Why Hollywood's finest are heading to Brick Lane

It’s been described as Hay Festival meets Glastonbury and now it’s coming to the East End. Robert Dex on how South by Southwest will boost London’s standing at the heart of tech and culture

THE legendary South by Southwest (SXSW) festival might have started life as a music event, but the annual gathering in the Texan city of Austin has grown into something much more — an international cultural juggernaut where film studios premiere their latest movies, US presidents make keynote speeches on the future of technology, bands perform and tens of thousands of people flock to see them, boosting the local economy by hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. It pulls in line-ups like no other — headliners range from Hollywood royalty (and sometimes real royalty too, with Meghan Markle’s appearance this year) to world leaders to world leaders, tech bros and the next big things in music — and now it is heading east to Shoreditch. The Truman Brewery in the heart of the Brick Lane will host the first London version of the festival next June. Randel Bryan, the man charged with making it a success, explains how he wants to make the festival for the “curious mind” a mainstay of the capital’s cultural scene.

A typical trip to SXSW can involve a keynote speech from the US president — both Barack Obama and Joe Biden have addressed it at different times — then listening as actors and directors are quizzed at screenings of their latest work before heading off to see an unsigned act tipped as the next big thing.

If that sounds confusing — think the Hay Festival meets Glastonbury on the Croisette in Cannes — Bryan insists it is the most obvious way of understanding the huge technological changes transforming our creative industries.