Size of Glastonbury Festival compared to Liverpool and other venues

Until you’ve spent a day hiking from the Pyramid stage back to your Worthy View campsite, it’s hard to grasp the scale of Glastonbury Festival.

Some of the world’s biggest music stars are set to descend on the log farm fields near Pilton in Somerset. But how big is Glastonbury Festival?

While it’s hard to get an exact size, the main festival site can be measured anywhere between 900 acres and 1,100 acres. This is the equivalent of over 500 large football pitches.

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There are over 100 stages on site, plenty of toilets including over 2,000 long drops, over 1,300 compost spaces and over 700 meters of urinals. There are over 100 bars and over 500 food stalls.

When in operation, many compare Glastonbury to a big city. To put the location of the festival into perspective, a special map allows you to overlay the Glastonbury site onto your desired location.

You can use this site to compare the size of the main festival site to where you live. Search for a village, town or city and the website will overlay a sketch of the festival site over the desired location.

The official capacity of Glastonbury Festival is 210,000 people. That’s the equivalent of over two Wembley Stadium music fans.

To put this into perspective, for five days in June the festival becomes the biggest city in Somerset, beating neighbors Bath (101,000), Weston-super-Mare (82,000) and Taunton (68,000). It also becomes the fourth largest city in the South West, after Bristol (467,000), Plymouth (264,000) and Swindon (233,000).

Is it the biggest music festival in the world?

Many people claim that Glastonbury Festival is the biggest music festival in the world, but this is a difficult claim to accurately corroborate. A number of other festivals claim to be bigger, but some of them give free admission, making it difficult to determine a total number, some events are spread across multiple venues, and other festivals sell tickets for a single day and add up the total number . of participants over a week, swelling the total capacity.

However, there are a number of music festivals around the globe that claim to be bigger in both size and/or frequency. These include Donauinselfest in Austria, Mawazine in Morocco and the Montreal International Jazz Festival in Canada.

The number of participants was higher in the 1990s

Attendance at Glastonbury Festival has been higher in the past. Before the “superfence” was erected around the perimeter twenty years ago, many people crashed the event, increasing the capacity to over 300,000 in the 90s.

Coming off a wave of “wild” festivals from that time, residents from surrounding villages said they were fed up and attacked Glastonbury Festival at a council meeting in 2002. They called the event “a war zone” and “a very real area”. threat to public order”.

This led to Mendip District Council refusing a new license to festival organizer Michael Eavis, leaving the future of the event in the balance. However, Mr Eavis appealed the decision and a new license was eventually granted, paving the way for another 20 years of world-class music in Pilton.

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