Reading and Leeds 2026 Dance Stage: The Warehouse, Explained by DJs

The Warehouse was the dance music stage at Reading and Leeds Festival 2026: a new, purpose-built stage that ran at both Richfield Avenue in Reading and Bramham Park in Leeds from Friday 28 to Sunday 30 August 2026, with a different Skepta b2b at each site. It carried house, tech house, drum and bass and bass music across all three arena days, from Hybrid Minds, Hedex and Hamdi to Mall Grab, Rossi. and Silva Bumpa. The 2026 festival is over, and NME's review said The Warehouse "never seemed to be empty". Reading and Leeds returns on 26 to 29 August 2027, and no 2027 line-up or stage plan had been announced by late September 2026. Here is the full Warehouse line-up with set times for both sites, the acts that mattered, and why Britain's biggest rock weekend built itself a rave room.

The Warehouse at Reading and Leeds 2026 at a glance

• What: The Warehouse, a purpose-built dance music stage, new for 2026 at both sites
• When: Friday 28 to Sunday 30 August 2026, the three arena days of a festival that ran 27 to 30 August, with Kasabian headlining Leeds on the Thursday
• Where: Richfield Avenue (Little John's Farm), Reading, capacity 105,000, and Bramham Park, Leeds, capacity 95,000 (Pollstar). The Warehouse's own capacity was not published
• Status: over. Reading and Leeds 2027 runs 26 to 29 August 2027; the festival has not said whether The Warehouse returns
• Announced: 27 March 2026, as part of a second-wave announcement of more than 60 names
• Design: viewing platforms behind the decks and large-scale screen production, described by Festival Republic boss Melvin Benn as an "old school rave vibe, DJ in the middle of the audience, dance platforms"
• Closing sets at Reading: Skepta b2b Prospa (Friday 21:40), Max Dean b2b Luke Dean (Saturday 21:50), Hybrid Minds (Sunday 20:00)
• Closing sets at Leeds: Hybrid Minds (Friday 19:25), Skepta b2b East End Dubs (Saturday 21:05), Rossi. (Sunday 19:15)
• Both-sites acts included: Hybrid Minds, Hedex, Hamdi, Mall Grab, Rossi., Silva Bumpa, OMAR+, SOTA, Notion
• Context: part of what Festival Republic called the biggest staging and arena overhaul in the festival's 37-year history, replacing the hybrid Chevron stage introduced in 2024
• Headliners 2026: Charli XCX, Dave, RAYE, Fontaines D.C., Florence + The Machine and Chase & Status (Live) at both sites, plus Kasabian headlining Leeds on the Thursday

What is The Warehouse? Reading and Leeds finally builds a real dance stage

For decades, Reading and Leeds treated dance music as a guest in someone else's house. Electronic acts got squeezed into tents built for bands, onto bills programmed around guitars, in front of crowds who had mostly come for something else. The Warehouse was the festival admitting that era is over. Announced on 27 March 2026 alongside more than 60 new names, it was billed as a brand-new, purpose-built home for dance music covering house, tech house, drum and bass and more, at both the Reading and Leeds sites.

The word that matters is purpose-built. The festival described the stage as built for dance music, with viewing platforms behind the decks and large-scale screen production. Melvin Benn, the Festival Republic managing director who has steered the festival for decades, described the concept to NME in July 2026 as an "old school rave vibe, DJ in the middle of the audience, dance platforms". That is club architecture, not festival-tent architecture, and anyone who has played both knows the difference is everything. A DJ set dies in a room built for a drum riser and a barrier 20 metres from the front row. It lives when the crowd wraps around the booth.

The Warehouse arrived as one piece of what Festival Republic called the biggest staging and arena overhaul in the festival's 37-year history. The 2026 arena map, revealed in full on 14 July 2026, ran: The Grid, the renamed main stage; The Gallery, a new undercover stage for live acts; The Warehouse for dance; The Ballroom, dressed in chandeliers and draping; The Canopy for emerging artists; and The Yard, a Reading-only open-air club-culture space built from shipping containers. Benn told NME, "This really is the next phase of Reading & Leeds festivals."

