always lent into that.”
Gaskell says key considerations when redesigning the site layout have been finding wasts to utilise its natural highlights, and creating more immersive and surprising activations: “We’re so lucky being on the coastline; we’ve got the ocean, the castle, the trees. Our site is so naturally beautiful, we’ve always lent into that. This year we’ve brought on a creative producer and we’re focusing more on the customer journey; identifying areas and making moments that will provide highlights beyond the main stage. There’ll be a lot more decor on site, and the creation of new areas that provide attendees with the feeling that they are on an adventure.”
The impact that Victorious has had on Portsmouth is huge, and not just in terms of the monetary support it provides for charities and local businesses. Gaskell says the team has forged a strong relationship with Portsmouth City Council and they offer its team guidance when it is launching new events in the city. The Victorious team also lend their time and energy to helping other community projects.
“We have donated £50,000 to a CIC called Portsmouth Creates, which looks after the cultural infrastructure and talent development within the city,” says Gaskell. “They run a couple of events across the city including We Shine, in November. Our team runs the event for them operationally. It is free for the public to attend, and we don’t charge for our services. Something we do continuously throughout the year, because we have a surplus of infrastructure in our yards, is lend that out free of charge to all the local community events that Portsmouth Council puts on including Armed Forces Day and Southsea Food Festival.”
Victorious Festival has been owned by Superstruct Entertainment since 2019, but Gaskell says that the Portsmouth event team is given the freedom to work on it autonomously: “The original ethos remains; we just have the backing and support from a bigger company. Being part of a wider group and having access to other operational directors and site people is hugely beneficial. It means we are able to discuss trends and problems that are happening across the summer.
“That sharing of information is important because as an industry we need each other to help make the festival sector stand up. We need all the festivals throughout the season to work well otherwise the hiring of the kit would be astronomically expensive.”
An issue that has impacted the vast majority of outdoor event organisers this summer as been the extremely hot and dry conditions, meaning extra dust-mitigation, added water availability and additional cover have become vital measures
Gaskell says that with the Victorious site being so open to the elements on the seafront, its team has always had to prepare for extreme weather conditions: “Being coastal means that one minute it can be beautiful and the next blowing a gale of 40mph. That’s all year round for us. So when we launched the event we knew that this was something we would have to prepare for. We are really lucky in that we have mains water, so it’s never been an issue; there are water points everywhere. We’ve always been over cautious with everything from the beginning, so for us it is just carrying on and making sure it all works as it has done before.
“When it comes to the build it just means being a bit more mindful that all the team members and crew are looking after themselves. I know our staging crew will just crack on no matter what, so you have got to make sure that they’re not doing that. This year we have brought in extra canopies to provide shade but half of our site is covered in trees, so we are fortunate.”
Looking further ahead, Gaskell says that future editions of Victorious will involve an increased focus on the premium offering: “We are looking to elevate the experience level to offer a bit more to a wider range of people. Glamping is definitely something we’re going to explore. That higher end experience is a key focus, and our premium area is something that we will continue to elevate. We put in some new structures there last year and that was received very well.
“We’re going to keep that momentum going. It is all about enriching the experience and that customer journey.”