News / Bristol festivals
Could Bristol become the new home of Glastonbury Festival?
Michael Eavis, the founding father of one of the UK’s biggest and best music festivals, has confirmed that a new location will be found for Glastonbury Festival once every five years after 2019.
The current site at Worthy Farm in Pilton, famous for its Pyramid Stage and muddy wallows, will be rested in the fallow year with the new festival being christened Variety Bazaar.
Glastonbury Festival will remain on its current site under its traditional name when not at its as-yet unannounced new home.
is needed now More than ever
A previous attempt to move Glastonbury to the Longleat Estate – around 15 miles from its current home – fell through recently when the son of landowner Lord Bath raised concerns about the mud and damage that would be caused by the 175,000 festival-goers who descend on the site each year.
The location of the new festival is still cloaked in mystery, but Eavis let slip in a Glastonbury FM interview that the new site was “halfway to the Midlands” – which, by our reckoning, puts Bristol right in the middle of the action:
To run Glastonbury festival in its current form, the organisers, including Eavis’ daughter Emily, rent land from over 20 adjacent farms.
When not the buzzing heart of the summer festival scene, Worthy Farm is a peaceful dairy farm with a view of Glastonbury Tor, home to 200 cattle, and neighbours complain each year about noise, litter and anti-social behaviour.
But Eavis has said that it would be a “huge loss to Somerset” if the festival disappeared from there entirely.
“I’ve been a risk-taker all my life,” Eavis said of the move and the creation of the new festival. “In 47 years of taking risks, so far, touch wood, I haven’t come unstuck. This might be one risk too far, I don’t know.”
Read more: How Bristol’s spirit helps shape Glastonbury