Moving the festival crowds

With over 200,000 festival-goers in attendance, moving the crowds to and from Europe’s largest music festival is a major exercise which a number of bus and coach operators have perfected over several decades. Martin Curtis reports

The Glastonbury festival site covers an area of 900 acres and holds a population equivalent to a city the size of Bath. Attendance is by ticket only, which quickly sell out when released – with or without all the acts being confirmed. Over the five main days of events, from Wednesday 21 to Sunday 25 June, more than 3,000 acts performed on 100 stages, the most prominent being the Central Pyramid stage and almost continual TV and radio coverage is provided. From the site, Glastonbury Tor can be seen on the horizon.

The location and its name

In a rural setting, essentially the event takes place at Worthy Farm, Pilton, which is a fully working dairy farm for the rest of the year, run by the Eavis family. Whilst officially and nationally termed Glastonbury Festival, activity is actually located in and around the Somerset village of Pilton and referred to by locals as Pilton Festival. Indeed, the village is effectively locked down during the event with almost every villager participating in various roles including that of marshal or steward. In the early days particularly, many music fans descended on the town of Glastonbury only to find they were a few miles away from the festival ground.

Nearby is the Bristol & West Showground, which acts as a base and relief point for many bus operators involved in moving the crowds.

History and background

The Glastonbury Festival has officially been in existence since 1970, although smaller music gatherings began to be established a little earlier. In its early years, before deregulation of bus services, Bristol Omnibus was the principal local operator and initially ran additional buses as demand to reach the site grew. Later, substantial extra services from Bristol, and to a lesser extent Bath, were established to cope with the growing numbers while Wells and Glastonbury were also connected to Pilton.

These services terminated or loaded at the roadside, queues forming along the grass verges on the A361 with normal traffic still passing by, but as this became unworkable an adjacent field became the bus queuing position until eventually a large bespoke coach and bus ‘station’ area was created on the other side of Pilton towards Glastonbury town.

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The coach and bus station area is established on rough ground, which is dusty when dry and muddy when wet. It comprises approximately a dozen bus bays and twice as many for coaches, with more than double this area available for vehicle parking. The A361 is now one of several roads in the district closed to normal traffic during the festival, with only coach and bus access permitted, together with other site vehicles.

The bus shuttles

There are several bus shuttle services working in and out of the Festival bus station, including Drop & Collect, which allows people to be set down or collected at the Bath & West Showground; Worthy View campsite; to and from local towns; and a significant operation connecting the site to Bristol.

A constant operation to and from Bristol this year was undertaken by National Express with a fleet of fully electric Alexander Dennis double-deckers supported by Zenobé charging equipment installed at the Bath & West Showground specially for the event. Both Stagecoach and, to a lesser extent, First were also busy on transfer work, with First’s local network having increased capacity as needed.

Local operator Centurion Travel of Midsomer Norton, whose vehicles are always turned out to a high standard, was another operator associated with the shuttle and transfer services and which has been involved in the Pilton Festival over a great many years. Absent this year however was Go-Ahead, as was RATP. The latter had for several years contributed buses from Bath Bus Company, Bournemouth’s Yellow Buses and London United, but had not sought to participate on this occasion.

Festival rail movements

If only the Beeching cuts of the mid-1960s had not closed the Somerset & Dorset Railway, the nearest major railway station at Evercreech Junction could easily have become the Festival’s main rail interchange. However, since that no longer exists the next closest railway station is Castle Cary and with the festival’s railway partner GWR, has become the location for many festival-goers to reach. From here, a constant shuttle of mainly double-deckers take thousands of passengers and their baggage, which includes full camping equipment, food, drink, and regalia, to and from the site during the days of activity.

The contract for this operation is held by Abus, whose owner Alan Peters, retired from his main operation between Keynsham and Bristol in recent years, but has maintained some schools and local authority contract work. For Glastonbury, in addition to his own vehicles, Alan hires in several regular operators including, BH24 Consulting, Burrows Coaches, Chepstow Classic Buses, Coach Event Services, Mayflower, North Somerset Coaches and Southern Transit.

Alan’s involvement with Glastonbury goes back decades to the early days and operations by Bristol Omnibus and later Badgerline. Interestingly, a number of his ex-colleagues from these companies are also to be found assisting with his operations.

As the festival built up, as many as twenty-two buses were in use on the Castle Cary Shuttle service resulting in up to 8,000 passengers carried per day, transferring tens of thousands of people over the whole event. Moving large crowds quickly after disembarking from the trains at Castle Cary is imperative because the platform areas need to be cleared before the next arrival, to avoid the possibility of overcrowding within the station.

To assist loading the buses, a large team of baggage handlers stow belongings inside the lower saloon while most passengers take their seats upstairs. Upon arrival at the festival site, a further team of handlers form a chain to unload and place baggage and equipment adjacent to the designated bus bay. Only then do the bus passengers alight to retrieve their belongings and make their way to camping fields and the performance areas.

Colin Stanaway, Bus Services Manager for the event and an established figure at the Festival, advised that on Monday 26 June (the main departure day) the number of buses on this shuttle reached 50, in order to meet the level of demand.

