Creamfields Festival

Where Creamfields happens.

Where is Creamfields? Since 2006 the Creamfields location has been the Daresbury estate in Cheshire. By the festival's own figures the site is 19.6 miles by road from Liverpool and 26 miles from Manchester. Daresbury is a village in the Borough of Halton with a Warrington postal address, which is why the festival also turns up as Creamfields Warrington.

When is Creamfields? Always the August bank holiday weekend. It has run for four days since 2016, Thursday to Sunday, and in 2026 that was 27 to 30 August. The festival asks drivers to follow its own signs rather than a sat-nav, because roads around the site close for the weekend.

It has not always been here. The first Creamfields, in 1998, was in Winchester, in Hampshire. From 1999 to 2005 it was held on the old Liverpool airport at Speke, closer to its parent club, on a site that held 50,000 people. It moved out of the city to Daresbury in 2006 and has stayed.

Creamfields South

For two summers there were two. Creamfields South was launched in 2022, the festival's 25th anniversary, at Hylands Park in Chelmsford over the Platinum Jubilee weekend in June, with David Guetta and Calvin Harris among its headliners, and the Daresbury event was renamed Creamfields North. Creamfields South came back in 2023. That September Live Nation announced it would not return, and from 2024 there has been one Creamfields in England again, at Daresbury.

Creamfields around the world

Outside Creamfields UK, the name has been used for editions in more than twenty countries. Buenos Aires held one from 2001 to 2015 and again from 2024, Chile from 2004 to 2018 and again from 2022, and Hong Kong and Taiwan since 2017. There have also been editions in Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Poland, Russia and Thailand, among others.

The editions abroad are separate events with their own dates and bills. The rest of this guide is about the original, in Cheshire.

How big Creamfields is.

Creamfields capacity is 70,000 people a day, the figure Wikipedia gives, and reports on the 2026 edition put the crowd at more than 80,000 across the four days.

Creamfields attendance is usually quoted as a weekend total, and those totals count admissions, not people: someone with a four-day ticket is counted four times. That is how the published figure reached 280,000 from 2017 to 2019. Read the table below with that in mind. The growth came in steps, each one a day added to the weekend.

The first sell-out came in 2009, at 60,000 over two days. The festival went to three days in 2012 and to four in 2016, and a site expansion in 2017 took the weekend total to its peak.

The audience at home is bigger again. In 2015 Creamfields was streamed live for the first time, to 500,000 people online.

A short history, and who owns Creamfields.

Creamfields grew out of Cream, a weekly house night at Nation, a club in Wolstenholme Square in Liverpool that had once been Snobs Disco. The night ran from October 1992 to June 2002, promoted by Darren Hughes, James Barton and Andy Carroll.

The first Creamfields was a one-day event on 2 May 1998 in Winchester, with Sasha, Paul van Dyk, Daft Punk and Tony De Vit at the top of the bill. The next year it came home to Liverpool, and in 2006 it moved to Daresbury. For its tenth anniversary, in 2008, it became a two-day event.

Who owns Creamfields? Live Nation, since 2012, when it bought Cream Holdings, the company that owned the festival. The same year brought the festival's worst weekend. On Sunday 26 August 2012, the third and final day, the organisers cancelled everything after overnight rain flooded the site, with Calvin Harris, deadmau5, Axwell, Sub Focus and Tiësto still to play. The next year £500,000 went into protecting the site against bad weather, and in 2019 another £2 million into safety, security and the site's environmental impact.

Cream's own home did not last. The Nation building was demolished in 2016, and the brand carried on running the festival without it. The 2020 edition was cancelled for the pandemic and replaced by a virtual festival; 2021 went ahead, and sold out in record time.

In 2026, the 20th year at Daresbury, thunderstorms under a yellow weather warning stopped the music across the site on the Friday night. The festival carried on through the weekend and reported more than 80,000 people.

Why Creamfields is famous.

