Creamfields

Before the festival there was Cream, a weekly house night at Nation, the former Snobs Disco on Wolstenholme Square in Liverpool, from October 1992 to June 2002. The first Creamfields took place on Saturday 2 May 1998 at the Matterley Estate near Winchester, Hampshire: one day, 25,000 people, with Sasha, Paul van Dyk, Daft Punk and Tony De Vit on the bill.

From 1999 the festival moved closer to its club, onto the old Liverpool airfield, where it stayed until 2005. In 2006, for its ninth edition, it moved to Daresbury in the Cheshire countryside and has never left. It went to two days in 2008, three after that and four in 2016; in 2017, for its twentieth birthday, the organisers raised capacity to 280,000 admissions over the weekend. The final day of 2012 was cancelled because of flooding, and the 2020 edition because of COVID-19.

The festival thinks in structures rather than themes: the Steel Yard, a 20-metre-high covered superstructure opened in 2016, a 30,000-capacity indoor stage in 2024, billed by the organisers as the largest in the world, then HALO, a 45-metre circular arena, in 2025. The brand belongs to Cream; Live Nation has run it since 2012. It tried a second UK edition, Creamfields South in Chelmsford, in 2022 and 2023, and has editions in Argentina, Chile and Malta.

The festival has won Best Dance Festival at the UK Festival Awards eight times between 2004 and 2015, and Best Major Festival in 2016. In 2026 it celebrated twenty years at Daresbury from 27 to 30 August, with more than 80,000 festivalgoers expected according to the organisers and more than 250 artists; the 2027 edition, from 26 to 29 August, marks its 30th anniversary.