Vintage Computer Festival GB 2026 — Put This in Your Diary (or get AI to do it)
Updated June 2026: The festival has moved venue and date. Full details below.
Vintage Computer Festival GB returns in 2026 at a new venue — Aintree Racecourse in Liverpool — from Friday 11th to Sunday 13th September. The move from the North West Computer Museum in Leigh brings the event to a larger space capable of hosting the full programme of exhibitions, guest speakers, workshops, and live music that organiser Simon Hewitt has put together.
Tickets are on sale now via Ticket Tailor.
Guest Speakers
The speaker lineup is the strongest the festival has had. Steve Furber is the headline name — co-designer of the ARM processor at Acorn Computers, the chip architecture that now powers virtually every smartphone on the planet. Furber is Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester and one of the most significant figures in British computing history. If you want to understand how a BBC Micro project in Cambridge in the early 1980s became the architecture that powers your phone in 2026, Furber is the person to hear it from.
David Pleasance joined Commodore UK in 1982 and was central to the Amiga’s commercial life in Britain. He was the man who attempted to buy Commodore when the company went bankrupt in 1994, putting together a bid that came agonisingly close to saving the platform. His book on the subject is essential reading for anyone who grew up with an Amiga.
Chris Cannon was one of the teenage pioneers of Liverpool’s 1980s games industry — a scene that’s documented in our Manchester computing piece and deserves its own full history. Simon Butler has been in the computer games industry since 1983. Andrew Spencer founded the Retro Computer Museum in Leicester. Bart van den Akker runs the Home Computer Museum in the Netherlands. Christine Finn is a journalist and author who has written on technology and culture. Joseph Kay leads the Northwest Computer Museum.
What’s There
The festival covers the full span of computing history — from the earliest machines through the home computer era to the present day. Exhibitions, playable hardware, workshops for people who want to get hands-on, and live music performances using vintage technology are all confirmed. The Northwest Computer Museum and Retro Computer Museum (Leicester) are both exhibiting.
The event has its roots in the original VCF, founded in the US in 1997. The UK version launched at Bletchley Park with the National Museum of Computing in 2010 — the largest retro and vintage computing event Britain had seen at the time. After a long hiatus, 2026 brings it back with a new venue and what looks like its most ambitious programme yet.
Getting There
Aintree Racecourse is in Liverpool, well served by public transport — Aintree train station is immediately adjacent to the venue. From Manchester, trains to Liverpool take around 45 minutes; Aintree is a further 20 minutes on the Merseyrail Northern Line.
Dates: Friday 11th — Sunday 13th September 2026
Venue: Aintree Racecourse, Liverpool
Tickets: Available now via vintagecomputerfestival.org.uk
A quick note on The North West Computer Museum
The museum itself is worth knowing about if you don’t already. Based on the fourth floor of the Grade II listed Leigh Spinners Mill on Park Lane, it’s a hands-on, interactive museum covering computing history from the 1970s to the present day. That means working exhibits — BBC Micros, ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64s, Amigas, early PCs — that you can actually sit down and use, not just look at through glass.
There’s a retro arcade section, a Raspberry Pi workshop area, a VR suite, and a café. Admission is £7. Run by Joe and Helen Kay, it’s been built with the kind of genuine enthusiasm that no amount of funding substitutes for. Reviews consistently mention how welcoming the staff are and how much longer visitors end up staying than they planned.
Opening hours are Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 4pm. The mill has lifts as well as stairs.
The grand opening in June 2023 was presided over by Professor Steve Furber CBE — one of the designers of the original BBC Micro and ARM processor — which tells you something about the calibre of people who take this place seriously.
Why It Matters
There are very few places in the UK where you can walk in off the street and play a working ZX Spectrum, a BBC Micro, or a Commodore Amiga. These machines aren’t just nostalgia objects — they’re the hardware that created the British games industry, trained a generation of developers, and produced some of the most inventive games ever made. Preserving working examples, and making them accessible to people who’ve never seen them, is genuinely important work.
The museum is community-funded and community-run. It doesn’t have a major institution behind it. It runs on the support of visitors, patrons, and donors — and on the donated time of people who care about keeping this history alive.
Support the Museum
If you can’t make it to Aintree in September but want to support what they’re doing, there are three ways:
Patreon — monthly support that helps with running costs.
JustGiving — one-off donations.
Crowdfunder — the original 2021 campaign that helped get the museum off the ground. Still live if you want to contribute directly.
They also accept donations of hardware — if you have old computers, consoles, or peripherals gathering dust, the museum is interested. Contact them via nwcomputermuseum.org.uk.
The North West Computer Museum features in our Manchester computing history piece and our guide to the home computers of the 8-bit era. If you’re planning a visit, the Vintage Computer Festival GB runs 19-21 June 2026 at Leigh Spinners Mill, Park Lane, Leigh, WN7 2LB.