b-side's Big Weekend

A four-day contemporary arts festival on the Isle of Portland, featuring site-specific artworks, performances and creative encounters across the island inspired by place and community.

This year’s festival theme, “That Other Place,” draws inspiration from the Isle of Portland’s proud oddness, the now-defunct Portland Fair, and local resident David Palmer’s extraordinary Fair archives.

In 2026, we’re bringing this to life through artists and communities bringing back their interpretation of the Fair alongside ambitious, year-long artist projects rooted in the island.

The Portland Fair was a hugely popular event for more than 200 years – part childhood rite, part otherworldly escape – That Other Place will reawaken the experience of it in a stranger, twistier, sideways sort of way.

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b-side's Big Weekend