Glastonbury Festival’s Emily Eavis revealed the changes she’s made to the site to help avoid overcrowding at this year’s event
The organiser of Glastonbury Festival has revealed one major change they made to this year’s festivities, which meant a number of people missed out on tickets. Organiser Emily Eavis sat down with DJs Annie Mac and Nick Grimshaw for a special episode of their BBC Sounds podcast ‘Sidetracked’ to talk all things Glasto.
Emily spoke about the behind the scenes work, performance secrets, and changes for this year’s event, including the change to the capacity of the festival. She revealed that some areas of the iconic festival have shifted slightly to make way for extra space for visitors, in places such as the South East Corner.
The festival even purchased an extra field on the perimeter of the site to help fit in changes made to areas and crews in the South East Corner for the night-time performances.
This is to help festivalgoers avoid herds of people all moving in one direction as they move from stage to stage at busier times of the day.
However, one major factor in the site changes was a reduction in the number of tickets sold for this year’s event, which was reduced by “a few thousand.”
Emily told the podcast hosts: “The other thing is that we’ve sold a few thousand less tickets. So it will be interesting to see how that affects the dynamics on site.”
She explained the reason for this is to see if fewer numbers of people will make an impact on crowds at busier times of the festival.
Glastonbury has had the capacity to host a massive 210,000 people on site for the five-day festival.
In previous years, concerns were raised about the overcrowding in areas of the festival during certain performances.
Nick and Annie pointed out that the likes of Charli XCX and Doechi would be likely to pull massive crowds, but that it’s “hard to predict” the reality.
Emily explained that with the help of Glastonbury Festival app, the organisers are able to keep on top of crowd control using a colour-coded system.
She said that if a stage or field is signified by ‘red’ then it’s likely the field would have to be closed, persuading festival goers to take alternative routes.
Glastonbury Festival will kick off on Wednesday, June 25, with headliners The 1975, Neil Young, and Olivia Rodrigo.
There are a number of TBAs (to be-announced acts) on the line-up, including on the Pyramid Stage at 4.55pm before Alanis Morrissette.
Another act dubbed ‘Patchwork’ has been listed for Saturday on the Pyramid Stage at 6.15pm.
Source: Mirror
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