how to build a city for 5 days

or, nerding out at glastonbury

My run of 6 mad weeks is over. What a treat to have so many things in life worth celebrating, eh. Equally, what a treat to now catch up on some sleep. I am looking forward to a marginally more chilled July, with more spontaneity, more sun, more joy, more cooking and maybe even more rest. Or maybe not, let’s see.

books

I gulped down Consider Yourself Kissed on the train back from Glastonbury: a good little summer read, although I can’t help but think many of the points being made over women’s emotional labour and willingness - unwittingly or otherwise - to subsume their identity in the face of their partners were slightly hackneyed. Nonetheless, I love a book set very distinctly in an area of London I know and love, and I enjoyed following the characters round London Fields and Hackney.

I also bought myself a battered copy of Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind, which I have been recommended several times over. You know what? It’s great. I love Macfarlane’s writing in general, and I particularly like this book because it is about one of my fave niche topics/obsessions - mad men who try and climb very very big mountains despite facing near certain death (see mainly Everest, but other mountains are available etc).

Lastly, a lovely juicy proof of Eleanor Doughty’s Heirs and Graces landed on my desk: Eleanor is extremely well-versed in all things aristo-related, and her book is full of excellent details about the mad world of the 0.01%. TL;DR; the aristocracy are still alive and well, they’ve just done some shape-shifting to fit in better in modern Britain. Note that you will get v well-versed (as both Eleanor and I are) in title-based convention if you read this book.

just a girl in a field thinking about infrastructure

Yes, I was one of the 200,000+ people who descended on Worthy Farm last week, yes it was amazing etc, but actually, I can’t help but be impressed by the logistics of getting that many people (including global pop megastars) into 100 acres of farmland in sleepy Somerset. For the duration of the festival, it’s the equivalent of something like the 10th biggest city in the UK, and technically the most densely populated city on earth. The nearest town, Pilton, has a year-round population of 1,000 people. There is no major infrastructure nearby. This is a ‘build it from scratch’ operation each and every year.

It’s mind-boggling. My mum kept asking how the queues for the loos were. The answer? Actually probably didn’t ever queue for more than 10 mins for anything. Madness.

Things you as a festival goer rarely think about include:

- Internet coverage. Not just WhatsApping your mates to find out who’s where in the Charli XCX crush, but making every single one of those card payment terminals work, journos filing copy, BBC streaming live coverage etc. It’s like the internet coverage needed in a city a bit bigger than Oxford, but on steroids because there’s so much uploading / downloading going on. Nuts. Phone providers have to put in loads of extra infrastructure - think power towers and microwave dishes all over this series of fields - so that the festival can meet the needs of its modern audience.

- Loos. There are over 2000 long drop loos and 1200 compost loos at Glastonbury. Back in 2014, a sewage tank leak saw the festival fined £31k for pollution - and getting rid of c. 200,000 peoples’ excrement is a serious job. Compost loos help by turning ‘human waste’ into compost - but the process takes 2-3 years to complete / produce a safe and usable set of compost.

- Crowd control. Festivals are a truly fascinating mix of free-for-all (200,000 people living in a series of fields, half of them off their faces on booze and more) and meticulously planned (thorough-fares, structured stages, carefully thought through site plans). Emily Eavis has literally admitted to planning clashes (i.e. putting Charli XCX and Doechii at the same time) in order to prevent overcrowding. Real-time monitoring and drone surveillance have made crowd management much more responsive and easier than in years gone by, but it’s still an exercise in master-planning.

- Food & drink: OK, you probably think about this a lot. Apparently 1.2 million pints are sold at Glastonbury over the 5 days of the festival, across 100 bars - an average of 5.7 pints per person. Which I guess is c. 1 a day. So maybe not that wild. Doing the maths, maybe it should even be more??? But I guess that doesn’t take into account people like me who aren’t on pints but who are on the frozen margs. The pop-up Co-op is open 7am-3am every day, and sells around 250 items. It’s restocked multiple times a day. Creating temporary infrastructure to make this possible requires a huge quantity of logistics, planning and transport.

- The bins. Watching the veritable army of litter pickers swarm across Arcadia on Sunday morning is truly a sight to behold. Glastonbury has the UK’s largest event-operated recycling centre: in 2019, they composted 149 tonnes of food waste. All food and drink cartons + packaging sold by traders on site is compostable, so you can pop your bamboo cutlery, cardboard plate and any food remnants in the same bin. Bins are all individually sorted through (because people are, ultimately, terrible at doing even simple things like putting their rubbish in the right bin), and processed at the recycling centre. About 50% of the waste at the festival is recycled or reused: not bad, eh.

- The architecture of the festival. Yes, I’m banging on about architecture once again, but this piece by Phineas Harper goes into some of the coolest bits of Glasto architecture, and you should read it if you’re even vaguely interested. It’s a work of art, with tents and stages and whole areas painstakingly designed, planned and executed by a very talented group of people. It looks amazing because people put in a lot of work, and every stage is unique. Also v gutted I missed the chance to go to NYC Downlow now. 2027 here we come, eh!

Someone please commission me to do an actual piece on the Glastonbury infrastructure! I want to go and talk to all the people who make it happen!

etc

- Guys it’s happened I’ve temporarily switched NYT-blonde allegiance after making Molly Baz’s pistachio, halva and dark choc cookies. The internet told me they were the best thing it had ever eaten, and maybe, just maybe, they are?? (Ok they’re not that great but they are v v nice.)

- Very into cold noodle salads and smashed potato salads atm. Have I figured out how to get a crispy smashed potato? Not entirely (tell me if you know, please). Are potato salads still delicious? Absolutely.

- Tornado: think wild west brutality and violence in 18th century Scotland. Visually gorgeous (give me a bleak landscape any day!). Also loved 28 Years Later, which had me visibly hiding behind my hands at parts.

- This piece on the mystery of D B Cooper is excellent. I am a sucker for an aviation-based long-read, and D B Cooper’s hijacking is one of the great examples of a historical mystery with answers that are frustratingly just a couple of centimetres out of reach.

Me, right now.