It was more or less the first thing on everyone's lips at Glastonbury Festival this year. The weather's lush, music is tip-top but... it's busy, isn't it? And not just garden-variety busy—so busy it proved actively impossible to get within 200 yards of many areas. Stages were locked off, walkways rerouted and music across the site was intermittently halted due to overcrowding. A topic that's usually the domain of buzzy group chats felt more blatant than ever: Glastonbury's infrastructure is creaking. Badly.

2024 will likely go down as a tipping point. After the festival, performers balanced thank yous with tales of fearing being "crushed to death" (OK Williams) or apologies to fans for sets curtailed due to reasons out of their control (Bicep). There might be readers who wilfully extract the most negative message: that Glastonbury is oversold and miserable. It's not. This year's festival was great fun—it always is—but nevertheless, the magic is being steadily eroded by capacity issues and poorly ideated programming.

Glastonbury's top brass appear to have lost a handle on how dominant electronic music has become among its current clientele. The festival has a genuine conundrum on its hands and should face it with clarity. A serious crush would above all be a tragedy, not to mention irreparably scar Glastonbury and have wider ramifications for a festival ecosystem that's already wobbling. After three editions on the spin of surging crowds, this worst-case scenario feels too close for comfort.

First, a quick disclaimer. I've been attending Glastonbury from pre-teen years, and have only missed four editions since 2003. This isn't a boilerplate moan about how the vibe was better back in the day, man, or how the lineup disappointed me for X or Y reason. Nor is this a side-swipe from some backstage vantage point; I set my alarm and copped a ticket in the general sale like everybody else.

Take it from someone who's been coming since the days when Moby was a bona fide Pyramid Stage headliner: the lineup is deeper and better than ever, particularly on the DJ front. It's true that the festival sells more tickets than it once did, yet it's overly simplistic to cite that as the root of crowd control. I traipsed around the site on Sunday and found swathes of the ground as empty as I'd ever seen it. The issue lies in a failure to get arms around a mass demographic shift.

There's a fundamental misalignment between Glastonbury's vision of itself as a three-day contemporary arts festival, and the reality of how punters actually treat it: a five-day knees-up. Competition for camping space has accelerated greater numbers who arrive pre-dawn on Wednesday morning, which means Thursday has supplanted Friday as the majority of attendees' official musical kick-off.

Unsurprisingly, crowds on Thursday flock to parts of the farm that are open. This means capacity-limited electronic areas, among them the Glade, Arcadia and Silver Hayes. There's also the nebulous South East Corner (SEC), an all-night zone to which crowd flow is routinely paused. The SEC combines spaces with an evident rationale for queue systems—such as queer fantasia NYC Downlow—as well as those that don't, predominantly in the narrow corridor of dystopian art and microvenues connecting Shangri-La, the Unfairground and The Common.

Yet the five main stages—Pyramid, Other, West Holts, the Park and Woodsies (formerly the John Peel Tent)—are closed on Thursday due to the terms of Glastonbury's licence. Meanwhile, the number of smaller stages catering to the festival's historical bread-and-butter of whimsical folk, rock and global grooves have shrunk.

This forces a palpably insane amount of attendees into small parcels of land, requiring extensive strategising just to avoid congestion and wait times of multiple hours in order to catch the most sought-after acts. On Friday around 2:30 AM, as I trundled out of the SEC, sardined shoulder to shoulder with thousands, I couldn't help but think: at what point did we accept this was normal? Is this fun?

What Happened This Year?

In short, it was messier than one of the world's leading music events should be. 2024's lineup showed the festival is serious about modernising its booking policy in order to incubate a younger audience. That's commendable. Yet lower-than-hoped-for attendance on the Pyramid (capacity ~120,000) for Sunday night's bold top three of SZA, Burna Boy and Janelle Monáe suggests Glastonbury is running ahead of the curve on British festivalgoers' tastes. In parallel, overcrowding in dance areas and pathological tendency toward underbilling nostalgia acts shows they're struggling to keep pace with audiences' actual taste profile.

The problem wasn't exclusive to club music: good luck getting anywhere if you had to traverse record-breaking numbers turning out at the Other (capacity ~65,000) for Avril Lavigne. Following Dua Lipa's headline set on Friday night, screens flanking the Pyramid flashed an announcement in BRAT green—nice touch—that Silver Hayes was at maximum capacity, so anyone hoping to do a Dua-Charli xcx double was out of luck. As thousands had already been queuing for hours to catch Charli in PARTYGIRL mode, the migration from one megastar to another would have been horrendous. This was a welcome intervention, yet it barely scratches the surface.