Creamfields is famous first for its stages. The Arc Stage is the one people know. In 2019 Swedish House Mafia had it to themselves for the day, at their first UK show since 2012.

The Steel Yard came in 2016: a 15,000-capacity steel structure built by Acorn Events, big enough that it became a small festival of its own, with Creamfields Steel Yard events in Liverpool and London. Beside them are APEX, a 30,000-capacity indoor arena, and, since 2025, HALO, a circular arena 45 metres across with lighting, visuals and sound all the way round.

The second is its record. Creamfields was named Best Dance Festival at the UK Festival Awards several times between 2004 and 2015, and Best Major Festival in 2016. The DJ Awards gave it Best International Dance Music Festival in 2014, and DJ Mag placed it 13th in its list of the world's best festivals in 2019.

The third is that it has lasted. The first edition was in 1998, and since 1999 every Creamfields in England has been held at the end of August.

The music

What the music actually is.

Creamfields was a house night's festival first. Cream was a house club, and the 1998 bill put Sasha, Paul van Dyk and Daft Punk in one field. From there the bill followed big-room dance music wherever it went: Tiësto and Paul van Dyk from the late 2000s, then Avicii, David Guetta and Swedish House Mafia, and now Calvin Harris and Martin Garrix at the top.

Trance has never left. Paul van Dyk, on the first bill in 1998, headlined in most years from 2008 to 2014, and Armin van Buuren, Above & Beyond and Aly & Fila followed him. For 2026 the festival billed Tiësto with a new sound inspired by his trance roots, and Ferry Corsten was on the line-up.

Techno has its own arenas. Carl Cox has headlined again and again since 2007, and in 2026 he was booked to take over HALO on the Friday. Adam Beyer, Nina Kraviz and Charlotte de Witte have all been on the bill, and Amelie Lens brought her AURA show to Creamfields in 2026 as a UK festival exclusive. It reaches further out, too: in 2025 the Misfit stage had the hardstyle DJ Maddix, and Fatboy Slim had a stage of his own on the last day.

Drum and bass is the part this site cares about most, and Creamfields has booked it for longer than its posters suggest. Sub Focus was due on the flooded Sunday in 2012. Chase & Status were among the 2016 headliners, and Pendulum were on the 2020 bill before the pandemic cancelled it. In 2025 Chase & Status, who started out in jungle before moving to drum and bass, headlined the Arc Stage on the Friday for the first time, with Sub Focus and Andy C, the founder of RAM Records, also on the bill. The 2026 line-up had Andy C again, with Shy FX, Hybrid Minds and Hedex.

The festival's own film from its 2019 After Series is two minutes of that crowd, the bass and drum and bass tent at full stretch.

For a listener who comes from breaks, jungle or drum and bass, that is the useful thing to know. Creamfields is not a drum and bass festival, and the Arc Stage mostly belongs to EDM. But the music this site comes from has had a real place on its bill since at least 2012, and in 2025 it headlined the Arc.

Hearing Creamfields from home.

Creamfields films its stages. Beatport has streamed and filmed whole sets there: of the 62,877 DJ sets behind the Selector, 52 are from Creamfields, 51 of them Beatport's, from Carl Cox and Adam Beyer to CamelPhat and Eric Prydz. None of the drum and bass acts named above is among them.

The festival also puts full sets on its own channel, and some artists post their own. The two below are Ewan McVicar on the Steel Yard in 2023, the most watched of his Creamfields sets, on his own channel; and Pete Tong in 2025, on the festival's, who was on the first Creamfields bill in 1998.

Creamfields and Tomorrowland once shared a Steel Yard, for a one-off Garden of Madness event in Liverpool in 2018; for the Belgian festival, read our guide to Tomorrowland. For where Chase & Status and Andy C come from, read the drum and bass guide and the jungle guide. And the Selector plays one full DJ set at random from 62,877, if you would rather not choose.