Tag: Summer Gathering 2026

Travel Planning Guide for Earth First! 2026 Summer Gathering

Site location

This year, EF! will be squat­ting a site in the Peak Dis­trict. As it will be non-per­mis­sive, the exact loca­tion can’t be shared ahead of time. It will be shared on this web­site on the morn­ing of Wednes­day 12th August.

How­ev­er, the rough loca­tion can still be shared, as it’s often impor­tant to make book­ings in advance.

Traveling from the East (Sheffield)

It’s rec­om­mend­ed that peo­ple com­ing from the East side of the coun­try make their way to Sheffield. The site loca­tion is acces­si­ble by a direct bus ride from the city cen­tre, last­ing no more than 45 min­utes and cost­ing £3. The bus runs from the morn­ing until the ear­ly evening — any gaps in the ser­vice should be filled by a shut­tle.

It will then be a 5 minute walk on slight­ly bumpy, nar­row, and then steep ter­rain. (We appre­ci­ate this sounds con­cern­ing to peo­ple with mobil­i­ty needs — please email us earthfirst.uk@proton.me if you’d like to talk about options)

Sheffield is acces­si­ble by train and coach from vir­tu­al­ly all major cities.

Traveling from the West (Manchester then Bamford)

If you are trav­el­ing from the West of the coun­try, you are still wel­come to make your way to Sheffield, how­ev­er you may also find it eas­i­er to go to Man­ches­ter and then take the Hope Val­ley line to Bam­ford, from which the site will be a half-hour direct bus ride, cost­ing £3.

Man­ches­ter is acces­si­ble by train and coach from vir­tu­al­ly all major cities. The train to Bam­ford nor­mal­ly runs hourly from about 6am to 10pm and lasts about an hour.

The any­time fare is £15.10 (£10.05 with a rail­card) for a sin­gle, or £19.60 (£13.05 with a rail­card) for a return. Often cheap­er advance tick­ets are avail­able.

When to arrive and leave

Site set­up will start from the ear­ly morn­ing on Wednes­day 12th August, how­ev­er it may take a few hours to secure it enough to be able to pub­licly announce it. It should be announced by 10am, from which point every­one is wel­come and encour­aged to come help set up the site! If you’re plan­ning on arriv­ing ear­ly, bring some water and a packed lunch, as the first sched­uled meal won’t be until the evening.

The gath­er­ing will last until Mon­day 17th, which is the pack down day. There will be break­fast, but no lunch and din­ner. Every­one should expect to leave by mid after­noon — please stay and help us to pack down if you can, but as it’s a squat you may not want to linger too long after most oth­ers have left. There will be plen­ty of oth­er pret­ty places near­by if you want­ed to stay in the Peaks!

How much money? Solidarity pricing!

How much mon­ey?

This gath­er­ing is as DIY as it gets, and doing it our­selves also means fund­ing it our­selves. No one prof­its off of these gath­er­ings. No one gets paid.

Gath­er­ings always run on a dona­tion basis, and no one is turned away for lack of funds. At the wel­come desk you will be able to donate what­ev­er feels right, based on ‘sol­i­dar­i­ty pric­ing’:

Sol­i­dar­i­ty pric­ing: Have more, pay more. Have less, pay less.

Here’s a lit­tle guide to help you judge how much you can afford com­pared to oth­ers, it’s not just about income, oth­er fac­tors are impor­tant. Class, wealth and expe­ri­ences of sys­temic oppres­sion all play a part. Remem­ber, it’s just a guide, an imper­fect way to cre­ate a more eco­nom­i­cal­ly lib­er­at­ing mod­el while we work to smash cap­i­tal­ism and cre­ate dif­fer­ent eco­nom­ic sys­tems.

  • Some fac­tors that can allow you to afford more:

- Hav­ing above aver­age income

- Own­ing land or prop­er­ty

- Being like­ly to inher­it prop­er­ty or wealth

- Hav­ing sig­nif­i­cant wealth, sav­ings or invest­ments

- Being eas­i­ly able to meet basic needs and can afford lux­u­ries (hol­i­days, take­away)

- Hav­ing recog­nised edu­ca­tion­al back­ground and qual­i­fi­ca­tions (good schools, degrees, post­grad etc.) 

- Being eas­i­ly able to get well paid work

- Hav­ing a safe­ty net or strong social sup­port net­works (eg a par­ents house to retreat to, friends with mon­ey etc.)

  • Some fac­tors that can reduce how much you can afford:

- Earn­ing less than aver­age income

- Sup­port­ing depen­dents or hav­ing care respon­si­bil­i­ties (chil­dren, rel­a­tives, part­ners etc.)

- Hav­ing dis­abil­i­ties or long term ill-health

- Reg­u­lar­ly being in con­tact with state/institutional vio­lence

- Pre­car­i­ous migra­tion sta­tus (eg being a Refugee, asy­lum seek­er or per­son with­out papers)

- Being unable to legal­ly work

- Expe­ri­enc­ing finan­cial dis­tress (eg. unex­pect­ed court fees, los­ing a job, sud­den rent increas­es)

- Expe­ri­enc­ing sys­temic oppres­sion due to things such as race, class, gen­der, neu­ro­di­ver­si­ty, sex­u­al­i­ty

No one is turned away for lack of funds, please don’t let cost put you off attend­ing!

