ACCESS All AreAS VENUE PROFILE
One of a kind
Access visits Dreamland , the venue offering a ‘ plug in and play ’ experience for festival organisers
WoRDs : NIcoLA MAcDoNALD
It ’ s easy to forget how much festivals borrow from the traditional amusement park model . At the average green field festival you can hardly move for fairground rides , food stalls and arcades .
In this context , it ’ s not surprising that the newly revamped and renovated Dreamland amusement park in Margate , Kent , is attracting a lot of attention for it ’ s ‘ plug in and play ’ offering to festival organisers .
There has been an amusement park on the site since the early 1870s , but it ’ s only in recent years that Dreamland has really begun to redefine itself as a top tier venue for organisers . After surviving an attempted closure in 2003 , and following a successful ‘ Save Dreamland ’ campaign , the park reopened in 2015 with a range of new features . Significant investment in 2017 saw new landscaping for the park and a new PA system installed in one of its several unique event spaces .
There ’ s the 6,000-capacity Scenic Stage , the ‘ Hall by the Sea ’, which can hold up to 1,500 , and the allnew Tivoli Gardens , which have enabled the park to accommodate thousands of visitors for a one-of-akind festival experience .
The park hosted 15,000 people in the summer of 2017 for the much-anticipated Demon Dayz festival headlined by Gorillaz , and in April 2018 will welcome the second edition of alternative music event Undercover Festival .
“ As well as being an incredible amusement park it ’ s also an incredible festival site with an incredible infrastructure built into it ,” explains Rebecca Ellis , Dreamland ’ s senior creative producer . “ Usually when you have a festival you would have to bring in all of the rides , theming and decoration . We ’ ve got that here day-to-day with the park , and it ’ s also supported by the permanent infrastructure of the stages we have in and around the site .”
One of the aces up Dreamland ’ s sleeve , continues Ellis , is that the new , revamped venue is still relatively unknown to organisers , producers and artists .
“ Every time we have artists come here it ’ s usually a wildcard on their tour ,” she explains . “ It ’ s something unique that ’ s out of the ordinary , so they approach the site in a much more jovial way than for a bog standard tour date .
“ We do silly things like we ’ ll fire up the dodgems for them at the end of the show or give them some candyfloss or they ’ ll take over an area in one of our seafront pubs and have fish and chips . When people come to Dreamland they arrive and say ‘ wow I didn ’ t know this was here ’ and start to venture out a little bit , which is really nice to see . We pride ourselves on providing that experience .
“ Because we ’ re developing and we ’ re new in our programming we need that ; we want people to have a really good time here because there ’ s a lot of competition in regional venues . Plus , due to our proximity to London , there has to be something special about coming here .”
If there were two words that Ellis would want to define Dreamland as a venue , they would be ‘ fun ’ and ‘ quality ’.
“ I don ’ t think all artists or producers expect high quality from regional venues ,” she muses . “ We want to give them assurances that when they come here we ’ re going to be taking their event seriously and supporting them in the delivery of that .”
The future for Dreamland looks , to put it mildly , busy . The remit for Ellis and her colleagues is to get the event spaces working hard , and continue looking into innovative content growth , collaboratively and also in-house .
“ We ’ re looking at building some of our offseason events , such as Screamland and The Frosted Fairground so that they have a larger remit that isn ’ t just about the park overlay or scare mazes , but there ’ s also music content and concerts and cabaret combined with those .”
It ’ s clear that the newly revamped Dreamland is becoming a venue to watch , and one with a unique offering for organisers , artists and visitors . AAA
38 FEBRUARY 2018 AccEssAA . co . Uk