The logic of the split was unusually candid. Speaking to NME in July 2026, Benn said The Chevron had been intended to bridge live music, DJs and dance music, but "became a bit of a hybrid, and it didn't really work". Fans, he said, had told him "the need for a dance stage was paramount". That is a festival boss publicly retiring his own experiment. The Chevron, the 40,000-capacity open-air arena introduced in 2024 for dance, pop and hip-hop, was that hybrid. The Warehouse was its dance-only successor, and the honesty about why is worth noting: mixed-genre mega-stages flatten everything into festival wallpaper. A dedicated dance room, built like a dance room, is the fix.

The full Warehouse lineup for 2026

The core of the bill played both sites: Hybrid Minds, Hedex, Mall Grab, Rossi., Silva Bumpa, Hamdi, OMAR+, SOTA, Notion, Riordan, IN PARALLEL, Julian Fijma, Saint Ludo, Djammin and Meeshy were all billed at both Reading and Leeds. Read that list back and it is a surprisingly accurate map of where UK dance music actually is in 2026: drum and bass at arena scale (Hybrid Minds, Hedex), the bass and dubstep resurgence (Hamdi, SOTA), the UKG revival's second generation (Silva Bumpa, OMAR+), house and minimal's festival-conquering wing (Mall Grab, Rossi.), and a supporting cast pulled from the club circuit rather than the algorithm.

Then there were the exclusives, and this is where the booking got genuinely clever. Skepta was billed on The Warehouse at both sites, but with a different partner at each: Skepta b2b Prospa at Reading, and Skepta b2b East End Dubs at Leeds. He also had a solo slot on The Grid main stage earlier on the same day at each site. Two one-off pairings, one per site, is exactly the kind of you-had-to-be-there programming that dance festivals like AVA and Junction 2 have used for years and that Reading and Leeds had never really attempted. If you have followed why Skepta moved into house music with Más Tiempo, neither pairing is random: Prospa brings the rave-hardware energy, East End Dubs the rolling tech house depth, and Skepta sits credibly in both worlds now.

Beyond the Skepta sets, Reading got Max Dean b2b Luke Dean, Bou, Luuk Van Dijk, Joss Dean b2b Nafe Smallz and Tommy Phillips as site exclusives, plus KING BOOO!, who appeared on the final Reading stage times, while Leeds got Alisha, Locky, [IVY] and Jack Marlow. Bou, announced for Reading in the March second wave, sat on the Reading Sunday alongside the drum and bass bill.

The dance story did not end at The Warehouse either. Duke Dumont was added in the same second wave, Chase & Status headlined the main stage with their live show, and Reading's shipping-container Yard gave club culture a second, open-air foothold on site. But The Warehouse was the centre of gravity.

Day splits: who played The Warehouse at Reading

The official day splits went live in July 2026, and NME published the full stage times on 19 August 2026. At Reading, The Warehouse ran like this, closing act first:

• Friday 28 August: Skepta b2b Prospa 21:40, OMAR+ 19:40, Silva Bumpa 17:45, Luuk Van Dijk 16:30, Riordan 15:00, Julian Fijma 14:00, Djammin 13:00, Meeshy 12:00. The garage-and-bass day, closed by the b2b built to pull the biggest crossover crowd of the weekend.
• Saturday 29 August: Max Dean b2b Luke Dean 21:50, Rossi. 19:45, IN PARALLEL 17:45, Joss Dean b2b Nafe Smallz 16:25, Tommy Phillips 15:00, KING BOOO! 13:30, Mall Grab 12:00. House and minimal day, and quietly the most club-literate bill the festival had ever assembled.
• Sunday 30 August: Hybrid Minds 20:00, Bou 19:00, SOTA 18:00, Hedex 17:00, Notion 15:30, Hamdi 14:30, Saint Ludo 13:00. Drum and bass and bass music day, and on paper the loudest day on the Richfield Avenue site.

