Glastonbury festival-goers leave sea of rubbish behind
The five-day event concluded with a headline performance by U.S. pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo on the Pyramid Stage. Glastonbury will not return in 2026, as the festival enters a fallow year to give the ground time to recover before the next event takes place in 2027.
To ease congestion and avoid the peak heat—forecast to reach 31°C (88°F) festival-goers were encouraged to leave overnight between midnight and 6am.
Those travelling later in the day were advised to dress in light, breathable clothing, to stay hydrated, and use sunscreen. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here
Organisers also urged attendees to leave the site in good condition by taking all their belongings and tidying their campsites.
Following the mass exit, the festival's clean-up team began picking up thousands of discarded items including paper cups and food containers as festival-goers began to make their way home, leaving the festival in a steady stream.
Cleaners tackled over-flowing bins and big items such as camping chairs and blow-up mattresses, as well as slippers, flip-flops and shopping bags.
This year's edition of the festival saw punk duo Bob Vylan and Irish rap trio Kneecap have both of their sets on Saturday assessed by Avon and Somerset Police to decide whether any offences were committed.
Bobby Vylan, of Bob Vylan, led crowds on the festival's West Holts Stage in chants of "death, death to the IDF'
", before a member of Irish rap trio Kneecap suggested fans "start a riot" outside his bandmate's upcoming court appearance, and led the crowd in chants of "f*** Keir Starmer".
Sir Keir had said in the run-up to the festival that he thought Kneecap's set was not "appropriate" at Glastonbury. Organiser Emily Eavis told the on-site newspaper, Glastonbury Free Press, she had a 'huge list of things' to improve the festival ahead of its next iteration.
She said: 'We're always looking to make it better. The detail is critical. Even just a small touch – like putting a new hedge in – can make a real difference and that's what fallow years are for: you lay the ground to rest and you come back stronger.'
See all the pictures from the clean-up at Worthy Farm below:
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The Herald Scotland
7 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Film-maker who played pivotal role in the Scottish industry dies
Died: February 12, 2025 Laurence Henson was one of the key figures in Scottish documentary film-making and its transition to fiction films. Born in Mosspark in Glasgow, he attended St Gerard's Secondary School, where one of his classmates was Eddie McConnell (1936–2018) with whom he would go on to form a very successful partnership in movie-making. Following his national service, including a spell with the RAF in Borneo, Henson reunited with McConnell, who in the meantime had graduated from Glasgow School of Art, and as amateurs, they made Broken Images (1957), in which a drunk man wakes up in Glasgow's George Square to be confronted by the noble statuary of famous people. The film won one of the ten best amateur films of the year and thus came to the attention of the great John Grierson. The result was not only encouragement for the pair to turn professional, but to establish an important and lasting relationship with Grierson, 'the Father of the Documentary'. A job as a film editor at STV, including cutting the first football programmes, led to Henson becoming Grierson's assistant on This Wonderful World, the documentary film series, which became required viewing for anyone interested in movies. When the programme relocated from Glasgow to Cardiff, Henson moved with it, as did Grierson's PA, Rachel Collins. She and Henson married in Glasgow in 1961 and had two sons, Stephen and Peter. Sadly, the marriage did not last. In the early sixties, Henson accompanied Grierson to the Cork Film Festival, where he discovered an affection for Ireland. He also forged a life-long friendship with the late Irish broadcaster, Kevin O'Kelly. Reunited in film again with McConnell, the pair worked for Robert Riddell Black's Templar Films in Lynedoch Street, Glasgow. The company had just achieved the astonishing feat of winning a Hollywood Oscar for Seawards the Great Ships (1962), the stylish documentary on Clydeside shipbuilding directed by the American, Hilary Harris. Seawards was one of 16 films made by Templar for Films of Scotland, run by Forsyth Hardy whose mission was to gain commercial cinema releases at a time when it was conventional for there to be a short documentary (and often a newsreel) to precede the screening of the main feature. For example, Henson's Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride was screened with The Sting. A promotional New Town film, it was Henson's least favourite work while, as he pointed out, it was viewed by many more people than any of his other films. Directed by Henson, with McConnell as cinematographer, The Big Mill (1963) celebrated the steel works at Ravenscraig and Gartcosh. It was a classic high-value Griersonian documentary, and it too won international awards. Henson would say that it was the favourite of his works. Two years previously, he had made his directorial debut with The Heart of Scotland (1961). Again, Grierson was his mentor – he provided the outline treatment – and there was yet more support from the great man when Henson and McConnell were setting up their own independent film company. Grierson's Canadian company was International Film Associates; he permitted the new outfit to be called International Film Associates (Scotland). It was under the banner of IFA that Henson was to make the next major move: to add features to his documentary output. Forsyth Hardy had always wanted Films of Scotland to migrate from documentary to fiction. Perhaps he knew that the life of cinema documentary was nearing its end and that the rising Scottish talent, led by such as Henson, needed a new