The Best UK Music Festivals Happening This September (Get Your Boots Ready)

Summer festival season might be winding down but September is quietly one of the best months for live music in the UK. The crowds are smaller, the queues are shorter, and the artists are often more interesting than the big-name headliners who play the same set at Glastonbury, Reading, and Leeds in succession. Here is where to be this month.

End of the Road Festival (3rd to 6th September, Dorset)

End of the Road is the festival for people who love music rather than the idea of music. Set in the beautiful Larmer Tree Gardens in Dorset, it draws genuinely eclectic bookings across folk, indie, alternative, and the kind of leftfield acts you will not find on a mainstream bill. The atmosphere is relaxed, the site is gorgeous, and the discovery potential is genuinely high.

This year's event runs over four days from Thursday the 3rd to Sunday the 6th. If you are looking for a festival that feels like a proper musical community rather than a corporate event dressed in wellies, End of the Road is it. The Dorset countryside at the beginning of September tends to be magnificent. Just bring a light jacket for the evenings.

Lindisfarne Festival (3rd to 6th September, Northumberland)

On the other end of the country, Lindisfarne Festival takes place on the Beal Farm Estate in Northumberland, with views across to Holy Island that are genuinely hard to believe. This is a proper family-friendly festival with a strong programme across multiple stages, and the setting is unlike anything else on the UK festival calendar.

The combination of excellent music, a striking location, and a notably welcoming atmosphere makes Lindisfarne one of the more underrated events of the year. The crowds are manageable, the facilities are good, and you get to tell people you spent the weekend in Northumberland looking at a medieval island while listening to live music, which is an objectively excellent thing to be able to say.

The British Country Music Festival (4th to 6th September, Blackpool)

If country music is your thing, Blackpool is the place to be this weekend. The British Country Music Festival has built a genuinely strong reputation in recent years as the UK's premier celebration of the genre, drawing acts from both sides of the Atlantic and a crowd that takes the music seriously without taking itself too seriously. It runs Friday through Sunday at a venue that leans into the seaside kitsch of Blackpool rather than fighting it, which turns out to be exactly the right call. Three days of country music by the coast is a combination that absolutely works.