Reading's Friday and Sunday bookended each other nicely: garage swing to open the weekend, full-weight bass to close it. The Saturday was the sleeper, a minimal and house bill put in front of a festival crowd rather than a club crowd, with Rossi. and the Dean brothers closing it out.

Day splits: who played The Warehouse at Leeds, and the rotation pattern

Bramham Park ran the same programme rotated across the weekend, mirroring how the main-stage headliners flipped between sites. The Leeds Warehouse splits, closing act first:

• Friday 28 August: Hybrid Minds 19:25, Hedex 18:25, SOTA 17:25, Notion 15:55, Hamdi 14:55, Saint Ludo 13:25, [IVY] 12:25. Leeds opened with the drum and bass and bass day that Reading saved for Sunday.
• Saturday 29 August: Skepta b2b East End Dubs 21:05, Alisha 19:00, Locky 17:00, OMAR+ 15:30, Julian Fijma 14:30, Djammin 13:15, Meeshy 12:00. The Leeds-exclusive Skepta pairing topped the garage-and-house day.
• Sunday 30 August: Rossi. 19:15, Mall Grab 17:30, Riordan 16:00, IN PARALLEL 14:45, Silva Bumpa 13:30, Jack Marlow 12:00. House and minimal closed the weekend, with Silva Bumpa folded into this day at Leeds rather than the Friday slot he held at Reading.

The pattern is worth spelling out because nobody official did: Reading's Sunday bass day was Leeds's Friday, Reading's Friday was broadly Leeds's Saturday, and Reading's Saturday house day was broadly Leeds's Sunday. It was not a perfect mirror, a few names such as Silva Bumpa and Riordan drifted between days across the two sites, but if you knew which sound you were chasing, the rotation told you which day to pick. Notion followed the bass day at both sites: Sunday at Reading and Friday at Leeds.

The headliner rotation also meant Leeds paired its Warehouse bass Friday with Chase & Status Live and Florence + The Machine on the main stage, arguably the strongest single day for a dance-leaning punter anywhere on either site.

The acts that mattered

Lineup lists are cheap. Context is not, and half this bill is made up of artists we have covered at length because they have been reshaping UK club music all year.

• Hamdi: the biggest crossover story on the stage. Skanka took UK soundsystem culture to festival main stages worldwide, and our full Hamdi profile covers how he got there. His slots were Sunday at Reading and Friday at Leeds, both on the bass day.
• Silva Bumpa: the producer who quietly took over UK garage sets before most people could name him, then tested HYPA on London first this spring. He covered the swing-heavy end of the bass spectrum, on the Friday at Reading and the Sunday at Leeds.
• Mall Grab: a decade on from the lo-fi house wave, Jordon Alexander is one of the few from that era still moving forward rather than reheating. Mall Grab's road from lo-fi house joke to festival stages is the arc, and a Reading and Leeds booking was its logical destination.
• Rossi.: the minimal scene's most exportable name right now. If you saw Rossi.'s London Boiler Room debut, you know he can hold a camera-phone crowd without flattening the groove, which is precisely the skill this stage demanded.
• OMAR+: reads rooms for a living, which is what made our OMAR+ profile write itself. Booked at both sites, and one of the safest bets on the bill for a set that meets the crowd where it is.
• Notion: the Bristol DJ behind The Days remix has spent 2026 converting one viral edit into a genuinely deep catalogue of bass-house weaponry. Festival tents are his natural habitat.
• Prospa: one half of Reading's marquee b2b, deep in their Free Your Mind era, and the act best placed to deliver the "old school rave vibe" Benn promised, because old school rave is literally their source material.
• Hybrid Minds and Hedex: the two poles of arena drum and bass, liquid euphoria and jump-up pressure respectively, both operating in the ecosystem the DnB Allstars story maps out. Programmed on the same day at both sites, which told you exactly what those days were built for.