The impression was that the numbers arriving by rail in 2023, whilst still substantial, may have been a little down on the previous year, to the benefit of coach operators. This was perhaps influenced by the on-going rail disputes, which disrupted travel previously, and dependability for many travelling to and from Glastonbury was critically essential on particular days.

Coach operations

The numbers arriving by coach this year seemed to be greater than ever. National Express offers the official coach network for Glastonbury and provides services from as far north as Glasgow and Edinburgh, over 20 locations in the North of England, South Wales, the West Country and of course London and the south east.

Festival tickets can also be booked with See Coaches which specialises in event bookings combined with coach travel to and from the venue. A vast range of coach operators contribute vehicles for these direct services and in addition many smaller concerns pre-arrange trips to the Festival, adding further to the arrivals and departures by coach.

A highly organised schedule is therefore devised to handle these passenger movements with the coach and bus station area active day and night. Duplicate vehicles for the express departures have then to be added and accommodated in the boarding areas.

The total number of coaches involved has been estimated for the peak departure day of Monday 26 June as around 900, representing a movement by coach from the site over a 16 hour period of around 50,000 people. What then needs to be remembered is that Pilton village itself has narrow roadways and a number of steep gradients, with buses and coaches departing while passing further incoming traffic.

DVSA

With so many buses and coaches in attendance, it has become routine for DVSA to establish a presence in the coach and bus station area during the festival. On-line checks are now made against operators and details held without the need to stop vehicles, although spot checks on both vehicles and drivers continue on occasions to ensure the road-worthiness of vehicles, and that drivers are in posession of the correct qualifications and driving records.

Day visitors

In the early days of the Glastonbury Festival, considerable controversy surrounded the event and the disruption this caused local residents. To a large extent this has now been overcome by a culture, established by the festival organisers, that allows the local community to benefit from the event. One way this has been achieved has been to make tickets available for the residents of the nearby towns who can become visitors for the day on Sunday, the final day of performances with headline acts appearing in the evening. In addition to those already on site, a further 5,000 day visitors are drawn from seven nearby towns – Castle Cary, Frome, Glastonbury itself, Radstock, Midsomer Norton, Shepton Mallet and Street – together with the city of Wells (which is England’s smallest city).

Transport to and from Pilton, on timed departures according to tickets held, is closely supervised by the Bus Services Manager, Colin Stanaway, who coordinates these services provided by many of the local operators, including once again Abus and Centurion. They commence from Sunday morning with departures from early evening through to the early hours of Monday. For the operators involved and in view of the times of travel, separate groups of drivers are usually required for the forward and return journeys.

Oxfam

Among the more unusual aspects of the festival is the involvement of Oxfam volunteers. Oxfam is among many charities to benefit from the festival and recruits and organises large teams of stewards who, in exchange for their assistance at the festival, also get to see some of the performances. They are transferred in to their own compound on site from Temple Meads railway station in Bristol, and return again on the Monday following the event, to make rail connections home. This seemingly minor activity nevertheless requires a series of coaches and buses to make return trips at specified times and – unlike other departures – sees double-deck buses running across the festival area (under escort from a marshal) as these volunteers are carried to their destination.

Vehicles employed

Whilst some of the most modern, zero-emission buses can be found on shuttle work at Glastonbury, so too can a range of older vehicles, some of which are used solely for special events. All work hard however, as steep gradients are found on roads both approaching and leaving Pilton village – and with full loads and extensive baggage and equipment, it is a reflection on the operators that very few breakdowns occur.

Among the oldest to be used for shuttle work, were six Bristol VRTs from the Chepstow Classic Buses fleet. These are now approaching 50 years old but far from failing to keep up with more recent models, they actually out-performed some newer vehicles while fully loaded climbing steep gradients.

Experienced operators & control

With so many of the participating companies having experience of Glastonbury Festivals over many years, it is to be expected that travel generally runs smoothly – although in earlier years this was not always the case, with congestion and delays proving difficult.

A role once performed by police is traffic control, which is now undertaken by a private company. This requires considerable skill and experience in order to keep traffic moving, including non-festival traffic which is negotiating its way through the area. If maintaining traffic flow fails, serious delays may occur and often it is the experienced operators who are first to anticipate an impending problem. Those on the ground need to be fully aware of numbers of buses approaching and the space required to manoeuvre through Pilton’s narrow roads.

Generally, traffic kept moving at this year’s event except for a period on Monday afternoon where the volume of vehicles was exceptional and once delays built up, timed arrivals and free traffic flows seemed to overwhelm some of the traffic control staff. Throughout this, organisers at the bus station area sought to continue to load vehicles but at one point were unable to despatch them quickly as a free path onto the road network wasn’t available.

Fortunately, the weather on Monday was good and this tends to affect how eager people are to pack their tents and leave the site. At previous events, wet weather has caused an early mass exodus, with a greater demand than operators can meet.

Green travel

Inclusion in the provision of buses and coaches for Glastonbury has become a tradition for many operators and drivers at the festival. Overall the travel arrangements worked successfully this year.

The Festival organisers encourage sustainable green activities and this includes attending the event by bus, coach or train rather than private car. By taking account of all those who travelled by rail, direct bus or long distance coach, it would seem the vast majority of festival attendees used a form of public transport, made possible by the massive combined effort of the passenger transport industry.

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