Standing in Stockwood Park among thousands of people singing, dancing and waving their arms in the air as fireworks, lights and lasers lit up the sky, it didn’t feel particularly like a celebration of the past 150 years in Luton – it felt like a glimpse of the future.
Something had shifted by the time Kaiser Chiefs frontman Ricky Wilson replaced the lyrics of “Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby” with “Luton, Luton, Luton, Luton”.
Not because of the Leeds indie rockers or their hit-heavy headline send-off for Party in the Park. It was because, for once, our town was the stage.
More than a big birthday party, it felt like a town beginning to understand what it could become.
And as a proud Lutonian who has crow-barred myself into the emerging grassroots music scene here, that meant possibility.
Was it perfect? No. But queues at the bars are first festival fare and fixable, seeing as this is likely to happen again. More on that shortly.
More importantly, there was a sense that this wasn’t an event happening in Luton that people had been invited to attend. It was Luton putting on an event for itself.
That distinction matters.
Because our town has spent an awfully long time being told what it is by other people. For most of our lives, the town has existed somewhere between punchline and punching bag in popular culture.
Lorraine Chase’s famous 1977 Campari TV advert made “Luton Airport” the butt of a joke about class and aspiration. The plastic pitch at Kenilworth Road made us football pariahs, circa 1985-89. And then came ‘Crap Towns’ in 2004, the book which branded itself as a guide to Britain’s 50 worst places to live. Luton topped the unwanted podium. Incidentally, in the previous year’s edition Hull came top of the pile, but in 2017 it became UK City of Culture. Food for thought, perhaps?
It is easy to dismiss some of that stuff now as harmless British humour. But when you’re from Luton, you know how long those jokes can stick. And that is why Party in the Park was the latest in a series of events that mattered.
Because the most powerful antidote to a town’s reputation isn’t political spin or a marketing campaign telling people how wonderful it is.
It’s giving people something to see.
Something to hear.
Something to experience.
It is show, don’t tell.
On this day, Luton gave people that. And it wasn’t just Kaiser Chiefs either.
Favourite things JW Paris opened the main stage. A bloody good live band, the Luton fronted trio were the one act from the line-up that also played Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Stockwood Park two years ago, having honed those chops in small venues all over town and beyond.
That is the bit that can sometimes get lost when we talk about big events. The local music scene isn’t something that exists separately from the headline acts, like Kaiser Chiefs. It is the foundation underneath them and venues like The Castle and The Bear Club are the bedrock for giving emerging artists somewhere to play.
Like Olivia Lynn. The Lutopian internet has been abuzz since her performance.
The Stopsley country-pop starlet drew a huge crowd and made that massive stage her own, shimmying her tail-feathers through toe-tappers including ‘I Really Hate Boys’, ‘Open’ and ‘Little Miss Nightmare’, which closed her joyous set. Look out for her next performance and Comic Con next week and then her hometown takeover at The Castle on November 6-7.
Afterwards, she told the BBC backstage: “I’ve never done anything like that in my life. It was insane and I’m so proud to say that the first time was in my home town. I can’t believe it.”
She then made perhaps the most important point of the whole weekend.
“I just think Luton has so much to offer. I think the people are amazing and we are what a real community is. Like I’ve said before and I’ll keep screaming from the top of my lungs, we get such a bad rap, and there’s so many other places that are so much worse than us,” she said.
Exactly.
There is something particularly powerful about hearing that from someone who has just stood on a major stage in front of thousands of people and experienced the town at its best, like few others have… so far
No-one is trying to pretend Luton has zero problems, but as Olivia put it, those problems aren’t the whole story and, firstly, there’s a better tale to tell ourselves.
Then it’s incumbent on Luton to bring the rest of the Blighty to us – not for a Lorraine Chase-esque departure lounge exit via LU2, nor as a Channel 4 police docu-portrayal as a crime-ridden hellscape – but as party central, with events big and small to draw people in.
Enter Kaiser Chiefs. Crafted in Leeds, newly loved in Luton. A field full of “Na Na Na Na Naas”. A march through two decades of singalong singles, including ‘Ruby’.
Its familiar chorus rattled out in front of four women, all named Ruby, all with a connection to the town. A “never happened before” moment declared by to BBC Three Counties Radio presenter Justin Dealey, who had organised it.
It was daft.
It was playful.
And it was triumphant.
Then the fireworks went off.
The whole day felt like a statement.
It also felt like a continuation of something that began in the same park two years ago.
