Glastonbury is held on Worthy Farm in Pilton, Somerset — a working dairy farm that becomes, for five days most summers, one of the largest temporary cities in Europe. Around 210,000 people attend, which makes it comfortably bigger than the city of Oxford.
How it started
Farmer Michael Eavis went to a blues festival in 1970, decided he could do the same on his own land, and held the first Pilton Festival that September. Tickets cost £1 and included free milk from the farm. Around 1,500 people came, and T. Rex headlined after The Kinks pulled out.
Eavis ran it — with his daughter Emily now sharing the job — for over fifty years. Its scale grew from a few thousand to a couple of hundred thousand, and it retained an unusual amount of its original character along the way.
Getting a ticket
Genuinely difficult. Tickets go on sale in the autumn and sell out in well under an hour to a queue of hundreds of thousands online. Buyers must register with a photograph in advance, which is checked at the gate, specifically to kill the resale market.
Crucially, the line-up is not announced until months later. People buy tickets for Glastonbury itself, not for the acts, which tells you most of what you need to know about the event’s standing.
The mud
Worthy Farm is a working dairy farm on clay soil in an English June. The mud years — 1997, 1998, 2005, 2007, 2016 — are legendary, with fields turned to deep liquid mud and tents floating. Wellington boots are not optional, and the sight of festivalgoers wading thigh-deep is one of the standard images of the British summer.
More than music
The festival covers around 900 acres and has over a hundred stages. Beyond the Pyramid Stage there is theatre, circus, cabaret, comedy, a healing field, a stone circle, and the late-night area of Shangri-La and Block9, which operates until dawn and is a substantial festival in its own right.
It also gives away a great deal of money. Glastonbury donates millions annually to Greenpeace, Oxfam and WaterAid, and those organisations staff and campaign on site.
Fallow years
Roughly every fifth year the festival does not run, to let the land recover and give the local area a break. These are announced in advance and are a genuine agricultural necessity — the farm has to go back to being a farm.
The BBC coverage
The BBC broadcasts extensively across television, radio and iPlayer, with hundreds of hours available. A very large number of British people experience Glastonbury entirely from the sofa, and consider this the superior option — all the music, none of the mud, and a working lavatory.