challenge; so Flash the Sheepdog (1967), from the story by Kathleen Fiddler, was directed by Laurence Henson, who also wrote the screenplay. Read more Tributes to Dundonian who became eminent director of the stars | The Herald 'First-class' producer at BBC Scotland and promoter of Gaelic dies | The Herald 'He never gave up': tributes to patriarch of Scottish undertakers | The Herald It concerned a London boy who comes to the Scottish Borders and learns the local ways. Made for the Children's Film Foundation, which catered for Saturday Morning matinees, it was an excellent way to learn the trade and led to further commissions for IFA – The Big Catch (1968) and Mauro the Gypsy (1973). The Duna Bull (1972), however, was Henson's pitch to an adult audience, with the whimsical story (based on a real event) of an island community which needed an appropriate beast to sustain their way of life. Henson's trajectory from amateur via television and documentary to features, was remarkable. He had been fortunate in his association with Grierson and Hardy, and in his partnership with McConnell. But it required character and determination to capitalise on the opportunities that had been presented to him, and the sense that he had benefited from the encouragement of others translated into his own desire to help the next generation of aspiring film-makers. However, in the late 1980s, Henson's life changed direction in a remarkable way. He had met Ruth Jacob who was visiting Scotland from Dublin, and the upshot was they became partners and moved to Ireland, first to Bray in County Wicklow, and then to Strokestown in County Roscommon, where they became very much part of the community, thus reaffirming his connection with Ireland. Another change for Henson was that now he was able to pursue his love of language by becoming a poet and being involved with local poetry groups and publications, even though he never lost his desire to make movies, which remained his motivational passion. His profound sense of place, and how the land shapes the people, always shows through in his films. Though a project on the Highland Clearances was an ambition that attracted well-known actors but not the requisite finance, a decades-long scheme did come to fruition in 2014 with Documenting Grierson, thereby completing the circle of his work. In that context, too, Henson ran occasional seminars in Dublin on screenwriting, under the title Writing Movies. Henson's poetry reveals a man of wit and warmth and of considerable ability with words, but his role in the development of the Scottish film industry was pivotal. He was ahead of most of his contemporaries in the progress to feature films and in the nurturing of talents such as Charlie Gormley and Bill Forsyth, who would go on to make it perfectly natural for Scots to create movies that reflected our culture. For paving that way, and for making excellent films in both documentary and feature, Laurence Henson deserves our overdue recognition and gratitude. DAVID BRUCE AND STEPHEN HENSON At The Herald, we carry obituaries of notable people from the worlds of business, politics, arts and sport but sometimes we miss people who have led extraordinary lives. That's where you come in. If you know someone who deserves an obituary, please consider telling us about their lives. Contact
The Guardian
8 hours ago
- The Guardian
The Guide #202: Awol headliners to rampaging deer: how festivals survive the worst-case scenarios
We're in the thick of festival season in the UK, where every weekend seems to host a dizzying array of musical mega-events. The likes of Glastonbury, Download, TRNSMT, Wireless and others may already be in the rear-view, but there are still plenty more to come across all manner of genres: Camp Bestival (happening this very weekend), Creamfields, Green Man, All Points East, Reading and Leeds, End of the Road and so many others, across farms, city parks, country estates and the odd mid-Wales mountain range. For the people who run these festivals, months or even a full years-worth of work will have gone into readying for a single, crucial long weekend. The stakes are high: whether things go off without a hitch or not will, in some cases, determine that festival's future. And boy, are there a lot of potential hitches: electricity, sanitation, ticketing, food and drink, security, and the fragile egos of famous musicians, to name but a few. 'The scary thing about festivals is, if you take away one small element, the whole thing collapses,' says promoter James Scarlett. James should know. He books and organises not one but two annual festivals: 2000Trees, a 15,000-capacity alternative, punk and indie festival in Cheltenham, which last month completed its 17th edition with headline appearances from emo veterans Alexisonfire and Taking Back Sunday, along with Keir Starmer faves Kneecap; and ArcTangent, which specialises in metal, math rock, prog, post-rock and general experimental music, and later this month (13-16 Aug) will lure 5,000 punters to a farm near Bristol to hear bands as varied as post-rock titans Godspeed You! Black Emperor, prog-metallers Tesseract, lugubrious indie dance veterans Arab Strap and a duo called Clown Core who play avant garde jazz fusion from a portable loo. In addition, James is also the co-host – along with Gavin McInally, who runs Manchester extreme metal festival Damnation – of 2 Promoters 1 Pod, a weekly, unvarnished, slightly sweary look at how a festival comes together from the booking of bands to the construction of the site. If you have even the most cursory interest in how festivals work, it's a fascinating listen. All of which makes James the person you'd call for in case of something going badly awry on site. So in this week's Guide we've decided to test his firefighting skills, by asking him to solve a series of festival disasters, including some ripped from recent headlines. Read on for his thoughts on awol headliners, heatwaves and herds of marauding deer. Festival disaster #1 | Your headlining band are playing a mind-blowing set but are overrunning. You've already reached the curfew time your festival has agreed with the local council and the band still haven't played their biggest song yet. What do you do? 