We all have dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ships to mon­ey and we encour­age every­one to be hon­est with them­selves. The emo­tions that come up when we talk about what we can afford can often cloud our judge­ment. Cap­i­tal­ism breeds a cul­ture of scarci­ty — for some this feels like emo­tion­al insta­bil­i­ty and uncer­tain­ty, and for oth­ers this looks like mate­r­i­al pover­ty and a lack of resources. It is impos­si­ble to talk about things like class, mon­ey, wealth or income with­out think­ing about sys­temic oppres­sions like racism or ableism.

 There are lots of hid­den costs involved with gath­er­ings like this. Some stuff can’t be found in bins or bor­rowed, and while we try to keep costs down, there is equip­ment we would like to pur­chase to make sum­mer camps like this more acces­si­ble in the future, (eg track mat­ting, a minibus, light­ing, solar pan­els, hear­ing induc­tion loop,.) By donat­ing more gen­er­ous­ly you are help­ing achieve this!

No one turned away for lack of funds

No one is turned away from EF! for a lack of funds, but if you are plan­ning on spend­ing any mon­ey at the gath­er­ing, cash is pre­ferred as there’s not a cash machine near the site!

EF! is as DIY as it gets, which means some­times the card read­er does­n’t have sig­nal, and do you real­ly want to give some­one your whole entire gov­ern­ment name so you do a bank trans­fer to buy their zine?

EF! does­n’t receive fund­ing from bil­lion­aires and dona­tions help cov­er costs like food, kit main­te­nance, hir­ing vans and buy­ing equip­ment to increase acces­si­bil­i­ty of the gath­er­ings. If you are unsure what you should con­tribute, please have a read of this sol­i­dar­i­ty pric­ing guide

Kit list

This is your (non-exhaus­tive) kit list for the EF! Sum­mer Gath­er­ing!

tent, sleep­ing bag, roll mat or ham­mock, mos­qui­to net, tarp
head torch, ear plugs, face mask
good shoes for lots of walk­ing, sun cream, bat­tery pack + cable
long trousers and socks (tick proof­ing!)
bug repel­lent (mos­qui­to proof­ing! no nasty chem­i­cals plz)
tooth­brush, any meds you need for the week
bowl, mug, cut­lery
crafts & pro­pa­gan­da
cash!! (for zines, books, snacks, dona­tions to cov­er gath­er­ing costs)

Summer Gathering 2026 Entertainment

Ampli­fied music can be very dis­rup­tive to wildlife, espe­cial­ly dur­ing peri­ods of extreme weath­er when crea­tures are already stressed. We love a wild wood­land rave as much as the next EF!er, how­ev­er to make sure that our pres­ence in the ecosys­tem is as low-impact as pos­si­ble, evening enter­tain­ment will be an acoustic affair at this year’s sum­mer gath­er­ing. We are look­ing for activ­i­ties that every­one can get involved with in the evenings and will have some very spe­cial per­for­mances🐴🐷🐲. If you can host a evening activ­i­ty, quiz, wide game, an open mic or a ceilidh please get in touch!

Earthfirst.uk@proton.me

Summer Gathering Workshops 2026

The work­shop sched­ule for the EF! Sum­mer Gath­er­ing is fill­ing up!!

EF!ers asked for more hands-on and prac­ti­cal work­shops and oppor­tu­ni­ties to learn with our whole bod­ies, so to meet this need there will be work­shops on 12V electrics, climb­ing, herbal­ism, tech secu­ri­ty and more! Please get in touch if you have your own prac­ti­cal skills to share!

To fol­low on from con­vos at the last year sum­mer gath­er­ing there will be work­shops on top­ics such as can­cel cul­ture, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence & data cen­tres, and move­ment strat­e­gy. We’re espe­cial­ly inter­est­ed to include work­shops on themes such as prison abo­li­tion or eco­cide & the mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex. If you have one on those top­ics please get in touch!

And because we are always wel­com­ing new peo­ple into the move­ment, we will have our reg­u­lar work­shops dis­cussing key prin­ci­ples of green eco­log­i­cal direct action move­ments, includ­ing work­shops on green anar­chy & bio­cen­trism, and an intro to EF!

To get in touch, email earthfirst.uk@proton.me

Save the date: EF! Summer Gathering 2026 will be 12th-17th August!

Greet­ings all,

The 2026 Earth First! sum­mer gath­er­ing will be from Wednes­day 12th — Mon­day 17th August! Woohoo

Save the date, and let your mates know. We don’t have a region in mind yet, but will announce more info when we can. If you have any site sug­ges­tions, feel free to get in touch at earthfirstuk@proton.me (you can no longer reach us at earthfirstuk@riseup.net!)

In the mean­time, we hope to see you at the region­al win­ter moots which are being organ­ised around the coun­try as we speak. As dates and loca­tions are con­firmed we’ll post them in the web­site, but at a min­i­mum there will def­i­nite­ly be a moot, some­where, on the 6–8th Feb­ru­ary 2026.