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Case study - Glastonbury Festival 2007

Licence application and crowd engineering.

The Glastonbury Festival is the largest greenfield music and performing arts festival in the world. It provides a unique experience and its popularity is immense.

Starting in 1970 with 1,500 people attending it has grown until 2005 when they were 119,000 visitors supported by 34,000 artists and production staff. Tickets sell out within hours.

For the 2007 Festival the organisers, Glastonbury Festival Ltd, wanted to increase the licensed capacity of the site to 177,500.

Following changes to the Licensing Act (2003) it is possible to apply for a licence that runs for a number of years. Melvin Benn, the licence holder, and GFL chose to apply to Mendip Council for a licence spanning four years.

A central consideration for Melvin Benn and GFL was crowd safety for the higher number of visitors, and it was essential to demonstrate in their application that their excellent crowd safety record could be maintained. GFL asked Evacuation Strategies to prepare a Crowd Safety Assessment reviewing GFL’s proposals and making recommendations where needed. 

Evacuation Strategies were consulted at an early stage to understand the changes proposed to accommodate the additional visitors, and reviewed all the existing documentation including risk assessments, event management plans, and the major incident plans.

Then we worked with the GFL team to develop a model of how crowds moved around the site in the past and how this might change in the future. Risks were re-assessed. A number of recommendations were made including:

·         Some routes were widened and new bridges added to create a balanced crowd flow system around the site;

·         Stewarding procedures developed to control visitor numbers at certain locations;

·         Enhancements to the risk assessment process; and

·         Additional observation and data collection during the Festivals.

These were committed to by Melvin Benn in the licence application.

The report by Evacuation Strategies underpinned the licence application and we were present at the hearing to substantiate the reports findings and recommendations to the Mendip Licensing Committee.

The report recommendations were further supported by Mendip Council and the Police, who went to state that they become a condition of the licence. A Crowd Safety study is now to be part of an annual review prior to the Festival for the duration of the licence.

Melvin Benn, director of The Mean Fiddler and licence holder for Glastonbury Festivals Ltd said:

“Simon Ancliffe had made recommendations to improve visitor safety following the 2003 Festival, which we implemented, and Evacuation Strategies were the obvious choice to assess our crowd safety planning as we prepared our licence application. Having experts on-board and their report smoothed the way to a successful application, and I am pleased that they will be on-site to observe this year’s Festival and help us prepare for the next one.”

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