Festival Wedding Ideas: A Guide to Planning the Perfect Wedding Day

Festival weddings are the absolute best. What better way to celebrate than a big festival style wedding with all your favourite people there as your wedding guests?! From tents and hay bales, wellies, live music and food trucks to an evening party at city wedding venues, there are so many different ways to bring the festival vibe to your special day and make your wedding as unique as you are. Read on for the ultimate guide to planning a fun festival wedding!

What is a festival wedding?

Festival weddings are as varied and diverse as festivals themselves. From a completely DIY party in a field to bringing colourful, festival touches to a more traditional wedding venue, the main theme that unites festival weddings is getting to do things your way and making sure that your wedding is a unique celebration of you. Read on to see some ideas for planning the ultimate festival themed wedding.

Festival Wedding Photography

As a wedding photographer (and someone whose own wedding was a festival-style one), I have picked up a ton of useful tips and tricks (both when working as a wedding photographer and when planning my own wedding!) for how modern couples planning a festival wedding can make sure that their day turns into an absolutely epic party.

Festival wedding venues

Setting the right vibe for your celebrations definitely starts with picking a wedding venue. Whether you're hoping for something a little more traditional, a down to earth affair or the ultimate festival wedding, there's a venue out there for you that can match your vibe and bring your festival-themed dreams to life. Read on for my top ideas for how to choose the perfect venue for your festival style wedding.

A big party in a field

If it's good enough for Glastonbury, it's good enough for your wedding! Setting up your wedding in a field is an absolutely perfect way to bring a festival vibe to your day.

The best thing about holding your wedding in the great outdoors is how creative you get to be with every part of the day. A traditional wedding idea you're not so keen on? Skip it! Not sure about a sit-down wedding breakfast? Why not make it a bit more informal instead? Planning your own festival theme wedding gives you the ultimate creative control over how you want your day to go.

There's two main ways to find festival wedding venues if you want a big festival wedding in a field.

The first way is to find a farmer or land-owner who rents out fields for events. I personally used radish.co but Curated Canvas Weddings is also a great choice. Once you've hired the land, you can contact tent suppliers like White Bison Tipi or Hooe's Yurts to hire some tents for your reception. Then it's just a case of sending out wedding invitations and finding other suppliers, like music, food, flowers, a bar and the all-important logistical elements - toilets, a generator and bins! If you've always fancied putting on your own festival then this could be the ideal method for you.

If you'd prefer to have some of the basics organised for you, there's an option for you too. Some venues, like Chew Valley Weddings, Lakeside Weddings at Maisemore Court, Curated Canvas Weddings or Pennard Hill Farm have marquees or tipi style tents already set up. They'll plan the logistics like ensuring your guests have somewhere to sit, freeing you up to decide on the decor, the style, the music line-up and making sure your guests have lots of fun!

A festival wedding at an indoor venue

You don't need to have an outdoor wedding to bring a festival vibe to your big day. There are lots of advantages to hiring a slightly more traditional venue with indoor space for your festival style wedding. Let's be real - weather is the first one. It can also be a lot of fun thinking about how to decorate and bring the wedding festival theme to an indoor space.

Venues like Sparkford Hall have loads of space both indoor and out, providing your guests the perfect backdrop for an epic party. This venue even has a disco in the cellar!

Another great festival wedding venue is Trinity Centre in Bristol. This has a big tipi-style tent in the garden and tons of indoor space too, so it's a great midway point between an indoor and and outdoor wedding. It has a huge dance floor area, which looks fantastic decorated with fairy lights and colourful bunting.

The Giraffe Shed in Wales is another wedding venue that would be perfect for festival themed weddings. You can put so much of your own personality into the decorating and it has tons of outdoor space for your guests to enjoy too.

Ridge Farm is another great choice. It has cool rustic aesthetics and is the perfect spot for a woodland wedding ceremony. It really suits a music festival theme because the venue used to be a recording studio and has a great musical history. You also get to hold the reception over a swimming pool which is pretty cool.

There's also Matara Centre, which would make an absolutely epic backdrop for a fun festival wedding with its string lights and fun, creative decor.

Getting married at a festival wedding

But what about the bit where you actually exchange vows and get married? You can do this your own way, too. Some venues are licensed to hold legal weddings - this is an important question to ask your venue. If you can't hold your legal ceremony at your chosen venue, a popular choice is to marry at the register office a few days or weeks in advance and have a celebrant-led ceremony on the festival wedding day. This way you get two wedding anniversaries, too! Ideal. Celebrant-led ceremonies are a lot more personal and give you a chance to create your own traditions or customise the ceremony wording.

