Glastonbury - a temporary place...

Some temporary places are significant. We have refugee camps springing up around the Ukrainian border, and others have been in existence for much longer and are in danger of becoming permanent.

One particularly important temporary place which has a special place in the UK's cultural landscape is Worthy Farm in Somerset.

Glastonbury Festival opened on Wednesday, although people started arriving early due to the train strike.

I visited the festival in 2010, working with other colleagues from the Geography Collective in the Green Kids field and experiencing the full festival from Wed-Sunday in a year when it didn't rain, and because I was working there, I had a wristband to allow access to toilets and showers, but as my tent was 100m from the Glade dance stage I didn't get a great deal of sleep for five days. It was an awesome experience.

I've previously blogged about our work teaching about music festivals, including a unit written by James and Vicki Woolven, based on Latitude (which we also worked at with the Geography Collective).

The festival was also visited by Greta Thunberg today, who gave a speech on the Pyramid stage:

“Hope is not something that is given to you. It is something you have to earn, to create. It cannot be gained passively from standing by passively and waiting for someone else to do something. It is taking action. It is stepping outside your comfort zone. And if a bunch of school kids were able to get millions of people on the streets and start changing their lives, just imagine what we could all do together if we try.”

A few hours later, several people who'd 'flown in specially for this' joined Paul McCartney on stage for about fifteen minutes...

Search this blog for more details of the work I've done previously using the festival as a way to explore map skills and sustainability.

Also other schemes of work here (from the RGS-IBG).

Image of Glastonbury letters: Alan Parkinson, shared under CC license. Other image used at the Glastonbury Festival to remind festival attendees to take care about their behaviour. We will see how many thousand tents and other items will be left behind on Monday morning.