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19 January 2018 / Nicholas Dobson
Issue: 7777 / Categories: Features , Local government
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Music festivals— a walk in the park?

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Nicholas Dobson explores the reasons why Wireless Festival 2016 was a lawfully held event

  • A London borough lawfully hired out part of a public park to festival promoters, under s 145 of the Local Government Act 1972.

In August 1969, armed only with a tropical rainforest of hair (compared with my present meagre scattering) I made for the Isle of Wight Festival to see star attraction Bob Dylan and other luminaries. Music festivals, then in their relative infancy, have since become a mainstream part of the national fabric with middle-aged and even elderly politicians strutting what (if anything) remains of their stuff.

But it was a proposed music festival in Finsbury Park, Haringey, London, that managed its own moment of legal fame. For in the Court of Appeal on 17 November 2017 in R (Friends of Finsbury Park) v Haringey London Borough Council and others [2017] EWCA Civ 1831 Hickinbottom, Singh and Treacy LJJ had to decide whether the Council acted lawfully in using s 145 of the Local

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