We tried to solve Boomtown
‘A festival, but not as you know it’ — Boomtown’s strapline isn’t wrong. The 70,000 drawn to the South Downs every August know this isn’t your standard arena-and-stage setup. Boomtown is different: part festival, part theatre, all a fever dream. For five extraordinary days, it becomes a living alternate city unlike anything else.
What makes it so distinct? “The Storyline”, Boomtown’s own modern mythical world. It’s a mix of live performances, immersive theatre and interactive quests spanning the entire festival. Understandably, Boomtown newcomers might find this daunting or simply overwhelming. We tried completing The Storyline at the last festival and are here to explain what we found and where to start. Hopefully you’ll know how to dive in for the next edition.
Every year heralds a new chapter of the Boomtown Story, and 2025 ushered in the fourth instalment: The Power of Now. The chapters are standalone so no homework needed, although there are recaps on social media if you want. Veterans of past chapters are going to spot deeper layers and call backs but you can easily go in cold.
As you follow The Storyline, you move through the six districts that make up the city. Each contains its own unique theme, venues, cast of characters, and quests. These include: Old Town, a faux 18th-century seaport filled with pirates, fortune tellers and Irish bars; Botanica, an otherworldly oasis filled with plants, strange animals and people recruiting you into competing cults; and Metropolis, a futuristic dystopia where all that matters is crypto. The aim is to complete quests across all six districts and finish The Storyline. There isn’t a prescribed order, you can start anywhere.
The main street of Boomtown, Letsbeavenue is probably the best place to begin. A street of barely controlled chaos, teeming with actors and complete with a hotel, laundrette and police station. Every time we walked through something different happened. We become signed up to the national pegging service (your guess is as good as ours), joined a paper-based dating app (“Looking for: man, woman, or ostrich”) and roped into a protest against the hokey cokey. If your only Storyline experience is interacting with miscreants on this street in a spare hour between sets you’d have an enjoyable time.
Scratch beneath the surface and the bones of the quests in each area are actually broadly similar. They involve collecting a series of stamps, coins, or other tokens by completing tasks given to you by the characters. Nonetheless, they are all dressed so differently that you barely notice the similarities. Our tasks for the week involve posting letters, filming mini adverts, and doing silly dances. If you’re ever stuck, an actor suggests ideas. Once all that district’s stamps are collected, you end up at its final venue. This is usually some variety of “final boss” style task, finishing it unlocks their part of The Storyline and you can go to the next.
Whilst the smaller venues add to the experience and immersion, their capacity is limited. This means queuing is at times inevitable. For us everything generally moved quickly, we found it was rarely more than a quarter of an hour. Characters subtly managed the flow without it feeling like hard work. Outside one sideshow we found a bank manager surveying us on the letter Q.
‘Yes or No?’ he barked.
We chose No.
‘Congratulations no queueing for you.’ We skipped ahead. The lesson: always interact with the characters.
There are other ways to speed through quests. Boomtown has its own currency, Boomtown bucks. You can get these for completing tasks or from trading with others. You can also use these to bribe your way through and skip ahead on parts. We did this with varying success, so keep your eyes open and collect these if you can. You’ll also quickly encounter the concept of trading. Swapping items to get by or skip ahead in The Storyline. You can trade literally anything; even jokes and poems will work. Boomtown would prefer you used recycled or handmade objects, though in practice many use any old tat. One of our group traded the tab from a beer can for a task from a character.
It’s when you have a task that the immersive world truly comes alive. Much time and love is clearly spent on the incredibly intricate sets. These often offer attentive visitors clues about what to do next. We found ourselves inspecting doors, signs and windows for clues and seeing the immersive world in a completely different way. Beware though, Boomtown also excels at pulling you off course and delivering the unexpected. In the midst of one task, we were dragged into a Victorian boudoir playing dubstep and found ourselves raving amongst beds and velvet cushions. With these distractions, it took us about four hours to do two full districts.
For the lucky few, there is actually an official ending — though most never reach it. The lineup is too good, and the sound systems are too loud. Instead the festival closes, not with a headliner, but a ceremony. It’s a moment that belongs to everyone no matter how much Storyline activity you complete.
This year, Boomtown’s Chapter 5 is “Radical Redesign”. It promises new stages, new areas, and new ideas. We will be back, maybe next time we’ll solve the whole thing.