Farnham Food and Drink Festival is one of the biggest one-day food festivals in the South East, and this year it is not where it has been for the last seventeen.

Roadworks in the town centre pushed the 2026 festival out of its usual footprint. It now runs from Brightwells Yard, with stalls spreading out across The Borough, East Street and the Bush Hotel Courtyard. Sunday 27 September, 10am to 4pm, free entry, and over 100 food and drink traders confirmed across the four areas. Free buses run between them through the day, alongside a farmers' market and live music.

It also opens British Food Fortnight, which is part of why it draws the crowd it does: this is the eighteenth year, and it has built a reputation well beyond Surrey.

What the move actually changes

A four-site layout is a different day to a single high street. Footfall does not spread evenly across four areas — it clumps, and it clumps around whichever site has the strongest anchor. If you are trading, the practical question is not how many people are coming but how many walk past your pitch specifically, and on a new layout nobody has a year of experience to answer that with.

A few things worth planning around:

  • The early-afternoon slot is the one that matters. On a 10am–4pm one-day festival, the middle two hours carry a disproportionate share of the takings. Whatever your fastest setup is, have it ready for that window rather than discovering it at 1pm.
  • Free buses mean visitors move mid-day. That is good for the quieter sites and it means your busy period may not be the one you would expect from a single-site event.
  • Restocking is harder across four sites. Town centre access for a van mid-festival is usually impossible. Whatever you bring is what you have.

Applications are closed — this is a calendar note

Trader applications for 2026 shut some time ago, so if you are not already booked in, this is not an invitation. It is worth knowing about anyway for two reasons.

The first is that a festival of this size, in its first year at a new site, is worth walking as a visitor. You learn more about pitch positioning in an afternoon at somebody else's event than in a season of guessing at your own.

The second is that next year's applications will open off the back of how this one goes. Organisers who have just moved a seventeen-year-old festival will be watching which sites worked. Being in the room, or at least having walked it, puts you in a better position when the 2027 form goes live.

If you are trading

Queues are the thing that decides whether a one-day festival is a good day or a frustrating one. On a four-site layout where people are moving between areas, anyone who joins your queue, looks at the six people ahead of them and wanders off to the next site has cost you a sale you will never see on the till roll.

That is the case for letting people order and pay from their own phone: they can join the queue from wherever they are standing, and the kitchen has the order before they have decided whether to wait. On a day where the crowd has three other sites to drift to, that difference adds up.

If you are heading to Farnham this year — trading or just eating your way round — have a look at the new layout before you go. Brightwells Yard is a genuinely different space to the old footprint, and knowing where the four areas sit relative to each other saves you the first hour of working it out on foot.