Reading Festival 2026— Tickets, Lineup & Dates

Reading Festival's origins are older than most of its audience's parents. The event began in 1961 as the National Jazz Festival, founded by Harold Pendleton of London's Marquee Club, and spent its first decade as an itinerant operation moving between Richmond, Windsor, Sunbury and Plumpton. The lineup absorbed blues, then progressive rock, then hard rock as the sixties closed out — by 1970 the bill was carrying The Who, Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd. The festival settled on Richfield Avenue in Reading in 1971 and, save for a brief and unhappy gap in the early eighties, has been there ever since. The site is a stretch of meadowland on the north bank of the Thames, a short walk from Reading station and close enough to the town centre that the festival has effectively grown up alongside the railway and the river it sits between. The Reading Rock years of the seventies and eighties cemented the festival's identity as a hard rock and heavy metal weekender. Iron Maiden, Motörhead, AC/DC and Status Quo were regulars. The bill leaned increasingly metal through the eighties until a 1988 edition variously remembered as either a triumph or a low point depending on who you ask, after which Mean Fiddler — the promoter responsible for steering it through the nineties — broadened the booking to take in indie, alternative rock and the wave of American grunge and punk that defined the festival's modern voice. Nirvana's 1992 Reading set, in which Kurt Cobain was wheeled onstage in a wheelchair, is the headline-making moment that most rock histories cite as the turning point. The Leeds half of the operation was added in 1999, when Mean Fiddler began running an identical lineup at Temple Newsam in Leeds before the move to Bramham Park in 2003. The twin-site model has been the festival's defining innovation since. Every Reading headliner plays Leeds; every Leeds headliner plays Reading. Acts swap between the sites across the weekend, with one set of bands playing Reading on Friday and Leeds on Saturday, and the other doing the reverse. The result is two festivals with the same booking sheet running concurrently in Berkshire and Yorkshire, sharing logistics, transport and crew but maintaining distinct local cultures. The modern Reading is owned by Festival Republic, which sits inside Live Nation, and is booked by Melvin Benn and his team. The festival has expanded its lineup beyond rock to include rap, pop and electronic headliners, with Eminem, Travis Scott, Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish and Dua Lipa all taking the main stage in recent years. The shift has been controversial in some quarters of the heritage rock press, but the numbers vindicate it. Reading is now the largest single-camping British festival weekend and one of the most reliably sold-out tickets in the British summer.