Why Reading and Leeds is chasing the dance audience

The Warehouse did not appear from nowhere. The arc runs through three summers. In 2024 the festival introduced The Chevron, a 40,000-capacity open-air arena for dance, pop and hip-hop, its first serious structural bet on electronic music. That same year, Fred again.. was one of the festival's six headliners, while The Prodigy, Sonny Fodera and Skrillex topped the Chevron. Two years later, Chase & Status headlined the main stage with their live show, and the Chevron's hybrid brief was split into a band stage and a proper dance stage. The direction of travel could not be clearer if it were painted on the Richfield Avenue grass.

Benn is not coy about the why. "The strength of dance music is total again at the moment. It's absolutely brilliant," he told NME in July 2026. And 2026 was a strong year to test the thesis: the festival billed all six headliners, Charli XCX, Dave, RAYE, Fontaines D.C., Florence + The Machine and Chase & Status, as UK festival exclusives, and all of them were UK or Ireland-based, which Benn told NME showed "the strength of UK and Irish music". Reading's 105,000 capacity and Leeds's 95,000 make this, on Benn's own numbers to Pollstar, a 250,000-to-275,000-ticket weekend. Pointing a machine that size at dance music matters for every DJ, promoter and label in the country.

There is a colder commercial logic underneath. Benn told Pollstar that major artists can now choose a stadium run over a festival slot, so "we've got to be offering more than what a stadium offering is". Production, in other words, is the moat, and dance music is the genre where production is the show. He was equally blunt about the aesthetics: every part of the festival, he said, has to be "capable of being photographed, and being photographed well". A dance stage with platforms around the booth and wall-to-wall screens is not just a room for DJs. It is a content engine, designed in the full knowledge that half the audience discovered half this lineup through 30-second clips. We can be snobby about that or honest about it: the clips are a big part of how Hamdi and Notion built festival-sized audiences.

From a DJ's point of view, the significant thing is not that a rock festival booked some DJs. Festivals have done that for 30 years, usually badly. It is that the biggest weekend in British guitar music looked at its own hybrid compromise, said publicly that it "didn't really work", and replaced it with club infrastructure: the DJ in the middle of the audience, platforms, screens, a bill drawn from actual club lineage rather than a Spotify mood playlist. That was the sound of dance music being treated as a first-class citizen at Reading and Leeds for the first time.

Tickets: how 2026 sold, and the 2027 dates

When this guide was first published in late July 2026, Reading was close to sold out, with Sunday day tickets the main route left, while Leeds was still on sale across most ticket types. That is history now: the 2026 festival ran from 27 to 30 August, and NME's review described The Warehouse as a new stage that "never seemed to be empty, judging by the notifications from the official app".

Reading and Leeds 2027 runs from Thursday 26 to Sunday 29 August 2027 at the same two sites. In late September 2026, the official Leeds Festival site listed first-release 2027 prices of £296 for Weekend Non-Camping, £326 for Weekend Camping and £362 for Weekend with Early Entry Camping, each with a £20 deposit option, and Reading was also taking £20 deposits.

No 2027 line-up has been announced, and the festival has not said whether The Warehouse returns or keeps the 2026 rotation, in which the bass day fell on Sunday at Reading and Friday at Leeds, the garage day on Friday at Reading and Saturday at Leeds, and the house and minimal day on Saturday at Reading and Sunday at Leeds.

Not that Warehouse: this is not Manchester's Warehouse Project

A quick untangling, because the name collision is real and the search results are already messy. The Warehouse was a new stage at Reading and Leeds Festival in August 2026. The Warehouse Project is Manchester's long-running club series at Depot Mayfield, an entirely separate operation with its own season running into the winter. If you searched for the Manchester one and landed here, what you want is our guide to Manchester's Warehouse Project 2026 season. If you want the festival stage, you are in the right place. Festival Republic choosing a name one letter away from the most famous club brand in the north of England is either an accident or a very confident bit of positioning; we genuinely cannot tell which.

