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MAMA Festivals

live music and lifestyle entertainment company

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 23, 2026
Entity authorityQ6714268
Source-derived summary

MAMA Festivals is a live music and entertainment company which owns and operates a number of live music venues and festivals in the United Kingdom. Founded in 2005, it has acquired many other venue-holding companies, expanding its reach significantly across England.

The company owns six London venues and three regional venues: Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen, The Forum in Kentish Town, The Garage in Islington, The Institute in Birmingham, The Ritz in Manchester, and The Arts Club in Liverpool. The venues range in capacity from 300 to 2,300.

In addition, MAMA operates several festivals and events, including Lovebox (London), Wilderness (Oxfordshire), The Great Escape (Brighton), Somersault (North Devon), Global Gathering (Stratford-upon-Avon), Godskitchen, and Future Gods events.

History

MAMA was founded by Adam Driscoll and Dean James in 2005 via the reverse takeover of Campus Media by Stonesthrow Media (Channelfly Group). The newly re-branded MAMA Group was admitted to AIM in December 2005. MAMA stands for Music and Media Assets. On 11 June 2007, the company purchased the Hammersmith Apollo and The Forum. The same year, MAMA Group acquired Mean Fiddler Holdings Limited the company which owned The Jazz Café, The Garage, The Borderline, and held a majority share in G-A-Y.

On 6 March 2008, the group acquired The Picture House, Edinburgh from Luminar Liquid Limited, a subsidiary of Luminar Group Holdings plc.

Editorial summary

“MAMA Festivals” enters the record as live music and lifestyle entertainment company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what MAMA, Festivals and live can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2005, 2007, 2008—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2005. Its strongest next move is a source search built around MAMA, Festivals and live.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“MAMA Festivals” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, MAMA, Festivals and live provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6714268. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2007 and 2008.

Critical limits

Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “MAMA Festivals”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow MAMA Festivals primary sources, MAMA Festivals archive and MAMA research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “MAMA Festivals”?
  2. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
  3. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from MAMA Festivals” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.