When I first saw Clare Widdowson, she was in the middle of the Waterworks Festival green kneeling on the ground, laughing and flailing her hands in the air like an inflatable tube man at a car dealership. Meanwhile, her friend, Natalie May, circled her, filming. Widdowson is 24 and on that late September Saturday, she wore a leopard print bucket hat pushed down over her tawny blond hair. She told me she came down from Oxford. "Our core group is about 10-12, but we know a bunch of people from Essex and they add an additional 10," she said. "We just lost everyone," added May, also 24 and sporting head-to-toe orange. "You spend the whole time looking for your friends, but the people we definitely want to see are Batu, Midland, and Ben UFO—but apparently he’s got Covid."

"Are you in Uni?" Widdowson asked me. "Not quite," I replied. Widdowson and her 20 person deep crew—clad in a hodgepodge of cowboy hats, fishnet tops, and double fisting the canned, pastel-branded cocktails on offer—represented something of the quintessential English rave crew at Waterworks: blithely unpretentious with a smattering of Essex flavor thrown in. Many of the sort had honed their festival stamina at Reading and Leeds at 16, a rite of cultural passage, and were now roaming around the Gunnersbury Park grounds like packs of incredulous, free-range animals as the sounds of UK bass music thundered on in the background.

Entering Waterworks that day, revellers were immediately confronted with the Water Tower stage, a circular wooden structure with multi-directional speakers planted at the very center of the festival. Grey smoke poured from its sides like thick fog, rising to kiss the overcast West London sky. It was one of the six stages, including Siren, Orbit, Pressure, Cedar, Hi-Hat and Commune, sprawled across the domain. Here, Kaifeng-born, Vancouver-based artist Yu Su played a roving, clubby set with gusto. Meanwhile, over at the Siren stage, which was hosted by RA, low-end frequencies by Fauzia and Om Unit hyped up what looked like a sea of gun fingers. At one point, a colleague excitedly informed me that Sancha Ndeko, one-half of bass outfit Sicaria Sound, brought her birthday festivities onstage. Someone paraded out a cake and Novelist led the crowd into a "Happy Birthday" song. "The vibes here are tip-top. Every set, the standard is high. You lot are killing it the most," MC SGT Pokes declared to the audience hours later during dubstep legend Mala's set. I glanced over the crowd to see Widdowson swaying alongside her friends, and at 5:30 PM, the sun suddenly broke through the clouds like a post-summer consolation prize, casting the tree-lined space in its modest, lambent glow.

Hours later, I passed by the Pressure Stage, which looked like a small, elevated, open-air club. The red lights pierced through the surrounding foliage as object blue presided over the crowd with a mix of rabble-rousing left field techno. I stopped briefly in front of the Water Tower to catch Job Jobse’s closing mix of "Glue" by Bicep and "Say It Right" by Nelly Furtado. Afterwards, weaving through the crowd, I could hear people echoing the lyrics a cappella—"Oh you don't mean nothing at all to me"—as if clinging to the departed moment.

Under the Commune tent, a woman with long, silver earrings and a wide-brimmed hat bounded towards me, arms akimbo and ready for an embrace. Her dark eyes were unnaturally large. "Do I know you?" I asked. She immediately recoiled. "No, it was a joke." She then clasped her hands together in a peace offering. "Sorry for the massive drop into your energy," she apologized, before quickly leaping away. I turned my attention to Toshiki Ohta, who played a set that deviated from his usual house and techno towards breakbeats, the highlight of which was A$AP Rocky and Skepta's track "Praise The Lord (Da Shine)" paired with a jungle-inflected blend. I later saw the wide-eyed woman behind the booth with Otik after his closing track, immediately after the crowd had dispersed.

Earlier that day, I was rolling a cigarette on a sheltered bench near the Siren stage when Pavel Troughton, a 25-year-old label manager, complimented me on my green Adidas hoodie. He looked like a straight-haired Timothée Chalamet, except with a more oblong face, and he told me that he pregamed the event with a full English breakfast and a couple of pints. He explained the energy at Waterworks more candidly than I ever could. "Dance music is an escape from reality where we can just mellow the fuck out for a moment," he told me straight. "We can go into a dark room, enjoy ourselves, not worry about emails, or all that shit going on. That's why during lockdown, people started baking and shit and doing 5-fucking-ks, to escape, just to do something. But now that everyone's back, look how fucking happy everyone is. They can finally just let go of all the fucking bullshit."

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Resident Advisor (@resident_advisor)

At Waterworks, London’s swan song to summer, festivalgoers leaned into the city’s final few weeks of fair weather, sporting bold, colorful attire and bright smiles.

Siren, the stage hosted by RA, welcomed the bass-forward likes of Dr. Banana, Lukas Wigflex, Jossy Mitsu, FAUZIA, and Mala, among others. In classic English fashion, revellers default to gun fingers to signal their wholehearted approval.

Experimental club selector object blue presides over the crowd at the elevated Pressure stage, designed with roving, multi-colored light over its rafters. The DJ wears a dress by London’s Royal College of Art emerging designer Daisy Suhwoo Park for the special occasion.