The festival will take place on the same dates as originally planned at the East London venue.
This year’s edition of Waterworks will take place at The Cause instead of its original intended location of Gunnersbury Park.
The move has come after the festival team revealed that Gunnersbury Park had not yet been given the necessary planning permission to stage events over Waterworks’ planned weekend in September.
The festival’s line-up will now be spread out across seven spaces at East London club The Cause, and will run as a continuous 36-hour party on the same planned dates: 12th and 13th September. It will be the first time that Waterworks has taken place at a different location since launching in 2021.
Confirming the news in a post on Instagram, Waterworks wrote: “It is with real sadness that we announce this year’s festival cannot take place in Gunnersbury Park, as the park has not yet been provided with the necessary planning permission to operate on the relevant dates in 2026.”
Though the planning permission may have ultimately been granted, the Waterworks team said that, as an independent festival, it felt too risky to wait as they “would need to commit to hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of infrastructure orders, supplier and crew commissioning, with no certainty of permission in place”. The event would also have been uninsurable, they said.
Waterworks added: “Ethically, we are not prepared to risk being unable to pay our staff, artists, suppliers, freelancers and crew, many of whom have already committed so much in creating Waterworks with us. Morally, we are not prepared to risk being unable to refund ticket holders.”
The festival will now take in extended sets at The Cause, with programming focused on the venue’s outdoor spaces during the daytime, and its indoor spaces at night. All tickets remain valid for the new-look edition of the festival, and updated ticket terms will be communicated to people who have already purchased them.
Waterworks plans to return to Gunnersbury Park in 2027.
