V Festival

V Festival
Genre	Music
Frequency	Annually (penultimate weekend in August)
Location(s)	Temple Newsham, Leeds Hylands Park, Essex Weston Park, Staffordshire
Years active	1996–2017, 2020
Inaugurated	17 August 1996; 27 years ago (1996-08-17)
Founder	Richard Branson
Most recent	21 August 2020 (2020-08-21) – 23 August 2020 (2020-08-23)
Participants	See lineups
Attendance	170,000 (2015)
Capacity	90,000
Organised by	Virgin Group
Sponsor	Virgin Media
Website	vfestival.com

V Festival, often referred to as V Fest or simply V, was an annual music festival held in the United Kingdom during the third weekend in August. The event was held at two parks simultaneously which shared the same bill; artists performed at one location on Saturday and then swapped on Sunday. The sites were located at Hylands Park in Chelmsford and Weston Park in South Staffordshire. In 2017, the final year of this format, the capacity of each site was 90,000.^[1][2]

Richard Branson announced on 30 October 2017 that V Festival would be discontinued but that a new festival would replace it.^[3] In 2018, a new festival called "Rize" was held in on the same weekend as the "V Festival" but only at Hylands Park. However, on 5 August 2020, it was announced that the "V Festival" was to return to Hylands Park, without an audience (due to the COVID-19 pandemic), later that month.^[4]

The "V" represented the Virgin Group, with the event being sponsored by Virgin Media.

It was originally televised by Channel 4 from 1997 to 2013, predominantly on its sister channel 4Music, with the exception of the 2003 event with ITV in charge. It was then televised by MTV from 2014 to 2015, and the 2016 edition of the festival was televised by Channel 5. ITV returned to televising the V Festival upon its return in 2020, with coverage hosted by Joel Dommett and Maya Jama.^[4]