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[bed0fna1ls-blog]

Glastonbury Camping Fields

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, rumour 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 1 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

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

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

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 1pm 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.