The Hierarchy of Glastonbury Camping

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

The Glastonbury Festival of Performing and Contemporary Arts has been going for over 40 years now, which makes it older than East Timor, Facebook and Lorde, combined. And when a massive rural piss up has been going as long as this, it’s inevitable that miniature structures of society will form within its walls, as each year, another yield of human attendees find their grooves and safe places, through recommendation, rumor and total rookie error.

Once just areas with designated names, fields like Pennard Hill, Big Ground and the mysteriously named “Hospitality Camping” have gradually become little societies of nylon cul de sacs, novelty VW gazebos, Tibet flags, and stale cow shit, each with their own supposed identity.

Nobody wants to say it, but there is an unwritten hierarchy to the campsite. It’s a sliding scale of accommodation, where places like The Tipi Village (where Preston and Zara, who couldn’t buy their way into the VIP area, drink bottles of £70 wine out of plastic cups) are contrasted with haunted bogs like Lower Mead (the absolute gutter, where experience trumps comfort and everything smells like dry shampoo and Doritos). There are places out there, where the common one capacity Quechua pop up everyman is just not welcome.

In fact, the Glastonbury campsite hierarchy is a lot like that of Ancient Egyptian society really, except instead of having a Pharaoh at the top, it’s got a Hospitality Area Winnebago. Hey, maybe that’s why the Pyramid Stage is shaped and named so. Makes you think doesn’t it?

Anyway, as we said, this was all unwritten… until now. Because we’re blowing the lid off this mother. This is the hierarchy of Glastonbury’s most hallowed areas, in order of their prestige and status. Stay woke, people.

Your Car

(via)

This is the worst place to sleep in Glastonbury. There is a rule on the festival website that clearly states that there will be no sleeping allowed in the car park, which can only mean that LOADS OF PEOPLE have tried. Maybe you got so fucking wasted you now can’t find your friends or tent. Or, perhaps, like a man in a dark room searching for a black cat that isn’t there, you never even brought one in the first place. But don’t worry, all is not lost. Just kip under the wheel of your Ford Fiesta with a bin bag camouflaging you as a piece of trash, and you will go entirely unnoticed.

Lower Mead and Oxlyers

(via Wiki)

Found next to the Silver Hayes dance area, these two fields are some of the lowest lying ground onsite, so they have a tendency to quickly become hedonistic swamps. See the “people” here, though? They thrive on that; they are mud people. These deranged young ravers do not rely on usual human needs like food, sleep, or love. They are promiscuous, amphibious types who dab mandy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They roll in the muck, bathe in it, build small huts with it, eat it, and slither their way through it, backwards, using their gurning chins as propellers. Usually to an Alex Metric DJ set at Bez’s Acid House. One day, they will probably rise up and take over.

The Big Ground

Photo by Peter Burgess (via Flickr)

Who needs to frolic with the maddening crowds when you could camp at The Big Ground. This field sits directly across from the Pyramid stage, so you can just sit outside your tent on your Tesco Direct camping chairs, with your Tesco Direct camping table and milk that box of Tempranillo until the udder is dry, rejoicing at the distant melodies of Hozier’s 1 PM Sunday slot, all the while gazing down the hill at the peasants waving their little flags. But there is a dark side to paradise. A huge amount of footfall trundles through here right into the night. And so as each year passes, and The Big Grounders continually wake up to find their campfire covered in piss and their chairs stolen, they get closer and closer to sacking it all off for V Festival.

Pennard Hill

Photo by Katrin Ingwerson

This used to be the place to be for the Glastonbury youth, thanks to its proximity to the Stone Circle, where each night, thousands descend so that they can compete with each other in balloon modelling competitions, and then dance around the fire singing “For he’s a jolly good fellow!” But the soar in popularity of Pennard Hill has resulted in it becoming more and more exclusive, usually reaching capacity on the Wednesday before most people have even set off. As a result, it’s now a fortress for extremely organized 30-somethings, as opposed to the young airheads who arrive confused on a Thursday night with a carry mat and a portable iPhone speaker. The modern Pennard Hill crowd are more likely to spend money on quillows than ectos. God tried to unsettle this by smiting the field with a plague of floods in 2005, but even He couldn’t usurp the status quo. There goes the neighborhood.

The Campervan Field

Photo by Robert Foster

Get a campervan for Glastonbury, they said. Be warm and dry and enjoy hot tea out of melamine mugs whenever you want, they said. Great in theory, but in practice the campervan fields are so far out of the festival, and you have to climb a Ben Nevis of a hill to get to them each night—not ideal when your legs have turned to damp jelly. You also have to leave the actual site to get there, which means being searched on a twice daily basis—but that’s fine, because you’ve got nothing to hide right? RIGHT?

The Dairy Ground

(via Wiki)

It’s like New Zealand here: green, luscious, amazing views, full of mystery and magic, and fucking miles away from everything. Tucked in the far corner behind the Park stage, and that massive ribbony tower that looks like a dildo-themed fairground ride, it has a vantage point over the entire festival. With Arcadia rumbling away in the not-too-distant-distance, it is perfect for spaced out night-owls making the scenic retreat back to their tent after a night dancing, chuffing on cigarette after cigarette and discussing how mint tomorrow is going to be as they go. That, or it’s a good place to store your tent while you sleep in your mates, cos, cba to walk that far m8 tbh.

Pylon Ground

Photo by Russell James Smith (via Flickr)

Just like in any city, when the young are forced out, they find somewhere untapped to call home. At Glastonbury, this is Pylon Ground, an emerging economy that thrives on space, innovation, free love, and a long row of pylons that buzz gently through the night. This is the early adopter neighborhood, this is Walthamstow, this is Thomas More’s Utopia, this is the future.

Hospitality Camping

Photo by Sonia Melot

This lot prance around like they’re guests at Kimye’s wedding, but they are the bottom feeders of Glastonbury’s elite. The real VIPs are placed elsewhere, away from the squelchy suckers of these social molluscs. However, there are showers.

The Tipi Village

Photo by William Coutts

A welcoming horizon of 18 foot pre-erected homes, that will set you back £950, Tipi Village has all the characteristics of a small market town in the Home Counties: they’re all Tories, there’s a local idiot, and everyone is related. If you ever pull someone that camps here, expect to be knocked back at the entrance because you’re not “one of us.”

Prangtanamo Bay aka The Hospitality Winnebagos

Now we’re talking. These are basically the gentrifying new-build penthouses of Glastonbury, the place where the festival’s most photographed go to sleep, drink, and do tablespoons of ketamine in private. Accessible through a heavily guarded hole in the wall in normal hospitality, this tiny enclave has its own private bar where you will see the weirdest get togethers of the whole festival: Noel Gallagher having a quiet chat with Lady Gaga, Lionel Richie having a quiet chat with a Giant Yorkshire pudding, that kind of thing.

Kanye’s Hotel Room

Kanye West is the kind of man who spends more than you make in a year on an exact copy of his own SUV to give to his one year-old daughter as a Christmas present, so you can only imagine what luxuries lie within his hotel room. Probably a gigantic bed made of gold and seal fur, buckets of caviar, and a champagne bottle the size of Michael Eavis. Yeah, ending up here is unlikely, but Glastonbury is magical. Play your cards right, and who knows where a combination of drugs, fate, and chat could lead to.

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