FAQ

What was The Warehouse at Reading and Leeds 2026?

A brand-new, purpose-built dance music stage that ran at both sites from 28 to 30 August 2026, announced on 27 March 2026. It covered house, tech house, drum and bass and bass music, with viewing platforms behind the decks and large-scale screen production.

Who played The Warehouse at Reading and Leeds 2026?

Billed at both sites: Hybrid Minds, Hedex, Hamdi, Mall Grab, Rossi., Silva Bumpa, OMAR+, SOTA, Notion, Riordan, IN PARALLEL, Julian Fijma, Saint Ludo, Djammin and Meeshy. Reading exclusives included Skepta b2b Prospa, Max Dean b2b Luke Dean, Bou, Luuk Van Dijk and KING BOOO!; Leeds exclusives included Skepta b2b East End Dubs, Alisha, Locky, [IVY] and Jack Marlow.

What day did Hamdi play at Reading and Leeds 2026?

Hamdi was on Sunday 30 August at Reading (14:30) and Friday 28 August at Leeds (14:55), both on The Warehouse, alongside Hybrid Minds, Hedex and SOTA on each site's drum and bass and bass day.

Did Skepta play Reading and Leeds 2026?

Skepta was billed twice at each site: a solo set on The Grid main stage and a b2b on The Warehouse the same night. At Reading that was the Friday, with Skepta b2b Prospa at 21:40; at Leeds it was the Saturday, with Skepta b2b East End Dubs at 21:05. Each pairing was exclusive to its site.

When was Reading and Leeds Festival 2026?

27 to 30 August 2026. Thursday 27 was the arrival day, with Kasabian headlining Leeds that night, and the main arena days ran Friday 28 to Sunday 30 August at Richfield Avenue in Reading and Bramham Park near Leeds.

When is Reading and Leeds 2027?

Thursday 26 to Sunday 29 August 2027, at Richfield Avenue in Reading and Bramham Park in Leeds. In late September 2026 both sites were taking £20 deposits on weekend tickets, and Leeds listed first-release weekend prices from £296 to £362. No 2027 line-up had been announced.

Will The Warehouse return at Reading and Leeds 2027?

The festival has not said. As of late September 2026, no 2027 line-up or stage plan had been announced for either site.

Who were the Reading and Leeds 2026 headliners?

Charli XCX, Dave, RAYE, Fontaines D.C., Florence + The Machine and Chase & Status (Live) at both sites, all billed as UK festival exclusives, plus Kasabian as the first-ever Thursday-night Leeds headliner.

Is The Warehouse the same as The Warehouse Project?

No. The Warehouse was a stage at Reading and Leeds Festival; The Warehouse Project is Manchester's separate club series at Depot Mayfield, which runs its own season.

What happened to the Chevron stage?

The Chevron, the 40,000-capacity open-air arena introduced in 2024 for dance, pop and hip-hop, was replaced in the 2026 overhaul. Melvin Benn told NME it "became a bit of a hybrid, and it didn't really work", so 2026 split the brief in two: The Gallery for live acts and The Warehouse for dance.

Sources

• Official Reading Festival and Leeds Festival lineup and ticket pages, checked late July 2026; 2027 ticket pages checked 26 September 2026
• NME: second-wave line-up announcement, 27 March 2026; arena overhaul announcement and Melvin Benn interview, 14 July 2026; full stage times, 19 August 2026; festival review, 31 August 2026
• NME on the Chevron stage and its 40,000 capacity, 15 February 2024
• Pollstar interview with Melvin Benn, 14 July 2026

Facts in this piece were first checked in late July 2026 and updated after the festival, on 26 September 2026, against the published stage times, NME's review and the official 2027 ticket pages.