Festival Themed Wedding Decor

The fun thing about planning a festival wedding is that you have a completely blank canvas. You can make the day the exact theme and style that you have always imagined and you get to make it really personal to you. Choosing the right decor to create a festival themed wedding celebration is a really important way to set the vibe. Here are some ideas for fun ways to style your festival wedding.

Make it personal

Your big day is a celebration of both of you! Think about fun ways you can bring a personal touch into the decor. Perhaps you could have table centrepieces based around places you've both visited - or dedicated to music festivals you've been to!

You could bring this personal touch into your wedding invitations, too - why not create festival ticket-style invites to your big day to get your guests really excited about celebrating with you!

Fun banners or neon signs with your names on are also a great personal touch to add - with the added bonus that you get to keep them and display them around the house afterwards.

Add a pop of colour

Nothing says festival wedding quite like vibrant colour. You could integrate colour into your flowers, into your outfit or - a personal favourite - into your confetti. Paper confetti in bright colours feels super festival themed and I'm a bit biased but it looks great in photos, too. This is another place where you get to choose what makes you happy - pick your favourite colours and make it as bright as you like!

Festival wedding food and drink

If you're foodies, why not turn your festival wedding into a food festival? If food stalls and gourmet street food vibes are your thing then this is another great way to bring a bit of what you love to your wedding day.

Consider hiring street food vans

One great way to create an informal and festival style to your wedding is to hire a food truck. If you have enough space, why not hire a few different ones and let your guests choose their meal? This is a great opportunity as well to make sure that YOU love the food - choose all of your favourites, the day is a celebration of you after all!

Wedding festival bar ideas

A slightly underwhelming warm beer is actually a music festival staple. But for your wedding it really isn't the vibe. A great way to keep your drinks cool is with big ice buckets - or even an ice bathtub! For slightly more fancy drinks, why not hire a mobile bar?

Think about your seating plan

Informal seating is a great idea if you want to bring a relaxed, festival theme to your wedding. Depending on your venue and how the space is set out, you could have long tables with sharing platters to encourage your guests to socialise. Or how about an outdoor picnic? When it comes to how formal you want your sit-down meal to be, you can set the tone.

Festival wedding cake

My advice when it comes to getting a wedding cake is the same as my advice for planning your festival wedding - forget tradition and just do what makes YOU happy. Get a cake in YOUR favourite flavour! Not much of a sweet tooth? Get a cake made of cheese instead! Actually a huge sweet tooth? Why not hold a bake-off and get your guests to bring cakes along so you and your guests have a huge selection to choose from?

Festival Feel Evening Party

Some of my favourite music festival memories are those moments where the sun is setting and you're surrounded by your friends, covered in glitter, drink in hand and ready to dance in a field. If that's the exact vibe you're looking for in planning a festival wedding, here's some ideas for making sure your wedding guests have loads of fun at your evening celebrations.

Entertainment options

A great way to keep the fun festival atmosphere is to have some games. Lawn games always go down very well with both children and children-at-heart. Board games can also be a fun way to entertain your guests. And how about a glitter station to really get your guests into the festival mood? If your venue has noise restrictions past a certain time, a silent disco can be a really great way to keep the music going into the night.

Music

Whether you're keener on a wedding band or a DJ, having live music at your evening reception is a great way to bring the music festival style to life.

Often, wedding bands will be able to adapt their setlist a little bit to your music taste, so if there are certain songs you can't wait to hear played live, this would be a great option. DJs are also usually very happy to play your taste in music, keeping you and your guests dancing through the night.

Dancing

Make sure you have a few bangers in your playlist to keep your guests dancing! An alternative way to get your guests up on their feet is to hire a ceilidh band for your music - this style of traditional dance is loads of fun and definitely something different from the ordinary.

Choosing the perfect festival wedding photographer

If you're planning a fun, vibrant, colourful day, you want to make sure it looks that way in the photos too.

You need a photographer who can go with the flow and capture your day in a relaxed, unobtrusive and non-traditional style. I absolutely love photographing festival style weddings and capturing couples living their best, most authentic lives, both with digital and analogue film photos.

My relaxed, natural and documentary style photography would be perfect for capturing your festival wedding. I love photographing untraditional weddings and I love a good party, so I would fit right in to your day! I can't wait to hear about your plans so get in touch and let's chat!