Britain’s biggest sci-fi festival celebrated its tenth anniversary in style with Area 51 helping to blast it into a new orbit.

AREA 51 helped honour some of the leading lights in the rock world at a four-day indoor festival. The company designed and crafted a collection of award trophies that were handed out at the annual Hard Rock Hell festival as it made its debut at a new venue, the Vauxhall Holiday Park in Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast.

Area 51 dancers cast their runes, donned shields and swords and rampaged across Wales and the north of England to help make two rock events the best this side of Valhalla! The performers were among the star attractions at the final Hard Rock Hell event held in North Wales and also at the HRH Vikings Festival staged in Sheffield.

Cirque Du Soul has been a much needed shot in the arm for UK club culture – a huge success story in recent years. A riotous explosion of hedonism and dance music mixing old-skool warehouse rave ideology with cutting edge contemporary club culture and mashing it up with burlesque and circus flavours.

A crack team from Area 51 jetted out to Serbia to take centre stage at one of Europe’s biggest and best festivals. Appearing alongside Jax Jones and other globally-popular acts on the main Dance Stage at the huge Exit Festival which is staged annually inside the Petrovaradin Fortress in front of 198,000 fans!

Area 51 helped bring a flavour of the Balearic party scene to Formula 1’s British Grand Prix staged at Silverstone. The company created a special “Ham-former” robot stilts character, a hybrid of the popular A51 Transformer and a Lewis Hamilton bobble head, which caused a storm among race fans

Area 51 warped space and time to transform a tiny part of North Wales into an intergalactic space base for sci-fi fans, geeks, fantasy fanatics and timelords alike. There was no tightening of the asteroid belt as dark energy

What happens if you bring together the UK’s largest indoor winter music festival at one of the nation’s best loved holiday resorts with the warped wit and wisdom of Area 51?

An army of demons, ghouls and fiendish freaks from Area 51 swarmed on to the streets of Birmingham’s arts quarter after a portal to hell appeared to open right in the middle of the Second City. Thankfully, it wasn’t the apocalyptic ‘End Times’ being ushered in to wreak war, famine, pestilence and disease but yet another heavy-duty Halloween street festival.

A crack swarm of 60 Area 51 star-performers helped ensure the last ever Secret Garden Party wasn’t a washout despite the festival being saturated by Monsoon-like rain!

Itinerant Igor Rasputin and his band of merry pranksters, freaks and performing peculiarities, pitched in at Britain’s most popular heavy rock festival to play up to their reputation as Europe’s leading spaced-oddities! Area 51’s aberrant master of ceremonies, sensation and strangeness, Rasputin rocked up at Download 2017.

A remote corner of North Wales was zapped into an interdimensional and intergalactic space colony as Area 51 helped stage the biggest sci-fi and fantasy festival seen in the UK! Thousands of sci-fi fans beamed down into Pwlhelli on the Lleyn Peninsula for a long weekend where normal reality was suspended and a colourfully costumed alternative existence emerged.

Sensational circus acts from Area 51 served up a marathon seven-hour ‘spooktacular’ at Britain’s biggest Halloween party in front of 10,000 clubbers in Birmingham. The persistent performers pulled out all the stops in a prodigious production

Area 51 hoisted the sails, cast aside any lily-livered swabs in their way and swash-buckled into action to storm one of the UK’s most happening festivals off the south coast. A crew of 45 buccaneers boarded the so-called ‘Shady Lady’ pirate ship stage at Bestival 2016 and took no prisoners with a bawdy weekend of manic mayhem and merry-making that only true legends are made of.

Area 51 ensured everything in the garden was rosy and other-worldly at one of the UK’s most stunning festivals. A gargantuan-sized crew of 65 crack entertainers descended on the stunning Secret Garden Party site in the picturesque environs of Cambridgeshire to deliver a four-day quota of quixotic mirth that left revellers smiling from ear to ear.

Area 51 unleashed legions of zombies on Britain’s second city as Birmingham took a hammering of Halloween horror. The Area 51 special ops brigade transformed the enormous collective of venues and art spaces in Birmingham into a heartland

Memories of sunshine doused summer days on the party island of Ibiza aren’t melting into winter obscurity thanks to the sweet success of Hed Kandi’s 2015 season which was hailed a tropical paradise

A detachment of 51 Area 51 performers (!) withstood everything that Mother Nature could chuck in their direction to emerge muddied and euphoric after three days and four nights of badass shows and partying

Clubbers froze in fear as freaks and fiends transformed a Fest-Evil into a true fright night! A creepy corps of “corpses” from Area 51 caused mayhem at the Secret Party Project bash in Nottingham as the celebrated club staged

Area 51 performers were buoyed up by a stunning reception after taking one of the UK’s best festivals by storm! One of the largest ever crews of artists from Area 51 appeared at Bestival on the Isle of Wight and won huge plaudits after four days and nights of hard work and hard partying that left them three sheets to the wind.

If you go down to the woods today you’re sure of a big surprise…as the spirit of Ibiza was reborn in Leicestershire!A herd of bright eyed and bushy tailed Area 51 performers stampeded in woodland close to the famous motor racing circuit at Donington and partied for three days non-stop as part of the third annual Zoo Project Festival which recreates the famous hedonism of the Iberian holiday isle.

Area 51 stormed a 17th century fortress in the Balkans before continuing with a rampage of hedonism down to a coastline festival on the shores of the Adriatic Sea more than 300 miles away. Two stunning festivals in a mere seven days of blissful indulgence was a tall order for even the most diehard 51 crew members used to punishing schedules of hard work and hard partying but the Class of 2014.

Sometime in the past before the future began, the 66Sick office was deserted, machines slowed before grinding to a halt, silicon chips were fried and a creeping growth of plant life in a garden of evil carpeted the once busy hive of activity with organic abandon.

Robots, space girls, butterflies and tribesmen cooked up Cornish delight as they ran to the sun to storm the festival that refuses to die! Area 51 characters invaded the resort of Newquay in Cornwall for the impressive Run To The Sun Festival which despite rumours of imminent death, continues to thrive as one of Britain’s best annual bashes.

Clubbers were given the creeps after Area 51 helped transform an old bus depot into a haunted house of horrors at an exclusive party event in the heart of the East Midlands. Area 51 transformed the Secret Party Project Halloween hoedown into a spectre-tacular scare-fest of monster proportions n Nottingham,

Area 51 rocked the dock as H.M.S. Bestival dropped anchor at one of Britain’s best-ever festival arenas. It was full steam-ahead as shipmates shared the fun in an amazing nautical-themed party at Bestival on the Isle of Wight.

One of Britain’s wildest festivals was treated to spellbinding animal magic as Area 51 turned zoo keepers! A herd of animal characters hoofed down to Donington Park in the leafy East Midlands to stampede in a safari of surrealism at the amazing Zoo Project Festival.

Once upon a time a legendary name from Ibiza’s clubland royalty needed candy to turn the heads of the party elite and so they called on Area 51 to help. Hed Kandi approached the Warwickshire company to create an elaborate and bespoke collection of stunning set

Peer into the twisted world of Area 51 with the company’s own “Twisted Circus.” These shots were taken at the Big Reunion event at the end of 2007 and highlight a crew of specially commissioned Circus performances. With thanks to Marc de Groot for some of the photos.