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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