Tucked away in a small wood somewhere in Fordingbridge, Dorset, Pharmacy Project demonstrates exactly what small, intimate festivals should be. 

We rolled onto site around 3pm on Friday, parked the car and walked the gruelling 200 meters to the camping zone where the air was thick with a sense of reunion as groups set up camp for the weekend ahead. Overlooking us at the top of the hill, like an omniscient observer, a small woodland housing Pharmacy’s musical abyss rests. A whimsical, fairy-like oasis interwoven through the trees with a DIY atmosphere that has clearly considered every element.

With only running for two days, there’s less time to settle in. At longer festivals, the pattern is familiar: Day 1 is about exploring, Day 2 you know your neighbours, Day 3 you’re properly in the groove and by Day 4, you don’t want to leave. Compress that across a weekend and there’s a sense of more pressure to pack in as much enjoyment as possible – but that’s not a bad thing, it creates a high-energy atmosphere from the beginning, resulting in talking to more new people and exploring different sounds. 

Across the weekend, musical programming felt seamless. Two carefully curated mainstages sit at opposite ends of the site. The Clearing, focuses on what Pharmacy calls “techy-elecy,” catering the darker, more heads down sound akin to the dark-dingy spaces electronic music heads know and love all too well, as well as hosting the weekends live bands. Electric Boogaloo contrasts this with a symbiotic relationship to its natural environment around it providing the lighter, funkier side of the dance music. Between them sits The Communal, a sprawl of sofas, hammocks and art installations designed for people to connect with old and new friends alike, soundtracked by eclectic ambient textures. This scale is what made the weekend special: small enough that you’re never at risk of feeling lost and with only two main stages catering different ends of the electronic music spectrum, nothing ever felt rushed or missed. You can drift through the woods and park up wherever you fancy. 

Something that stood out the most was the hybrid sets: real instruments over DJs gave things an unpolished, authentic edge. On Friday evening Lysander brought on Humdrum guitarist Hunter Greensmith at Electric Boogaloo for a set full of licks that kept the crowd on their toes from start to finish. During Saturday afternoon, while I took some time to recharge at The Communal, I stumbled across , aka who was set up with a variety of instruments and synths creating something that felt less like a scheduled set than a street pop-up – eclectic ambient soundscapes threaded with effect heavy live guitar, exactly the sort of thing you stubble into at a festival small enough to explore properly. Saturday night saw and draft in on saxophone with a delay-pedal for a dubby, spacey set at The Communal. 

Nothing about the production felt unpolished in the glossy sense, but nothing felt half-arsed either – handmade stages built from natural materials sit seamlessly among the woodland setting. A gentle red glow at Electric Boogaloo contrasted with the harder strobes at The Clearing created two polar atmospheres that contrasted each other perfectly. The coloured fabric drapes and netting cones strung through the trees made looking up just as optically stimulating as around. All of this amounts to a beautiful energy that after dark, transforms into something far weirder, in the best possible way.

Wellness at Pharmacy

Something evidently central to Pharmacy’s ethos is taking care of yourself and one another. This year powered by Grooves For Good, the Groove Garden offered a space to ease off, catch a breath and take a minute from the dancefloor. With saunas and Icebaths, a calm teepee, yoga sessions and classes available across the weekend head honcho described the project as “a music movement that encourages people to look after themselves, while also having a good time.” For her, spaces like this exist to “stop the stigma of thinking you have to go hard the whole time,” and make clear that if you have “taken it too far, that’s okay.” She contrasted this with other festivals where she feels there’s a “legend alert” pressure to tough it out rather than admit you need a break. Having a dedicated, welcoming space makes stepping away feel “a bit more approachable.”

The only real blemish on the weekend arrived on the first night just after midnight, and had nothing to do with the Pharmacy team. The council turned up after a noise complaint and the music volume dropped to the point where you could barely hear unless you were front row – completely out of the team’s control, and genuinely frustrating given the event had all its correct licensing and a real kicker to momentum right as things were getting going. But the mood among party-goers was sympathy, not annoyance. “It happens, and you can’t judge,” shrugged the next day. “If it was a big festival they should have sorted it before, but it’s a small one – the council were dicks, c’est la vie.” By 1am the volume crept back up and the dancing more or less picked up where it left off.

Pharmacy Project did everything you could possibly want from a small festival, and it’s genuinely hard to find fault with it. For anyone after quality music and a good atmosphere, without scale getting in the way of either, this is it. Ask around the site on Sunday and you’ll hear it called magical, fabulous and exceptional.