Osea Island
Forget Necker – Essex is where to head for a chic retreat
As the lament goes up over the year’s final bank holiday, a select few can take solace in the prospect of a music festival taking place in Essex this Thursday and Friday. Should you find yourself thinking, “Essex? Festival?”, bear in mind it is not the customary shindig with soggy tents and ungodly portable loos. Think, instead, a ritzy, champagne-fuelled rockathon, boasting Michelin-starred fare, held on an exclusive private island, accessible by land for only four hours out of every 12, via a 2,000-year-old Roman causeway. And, if you do happen to find a drunk girl in a Native American headdress shouting in your face, it’s likely to be a lesser-spotted Delevingne.
For a certain type of reveller – hot, high society, high-net worth – tickets to the Krug Island Festival are a snip at £449 per perfectly highlighted head to be whisked over to Osea Island, in Essex’s Blackwater Estuary, and accommodated in one of its 18 residences (shabby chic shrines to Farrow & Ball).
Cult band Mystery Jets will headline, oysters, foie gras and ox cheeks will be served by Michelinstarred chef Michael O’Hare, and Krug has made sure the fizz has been chosen to enhance the sounds.
The event has been “curated” by Mick Jones, formerly of the Clash, who maintains that it marks a return to the days when festival frequenters could press flesh with their icons. This being the same Mick Jones who once strummed along to the lyrics: “I don’t wanna hear about what the rich are doing / I don’t wanna go to where the rich are going.”
Nevertheless, the really interesting thing about the occasion is Osea Island itself. Just 45 miles from London, with a circumference of only four miles, there is evidence of human habitation here going back some 5,000 years. Osea has served as a Viking burial ground, secret First World War torpedo base, and a rehab retreat. Since 2004, it has been owned by music mogul Nigel Frieda, brother of hair entrepreneur John, who paid £6 million for it, and is described by one guest as “a hilarious agein’ rocker type straight out of Spinal Tap”. Frieda has transformed Osea into “the ultimate retreat for tired and stressed out City workers with a passion for music, dancing and celebration”. Devotees are wont to portray it as an “artists’ commune”, “ravers’ retreat”, “haute holiday destination” or (dread phrase) “creative hub”. The country’s yummiest mummies refer to it as the “English Necker Island” (after Sir Richard Branson’s Caribbean escape) or the “British Hamptons” (after New York’s swish weekend bolthole), with a look that’s “pure Nantucket”, before going into rhapsodies about its picket fences, four posters, and roll-top baths. Musos including The Who’s Pete Townshend claim they flock here for the island’s recording studio. However, it’s the social scene that keeps visitor numbers high, if confined to an elite few (the island sleeps 145 tops, although deluxe camping facilities are available).
Osea was put on the map in 2013 when a lavish shindig, featuring London’s bright young things dancing on 4x4s and disporting themselves on beaches, appeared in the Instagram feeds of Lady Mary Charteris and Poppy Delevingne. Model, DJ and rock chick Charteris hailed the bash as the best weekend of her life – and hers is a life that has presumably included many a top weekend.
As to the key to Osea’s appeal, well, islands do funny things to people, as we British know. The decadence of a country house party is magnified a hundredfold if guests have a minirealm at their disposal, the tide lending the place a sense of seclusion, and everyone feeling as if they know each other (doubtless because they do).
Frieda may speak lovingly of the lack of streetlights and five species of owl, but it’s the strobe lighting and night owls that give the place its heady allure. DJ John Lycett Green remarked: “I finished playing at 4am, and that’s when I realised this place is about more – it’s its own kingdom.”
A primal hedonism ensues. Tales include sunrise skinny-dipping in carp ponds, transvestite carousers scaling trees, and drunken mud fights, anonymity assured by the fact that what goes on the island, stays on the island (until it’s Instagrammed).
Laura Jeffrey, 37, owner of luxury travel company Passepartout, visited Osea in 2015 for a 40th birthday. “There was a lot of bonding over the adventure of our arrival,” she recalls, “driving over what is essentially a river bed. The staff couldn’t have been more obliging. They even helped me fashion a convincing cricket bat for my fancy dress outfit.
“We had drinks in one house, shifted to a barn, twinkling with fairy lights, for a delicious dinner, then traipsed across the island to a Terrapin, straight out of the school trip to Swanage, for the through-the-night stage. I don’t remember much about getting back to my room: I had a run-in with a hedge and know it was getting light.”
Jeffrey’s business has taken her to the world’s glamorous locations, but Osea occupies a very special place in her affections. “It was fabulous. The novelty factor of the location and layout make it such an attractive and entertaining destination – provided you have game invitees.” How could they possibly be otherwise?