Victoria Park, London, end of August: All Points East wrapped up its two-weekend run with a Friday headline set from Tyler, The Creator that summed up why the festival has finally found its feet. He opened with fireworks and 'Big Poe', staging his entrance around a full-size fake Underground train carriage in front of roughly 50,000 people, then tore through tracks spanning She, Earfquake, Noid and See You Again, vanishing into the carriage and reappearing on the runway as pyrotechnics went off around him. Between songs he reminisced about London, noting XL Recordings was the first label he ever signed to.
What made the day work wasn't just the spectacle but the bill around it. Rex Orange County, Mariah the Scientist, Clipse, Rochelle Jordan, Ecca Vandal and Turnstile spanned hip-hop, R&B, punk and hardcore, and somehow it all hung together. Turnstile were the wildcard — a hardcore band headlining this same patch of park at last year's Outbreak festival, now dropping into a Tyler-dominated lineup and dragging dozens of first-timers into their first mosh pit, rain and all. Ecca Vandal bridged worlds too, all bedroom-punk snarl and huge choruses.
Over on the X Stage, Rochelle Jordan delivered sleek R&B with an electronic edge borrowed from collaborators like Kaytranada, and revealed she was born in High Wycombe before closing with her Mariah Carey collaboration.
The bigger story is the festival itself. After eight years, All Points East has stopped feeling like a run of big outdoor gigs and started behaving like a proper institution. The site layout is settled, the bookings have real depth rather than token support acts, and — crucially — the sound is finally good, thanks to upgraded East Stage screens and production on the scale you'd expect from AEG, the company behind Coachella and BST Hyde Park. It may never have Glastonbury's camping culture or Reading's mud-soaked mythology, but as a single-day proposition in east London it now competes with the country's major festival weekends on quality alone.
For travellers, that's the appeal: world-class headliners without the tent, the wellies or the week-long commitment. Fly into London, base yourself in the east of the city, and you can catch a festival-calibre lineup and still sleep in a hotel bed. If you're planning a summer trip to the capital, the late-August All Points East weekends are now an easy anchor for a city break — Victoria Park sits in handy reach of Hackney, Bethnal Green and Shoreditch, with plenty of food and pubs nearby for the days between shows.
