Glastonbury – 10 Things to Consider When Taking Children to a Festival

Glastonbury is many things to many different people. To the hippies in the Green Field, Glastonbury is a space for spiritual enlightenment. To the kids moshing around in the mud before the Pyramid stage, Glastonbury is a chance to get wasted and listen to bands. To my two-year old son, Glastonbury is a tractor-and-lorry convention. To me, Glastonbury is a challenge to my Dadness. The logistics involved in getting in and out of the festival with the minimum of delay, camping with three young children, and coming out of the experience with all limbs and offspring intact requires the kind of fortitude, foresight, judgement and brute physical strength that constitute Dadness.

After camping there for three days I have some insights to share with other Dads who might consider attempting the festival with their children:

1) Camp high
As a performer, I camped backstage at the Park, on a high pitch overlooking the festival, close to the fence. The effort involved in hauling the gear uphill was offset by the relative peace and quiet of the spot throughout the festival. If I was going there as a common-or-garden Dad punter, I would aim far away and high.

2) Take a wheelbarrow
Hauling your gear from car to site is a difficult and unpleasant experience if you’ve got a big family tent and all the extra beds and sleeping bags that come with children. Glastonbury has metal reinforced pathways that are wide and hard enough to take a large trolley or barrow. The walk from car to campsite for me was about half an hour. I would struggle to carry my tent more than ten minutes on my back. As ever, keep a tight rein on the amount of gear you are taking. Take some rope to secure your gear to the barrow.

3) Don’t cook
A few of our party brought stoves with them, but I maintain you are better picking up food at the festival. Not only does this save on the amount of crap you have to haul around, it also means you are not leaving loads of waste packaging behind at the festival.

4) Kids’ field
Bugaboo hell. None of the parents we travelled with enjoyed the kids’ field. First of all, who wants to sit around watching their children do stuff. Secondly, children aren’t going to learn to juggle in the hour or two you spend there. I’d rather see family experiences more integrated with the festival such as…

5) House of Fairy Tales
Established and lead by the artists Deborah Curtis and Gavin Turk, the House of Fairy Tales is “a child-centred artist led project which draws on an extensive team of artists, performers, writers, educationalists, designers, musicians, film makers, dreamers and philosophers to create magical, parallel worlds where learning is play and play is directed learning.” The people at the House of Fairy Tales were the highlight of Glastonbury – my three children got thoroughly involved – from my two-year-old boy modelling an enormous tower of clay to my seven year-old dilligently acquiring medals as she went through the set activities – and the setting was interesting and friendly enough to keep us adults entertained too. After-hours, a banquet and live performance was laid on (tickets fifteen pounds a head), for which I gladly bought tickets.

6) The Park
The House of Fairy Tales was located in the Park, the area of the festival established by Emily Eavis in 2007. To Dads, the Park is ideal. The bar is not so packed, the stage is full of interesting and alternative acts (all the bands I wanted to see – Animal Collective, Bon Iver, and M.Ward played the Park stage), and you are well out of the maddening throng.

7) But what about the headliners?
I didn’t see any of the big acts. I’ve been in those crowds without kids. I couldn’t face them with small children. One of the consequences of taking kids with you is that you are excused Must Seeing the Must See events. For the first time, I was free of festival fret – that feeling that something better is happening somewhere else and you must trudge off to see it. Before Glastonbury, I negotiated two passes out of the family – one to see Animal Collective – and that was enough.

You sound like a really dull man
I am speaking only from the Dad perspective here, from that portion within me concerned with the logistics of shifting a family around. But it’s a fair comment.

9) When should I arrive at Glastonbury, and when should I leave?
Judging arrival and departure is the real trick. This year, because of the recession and the poor rate of exchange with the euro, many people took Glastonbury as their holiday. This skewed the usual traffic patterns. About half the people arrived on Wednesday, which is quite unprecedented. We rolled in at 11am on Thursday morning and had no problems and barely any delay. We left on Sunday at about 4.30pm and likewise there was no queue. To put that in perspective, my mate spent six hours in the car park on Monday. Six hours! We couldn’t have coped with that.

10) Buggy?
We went for two backpacks in which to haul the children around, each packed up with wet and hot weather gear. Just don’t take a buggy that runs on casters, as I saw a lot of Dads digging the mud and grass out from the wheels. My reasoning was that a buggy would struggle in the really deep Glasto mud, but in the event, the weather spared us that.

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Tags: camping, equipment, Festivals, Glastonbury