After disasters such as Astroworld and scary bottlenecks at last year’s Glastonbury, Emily Eavis and crowd experts explain how they’re trying to make events safe
In the last two decades the British festival season has ballooned in size to become not just a critical part of our cultural life, but the economy at large – worth billions of pounds, and numbering as many as 850 events last year. But as Glastonbury kicks off this weekend and the season enters its peak, there are a growing number of controversies around crowd safety and management.
In April, London Assembly member and Conservative mayoral candidate Susan Hall echoed Metropolitan police concerns about the potential for a “mass casualty event” at Notting Hill Carnival this year, and in May, the Mail on Sunday published an anonymous Glastonbury whistleblower’s allegation that the festival is a “disaster waiting to happen … Worst-case scenario, people are going to die.”