Europe’s largest pumpkin festival fast becoming social media phenomenon
© Tulleys Pumpkin Festival
Europe’s largest pumpkin festival has opened to a record number of visitors after growing from a traditional farm pumpkin patch into one of the UK’s biggest fall days out.
Tulleys Pumpkin Festival, near Crawley in West Sussex, welcomed its largest opening-day attendance when gates opened for the 2026 season on Saturday September 19.
The event has grown rapidly in recent years, fuelled in part by social media, where photographs and videos from its vast pumpkin displays have reached millions of people and helped turn the West Sussex farm into a destination for visitors from across Britain and overseas.
It has also become a popular Autumn day out for celebrities and well-known faces, who have visited the farm with their families as the annual trip to the pumpkin fields has increasingly become a fixture of the UK’s fall calendar. More than 1.5 million pumpkins and gourds now fill the site, with more than 100 different varieties spread across the festival and Pick Your Own fields.
For 2026, Tulleys has made its biggest single addition to the Pumpkin Festival since it began. Pumpkin Valley is a newly landscaped area featuring streams, ponds, wooden bridges, giant pumpkin sculptures, a Pumpkin Farm House and Hobbit House, surrounded by pumpkins and fall planting.
The new area took months to build and forms part of the continued expansion of an event which began with the simple tradition of families visiting the farm to choose a pumpkin.
“Seeing the Pumpkin Valley full of visitors for the first time on opening day was a really proud moment for everyone here, particularly with a record number of people coming through the gates.
When we first started growing pumpkins, we could never have imagined what the festival would eventually become. Pumpkin picking is still right at the heart of it, but it has grown into something families travel from all over the country to experience.”
From pumpkin patch to major fall attraction
Tulleys Farm is a fourth-generation family farm run by the Beare family in the West Sussex countryside.
Its Pumpkin Festival now covers more than 100 acres, with around 600,000 pumpkin seeds planted to produce the enormous crop required for the fall season.
Visitors can head into the Pick Your Own fields before exploring the Pumpkin Village, where more than 100 different varieties of pumpkins and gourds are displayed.
More than 30 photo opportunities have been created throughout the festival, alongside giant pumpkin displays, roaming musicians, street theatre, seasonal food and drink and a 33-metre Observation Wheel overlooking the fields and surrounding countryside.
The increasingly elaborate displays have helped make the farm particularly popular on Instagram and TikTok, with visitors sharing images and videos from the pumpkin fields throughout the fall.
Despite its growth, Tulleys remains owned and operated by the Beare family, with the Pumpkin Festival forming part of the diversification of the original family farm.
Tulleys Pumpkin Festival runs until October 31 2026.
Tickets are available at PumpkinFarm.co.uk.