'I have, occasionally in the past, let bands breach curfew. We got caught once doing it at ArcTangent. A council member was driving home from another event and just thought they'd stop outside the farm. He heard the music stop at 11pm … and then start again at three minutes past! We received a slap on the wrist that time, and have a good relationship with the council as our crowds are never any hassle – but you can lose your licence over breaking curfew, and then the whole festival is gone. So I think normally the answer is the curfew is the curfew. Still, If you've got a headliner who, say, have 45 minutes of technical difficulties, I think there might be an argument to let them break the licence just in order to keep the crowd happy, you don't want an angry 15,000 people who didn't get the headliner that they wanted. There's a health and safety argument for breaking your curfew if that happens.' Festival disaster #2 | A heatwave has descended on the festival site. You've not been told to shut it down, but temperatures are reaching the mid-to-high 30s. What do you do? 'This year we had 53 cases of heatstroke at 2000Trees on the Wednesday of the festival, when people had only just arrived. It's pretty impressive that people have come straight in and gone: bang, heatstroke! You have to have a really good first aid tent. We cleaned the local depot out of saline drips for ours, because so many people were coming in extremely dehydrated. In fact one drummer from a band, Future of the Left, had to go to the tent for severe dehydration and heatstroke. He's a very energetic drummer and in those tents the heat rises, you're higher than the crowd, and you're properly going for it – not really a working environment you want to be in! Still, we've clocked up mid-30s temperatures at 2000Trees at least twice and once at ArcTangent, and you can still run an event in that. It's about communication with your audience: drink water, wear a hat, wear sunscreen, try to find some shade.' Festival disaster #3 | An Icelandic volcanic ash cloud leaves the headliner you've booked stranded in mainland Europe with no way of making it to the festival in time. What do you do? 'If a headliner drops out, you're in trouble. You've just got to be honest with your audience that the band aren't gonna be there. And all you can really do is bump whoever was second from top up a slot, and everyone moves up. We go into each festival with a long backup list of bands that are either local or already on site as punters. So if we get a dropout, we can usually fill the gap at short notice. You can always guarantee that someone will miss a train, miss a flight, get stuck in traffic or just get confused about what day they're playing … which is quite frustrating if you spend all year booking a lineup!' Sign up to The Guide Get our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Friday after newsletter promotion Festival disaster #4 | The prime minister has said it is not appropriate for a controversial act to headline your festival. What do you do? 'What the UK prime minister says about Kneecap is of little interest to me to be honest. I'm not being bullied. We were having ex-MPs and current MPs writing to 2000Trees, like they have a say in what we do. We're a business, it's not up to them. I think it was a help that a few other festivals have stuck to their guns on keeping Kneecap on the bill: Glastonbury and Green Man for example. It does give you a little bit of solidarity. If everyone had folded on it and we were the last ones, I guess I would have felt more pressure. I don't think we would have caved until such time as it was a risk to the business over it. And in the end there was no risk. Kneecap were good as gold at 2000Trees – they did a brilliant, amazing headline set, one of the best we've ever had at the festival.' Festival disaster #5 | A fire breaks out on site just days before the festival begins, destroying your main stage, Tomorrowland-style. What do you do? 'If you don't have the main stage for your festival you're probably going to have to cancel because there's not enough space for everyone across the other stages. So you'd be on the phone to every stage and marquee company across the country trying to find a replacement. The problem is, with the massive explosion in the festival industry in recent times, stages and marquees are very hard to come by. It's likely to be squeaky bum time. In the case of Tomorrowland, amazingly, they borrowed Metallica's stage. Bands like ACDC and Metallica tend to tour with two rigs, so they'll be playing one night on a stage with a lighting and sound rig. And ahead of them, in the next city, there'll be another team building their stage for the next show. When that show's finished, they tear that rig down and move on to the next place. Which is crackers really – it's hard to imagine the scale of that.' Festival disaster #6 | A herd of deer has descended on the festival, trampling over tents and chomping on the merch stall. What do you do? 'Well, we had pigs and swans invading our VIP campsite at 2000Trees this year! The pigs had broken out of a nearby farm. There's no gentle way of getting a pig out of a campsite, really, you have to manhandle them. Our production team were chasing them around – it was quite a comic scene. For the swans we rang up the RSPB – 999 for birds – and they advised us to not do anything, and eventually they'd take off, which they did. Deer would be more difficult. You can't go manhandling deer, particularly stags with their antlers. We have 140 pages of risk assessments, covering every risk you could ever imagine … but pigs in the camp was not on that list!' If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday
The Guardian
8 hours ago
- The Guardian
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