When Coldplay headlined Radio 1’s Big Weekend in 2024, Chris Martin wrote a special song about Luton called ‘Orange’. It drew attention, but lasting impact of that weekend was that it brought more than 100,000 people to the town and generated an estimated £6.7 million for the local economy.
Remarkable as that was, until Party in the Park was realised, the danger was that we might simply look back on it as one of those extraordinary weekends that happened once and never again.
Saturday September 12, 2026, was important because it said: why not?
Why shouldn’t Luton host another major event?
Why shouldn’t thousands of people come here for music?
Why shouldn’t national artists play here?
Why shouldn’t local artists stand alongside them?
And, crucially, why shouldn’t there be another one?
As it happens, there now can be.
Luton Council has just secured a licence allowing it to host a three-day entertainment event at Stockwood Park once a year, with capacity for up to 14,999 people.
That is potentially a huge deal.
Party in the Park wasn’t the end of something. It might have been part of the new beginning.
For the fuller picture, just look towards the town centre, a stone’s throw away from Stockwood.
The Stage is being built, with a 600-capacity performance venue just across from where Luton Town’s new Power Court stadium is rising, due to open in 2028. A 25,000-capacity Power Court stadium, which is also planned to host live music.
Think about that for a moment. A state-of-the-art stadium in the centre of Luton. A dedicated 1,800-capacity music venue within the Power Court development. A 600-capacity performance venue at The Stage. A major outdoor events space at Stockwood Park. The Castle. The Bear Club. That’s an entire live music eco-system.
And there’s a growing collection of musicians, promoters, venues and volunteers trying to make something happen.
From not being able to compete with smaller neighbouring towns such as Bedford and St Albans as they seemed to attract more cultural attention, we’ll soon have everything all in one place. Folks from those towns will start coming to us.
Perhaps we’re finally getting over that inferiority complex on a grander scale.
It’s a reflection of the turning tide I’ve personally seen at The Castle as a co-conspirator of the Vandalism Begins at Home collective. Transformed from just a pub, it’s now recognised as a music venue. Acts come with preconceived notions of what Luton is. They leave with minds changed.
Not because of massive budgets – or, frankly, any budget at all – but because, as one of a small posse of local promoters – shout out to Vandal Ben Barry and The Castle crew – all who keep putting on shows because we believe people will come if you give them something worth coming to.
A sold-out Summer Assembly all-day festival last month at the self-styled ‘most ass-kicking alternative venue’ in town was a massive achievement to that end, because it showed that, now, people will come to Luton for a good-quality, lovingly curated music event, no matter the size. Next week, the venue will host Castlefest, which will hopefully continue that story.
These things matter.
Music isn’t the only thing happening, of course. Luton has always had a creative energy that is easy to overlook when the conversation is dominated by its problems. From the extraordinary 50-year legacy of the Luton Carnival to theatre, visual art, dance, filmmaking, literature, poetry and wealth of independent creatives, there are people all over this town making things, telling stories and creating spaces for other people to do the same. We just need to look and, more importantly, support it. Use it or lose it, people. We can’t afford that. We’re only just getting started.
That’s not to pretend that music is somehow more important than any of the above endeavours. It is simply the bit of Luton’s cultural life that I know best, and the bit where there’s a particularly exciting opportunity opening up in front of us.
Because cultural infrastructure isn’t just about building a £100million development or putting 25,000 seats around a football pitch.
It is about having somewhere for the band or the artist that might one day fill those seats to play when they’re starting out. It is about having promoters willing to take a chance on them. It is about having audiences willing to turn up. And, ultimately, it is about giving young people a reason to believe they can make something here.
And perhaps nobody represents that possibility better right now than Myles Smith, though The Itch are making waves and their song ‘No More Sprechgesang’ will soon appear on EA Sports FC27 football video game soundtrack (which is the new name for the FIFA).
But the former, is a Luton schoolboy who has gone from playing locally to becoming a genuine global pop star.
When he returned to the town for his hometown takeover earlier this summer, thousands turned out to see him.
And he has already spoken about wanting to be the first artist to play at Power Court when it opens. “Let me open it,” he said he’s told Sony Music chairman and Luton Town FC director Rob Stringer.
That isn’t some fantasy venue.
You can see Power Court now emerging from the ground ahead of its long-awaited opening for the 2028-29 season. And the plans include scope for up to three major summer music events at the arena, alongside the separate 1,800-capacity music venue, which should come along after the stadium is built.