Thursday was rough. Before the festival began, Glastonbury called off a set from Groove Armada in the Stonebridge Bar (~500), and bumped Faithless on the Glade (~5,000) to Friday in an attempt to skirt the dangerous scenes whipped up by Example last year. It didn't fix much. In the SEC, I witnessed a scrummage break out trying to get into one stage, The Temple (~4,000), as soon as it opened. The Levels (~7,000) was a similar scene a few hours later: one of Resident Advisor's coverage team spent an hour caught up in a roadblock to catch Joy Orbison before finally giving up.

The issues were persistent. If you didn't rock up to Barry Can't Swim or Sugababes on Friday afternoon with at least an hour to spare, no chance. One area, Greenpeace (~4,000), variously saw Jayda G, Confidence Man and Prospa all paused across the weekend due to crowd overspill. Bicep had to stop their CHROMA AV set on IICON (~15,000) for over 20 minutes to dissipate risk. Pathways to the SEC remained shut for hours, even as attendance on the ground thinned out. The situation was febrile as jammed crowds grew confused and agitated.

To Glastonbury's credit, additional stewards bearing marshalling wands were out in force by Saturday and Sunday, calming things down. By then, consensus had already hardened: this is getting out of hand.

In a statement to the Guardian, the festival said that "major artists wanting to perform at smaller stages with limited capacities is part of the magic of Glastonbury." That makes sense when Fred again.. plays an unannounced set. But there's no credible argument that Dr Banana and Lukas Wigflex are suddenly too large to be in an open-air arena, or that an aggy overflow at 4 PM to see Channel One Sound System—who you can catch for £11 every other month in London—is normal.

Why Are Things Going Wrong?

The sheer scale of the site is a good place to start. Every year that it runs, Glastonbury becomes one of the largest 25 BAU (built-up areas) in England, large enough to qualify for city status. Unlike most festivals, it comprises over a dozen individual areas and 100-plus stages, making centralised organisation impossible. Think of it like a cluster of federated states who are all bound by charter—in this case, a rigorous licence and event management protocols—into a single nation. Each zone has its own budget, bookers and allocation for passes. It's not as simple as rotating acts between stages contingent on expected turnout, no matter whose popularity might be rising as June draws near.

Given the complexity of keeping the event in line, the festival's licence is constantly under fluctuating levels of threat from Somerset Council; for decades, locals have been allocated Sunday day passes as a gesture of goodwill. So while the festival 100 percent should renegotiate to open up main stages on Thursday—or, better still, boot naff heritage pop off the Pyramid and stick Roni Size on instead—I wouldn't hold your breath.

Like any union of individual states, there's a mix of progress and disrepair. Silver Hayes, formerly the Dance Village, has received rolling upgrades since Team Love got in, including impressive new stages Assembly and The Levels being established over the past two years. It's a revelation compared to just a few years ago, but the logic that it would divert substantial numbers away from the SEC hasn't panned out. During the periods when demand for dance music outpaces Glastonbury's supply, bottlenecks simply occur at both ends of the site. The issue is compounded by the fact that Silver Hayes and Arcadia's music switches off at 3 AM, while the SEC runs until dawn—so the most hardy ravers migrate there and get trapped anyway.

Glastonbury's response to 2024's complications means they're quite possibly unaware of the real problem. Following a crush at Roskilde 2000 that claimed the lives of nine Pearl Jam fans, founder Sir Michael Eavis placed an effective moratorium on mosh-inducing bands out of fear. You'd be hard pressed to find much heavy music on the farm between Nine Inch Nails in 2000 and Metallica in 2014, but that's not where the likely source of future tragedy lies today.

A sizeable percentage of ticket holders aren't gracing the main stages at any point, nor are they rocking up early to align their chakras. While strobing beats have played a part in Glastonbury's history ever since Orbital broke new ground with a storied performance in 1994, the current gulf in perception needs urgent reconciliation.

At one point last weekend, my mind drifted to a notorious near-calamity of British clubbing, Bloc 2012, which was shutdown mere hours into the weekend following a cascading chain of events. But the situation was on a knife-edge, only likely kept at bay by the fact most punters were placidly pinging and could flood out onto the streets of the capital, where a series of unofficial compensatory events quickly sprang up. I then thought about the 2010 Love Parade disaster, which showed how "it could never happen here" is a risky card to play.

If someone fainted during the dark and cramped passages entering and exiting the SEC, I doubt they could be hauled out to receive immediate medical attention. I don't even know if half the crowd would be able to feel them underfoot. That's a serious concern.

