Festival Insights NEWS: Victorious – A Value Festival With Values

After growing out of its original site at Portsmouth’s naval dockyard, Victorious Festival is firmly anchored on Southsea’s seafront. We caught up with founder, James Ralls to chart the journey through growth, acquisition and sales to its place as a key player and supporter of the local music and events scene.

Where did it all start?

I started out building houses, but then bought a pub and got my mates to come and work with me. We used to put a couple of gigs on every week. We had Annie Mac in our pub, which was a highlight for us, because the pub could only fit 200 people in. But then we got asked to put on mobile bars in different places.

One of those was in the dockyard down in Portsmouth, which was something called Victorious Vintage. There were all sorts of things that were supposed to happen that didn’t happen. The dockyard actually said to me, Can you sort of sort this out? And I was…