Surely, Myles will get his wish to play to 25,000 people in the middle of the town he grew up in.
But his greatest gift, besides the music, is showing every other kid here that Luton is a place where you can start something and make something of yourself. We cannot underestimate how important that hope is to young people growing up here.
Unfortunately, the town has a perception problem. The difference can be that future generations, unlike mine, when the target of the same old reheated slurs about Luton, might be able to bat them away with more confidence. Better still, that the barbs stop getting thrown their way entirely.
There is a wider economic argument too.
Luton’s cultural ambitions shouldn’t be dismissed as nice things to have. The £6.7million economic impact from Radio 1’s Big Weekend was real. So were the 75,000-plus visitor day trips and more than 15,000 commercial bed nights generated during the event.
Power Court will soon have a football stadium, obviously. But it will also be a music venue, a leisure destination and part of a much wider regeneration of the town centre.
The Stage is another piece of that puzzle.
And Stockwood Park now has the potential to become a regular destination for large-scale music events.
This is what cultural soft power looks like at town level. Get a big enough artist on a stage and people who might never otherwise think about Luton suddenly have a reason to come here.
They spend money here.
They stay here.
They talk about it.
They post photographs of it.
They go home and tell someone what Luton was like. For the right reasons.
That matters when your town has spent decades having other people tell tales about what it is like here.
And if you doubt the power of music to change perceptions, consider what happened after Radio 1’s Big Weekend. People didn’t just talk about Coldplay or RAYE or Sabrina Carpenter.
They talked about Luton.
They talked about how good the weekend had been.
They talked about being proud of the town.
For a town that has spent so long being told it should be embarrassed about itself, that is not insignificant.
And there was something wonderfully Luton about my own experience of Party in the Park. I bumped into the supremely talented emerging singer-songwriter The Looted Youth, aka Ben Thomson. Organisers of future festivals take note.
I saw the Nangla brothers, Jaspal and Jasbir from Two Side Studios – brilliant local documentary makers who I drunkenly snuck backstage with me at the Big Weekend in 2024. Decent bit of blagging, that! It earned me a cameo in their award-winning film, ‘The Orange Weekend‘.
I bumped into Nik Scott, lead singer from ScreamingMechanicalBrain, the multi-talented Ed Smith and Luton’s Deadpool, minus the superhero costume, though flanked by Spider Man.
That was the thing. It wasn’t just an event.
It was full of Luton people. Luton musicians. Luton creatives. Our town is full of talent.
And perhaps that is why this feels particularly significant now.
Because Luton is changing in many different ways at precisely the moment it needs to. Some refuse to see it. To gently twist a classic Stone Roses lyric: the past is theirs but the future’s ours.
The Vauxhall factory closed last year after 120 years of vehicle production, despite protests, bringing the curtain down on an industrial chapter that had defined the town for generations.
Luton is a post-industrial town. So what comes next?
Well, perhaps it isn’t about trying to recreate what we have lost. Perhaps it is about building something new.
A town that still has its airport, its football club, its manufacturing heritage and its extraordinary diversity, but which also has top-class music, culture, entertainment and creativity at the heart of its future. If Hull can do it, why not Luton?
We don’t need to pretend Luton is perfect. It isn’t.
There are serious, but not unique, problems here. There is poverty, deprivation, inequality, struggling high streets and plenty of things that still need fixing.
But that is precisely why we shouldn’t allow those things to become the entirety of the story.
A town is more than its problems.
It is more than a ranking in a book published 23 years ago.
It is more than a joke from a 1970s advert.
And it is certainly more than the lazy national stereotype that has followed Luton for my entire lifetime.
Party in the Park gave us our latest glimpse of another version of the town.
We are noisy, diverse, chaotic and proud. And now you’re gonna believe us – we’re in the music game now… and I predict a riot.
This is a Luton where a country-pop singer can walk onto a huge stage and tell thousands of people how proud she is to be from here.
A Luton where the next generation of artists can see a 25,000-capacity stadium being built and think: one day, that could be me.
That, to me, is what the 150th anniversary should really be about.
Not simply looking backwards at the Luton that was. But asking what kind of Luton we want for the next 150 years.
We used to punch above our weight economically and industrially. Perhaps now, finally, we’re learning how to punch above our weight culturally too.
And if a fantastic summer of music events all across was anything to go by, Luton is finding its voice.
More importantly, I think it’s finally finding its feet.
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