How Can Glastonbury Fix It?

Bluntly, the festival needs to wake up and come to terms with its shifting dynamics. Glastonbury might still have "Contemporary Performing Arts" in its full name, but the percentage of attendees making use of family-friendly and non-musical zones is dwindling. It's time to give serious consideration to a remapping of the site, either in 2025, or after 2026's fallow year.

It'd be a contentious suggestion, given that legacy Glasto-goers bemoan that dance culture is already inescapable. Uprooting the Healing Fields would rob the festival of its unique texture—by the other token, though, would anyone mourn the loss of hopelessly twee areas like Carhenge and Glastonbury-on-Sea? Staffing and feeding somewhat redundant parts of the site requires more passes being allocated, which further swells the footfall. Sometimes you simply have to play the game as it lays.

The festival has reorganised out of necessity before: in 2014, Arcadia's fire-spurting spider was moved away from the SEC and has been pretty successful as a catchment area for tens of thousands of techno, tech house and drum & bass fans. Another, Avalon, has been incrementally reduced from multiple cafés to little more than an awkward abutment on the thoroughfare to SEC. A zone catering to whimsical folk being overrun with young ravers off for a big one? You don't have to look far for symbolism.

Glastonbury could improve the situation by generating more compelling late-night options. The Tree Stage, which booked beatless and New Age acts like KMRU and Steve Hillage, was a charming addition this year. But at over a 30-minute walk from the SEC, it provided little more than a breather for those already ambient-inclined: Ana Roxanne drew a few hundred people on Thursday evening, and that's as busy as it got. At many European festivals, major acts play deep into the night; in 2003, the first year I attended, the Pyramid ran until 1 AM. Toward the end of the '00s, Glastonbury negotiated beefier sound in exchange for earlier programming, which is why today's headliners typically start at twilight.

If Glastonbury can't extend operating hours or expand the dance areas, they owe people an honest response to the issues that have dogged the past three editions. We're beyond the point where this can be shrugged off as a blip or attributed to post-pandemic friction burns. Veterans gripe that newer attendees are falling foul of the unspoken social contract required to hold a gathering of this size together, and there's some truth in that. But the bonhomie between different pockets of society has always been one of Glastonbury's most impressive qualities. Navigating a festival that resembles commuters at rush hour is physically taxing, but witnessing a freewheeling event become more siloed is doubly a shame.

Glastonbury's transition out of its countercultural era into its more commercially dominant phase was pockmarked by incidents, all of which were overcome. In 1990, the site was ransacked in a molotov-fuelled frenzy, which led to a sharp change in relations with the Traveller community that had previously been a bedrock. On Saturday night in 1994, five were wounded in a gang shooting before Björk and Orbital; the site clamped down on open drug dealing after that. And, in 2000, break-ins were high enough to render this year's tally negligible by comparison. Under extreme pressure, a superfence went up in 2002 to save the festival.

Putting photos of the worst pinch points from Glastonbury 2024 side by side with, say, the kettling that took place before the 2022 Champions League final wouldn't portray the festival in a positive light. Obviously, Glastonbury's security were not wading in and pepper-spraying the crowd as the Parisian police did. But unlike the extensively publicised postmortems that follow blighted sporting events, coverage of Glastonbury's crowd control issues remains comparatively limited.

And I get it: Glastonbury takes up an outsized amount of real estate in the UK's cultural landscape and raises millions for charity. No regular feels great about criticising the festival. But no one benefits from the current state of play: not the performers whose sets are paused; nor older, impaired or very young attendees who are less equipped to handle enormous crowds flooding around the site; and certainly not new attendees, already squeezed financially after 14 years of national decline in the UK, on whom Glastonbury's next era relies.

It's a true shame for those who don't have the conditioning to plan their weekend around navigating surges. Several first-timers on RA's team were surprised to learn that Glastonbury hasn't always been like this. The systems set up to alleviate crowd pressure are working for now, yet those who spend close to £1,000 all-in on tickets, travel and sustenance aren't going to be reassured that the grindingly slow one-way traffic system is functional. Even if attendees aren't crushed to death—very much an active "if"—they're still going to feel bitterly shortchanged.

Glastonbury is at a crossroads. The line between tedious and dangerous is thin; it should settle for neither. We hold the festival to higher standards for a reason, and it's our duty to be honest: the time for change is past due.

Update, July 3rd: This piece has been updated with a link to our news piece on the 2026 fallow year.

Update July 6th: This piece was updated to link to our Glastonbury 2024 diary.