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.”
Glastonbury 2024 had prompted widespread concerns about overcrowding and bottlenecks – particularly when big acts such as the Sugababes, Charli xcx and Bicep played relatively small stages. At the time, festival organisers underlined their commitment to crowd safety but said that such performances are “part of the magic of Glastonbury”. Now, festival organiser Emily Eavis has announced that Glastonbury has sold “a few thousand less tickets” this year in the hope of easing overcrowding. “Crowd management has become pretty much our biggest priority and the thing we spend most time on,” she tells me, with teams constantly “planning, tweaking and updating our crowd management operation” before and during the festival, “to make sure everyone is safe”.
But with recent fatal crowd disasters at Travis Scott’sAstroworld festival in 2021, the 2022 Asake concert at Brixton Academy wheretwo people died, and Seoul’s Halloween celebrations the same year, where 159 people died, music fans are understandably concerned about their safety at mass events. This has led to well-meaning but misguided explainers like that offered in a BBC video before 2023’s Notting Hill Carnival, titled “how to stay safe in a crowd”. The common suggestions of what to do if you are caught in an uncomfortable level of crowd density – have an exit plan, hold your arms out, breathe deeply – “mostly aren’t going to help”, says social psychology professor John Drury, who does training in crowd psychology and behaviour for the events industry (the BBC did not offer comment when these criticisms were put to them). “Focusing on individual behaviour and responsibility is misplaced,” he says. “By the time the crowd is so dense that a crush is likely or is happening, it’s too late.”
Really, this kind of advice only serves to deflect attention from event organisers, venue owners, site designers, security, local authorities, health and safety inspectors and the emergency services – all organisations with the professional expertise, not to mention legal responsibility, that an individual crowd member is lacking. “The individuals within a crowd can’t possibly know what’s going on at the other end,” Drury continues. “It is poor management that leads to fatal crushes. It’s still too common to blame the crowd for decisions that should have been made weeks beforehand.”
In the aftermath of the Astroworld tragedy in Houston, Texas, where 10 festivalgoers died of compressive asphyxia, it didn’t take long for attention – and the finger of blame – to turn to the crowd of enthusiastic young fans, headliner Travis Scott and rap culture in general. Lurid headlines and social media rumours spoke of crowd stampedes, criminal behaviour, toxic drugs, even Satanic rituals. Not one of these theories bears the slightest bit of scrutiny. “It was not an accident,” said Scott Davidson, a crowd safety expert in the new documentary Trainwreck. “It was an inevitability due to a lack of foresight and the abandonment of basic safety protocols.” (In a written statement, Astroworld’s promoter Live Nation told the documentary makers that the number of tickets sold was under the venue’s approved capacity, and that stakeholders such as Houston police “were aware of the event plans, which were developed in line with safety codes”.)
Away from the doom-mongering and poor public awareness, crowd safety experts have a great deal of knowledge to draw on; they’re putting to bed pseudo-scientific ideas such as “mob mentality” or human “stampedes”, which are tired myths dating back to the 19th century, and long since debunked.
When crowd scientist Keith Still is called in to investigate a crowd disaster, as happened after Astroworld, the first two documents he asks to see are the risk assessment and the crowd management plan. “The characteristics, the DNA of these accidents, are always the same,” Still says. “Insufficient preparation, lack of staff training, lack of wayfinding, poor signage, and allowing the volume of people-flow to exceed capacity, or throughput. They inevitably tend to point the finger at the crowd being at fault, rather than asking: what were the underlying fundamentals?”
Density is traditionally monitored in terms of people per square metre – five is the upper limit for standing spaces. Above that, things get dangerous: people lose control of their movement, the crowd is susceptible to waves of motion and crushing and collapse become serious risks. At a large-scale festival with multiple stages you have more variables, and more potential for unsafe changes in density and pinch-points.
Drury says that understanding each crowd’s desires and behavioural norms is key. For example, he says, if you’re putting on a large punk festival, then of course you should account for a fairly lively moshpit: “People actually enjoy the density they get at the front of a gig, and they enjoy it at levels that the orthodoxy would say is unsafe.”
He says that people in the live events sector have adapted well to shifting orthodoxies: “People understand now that crowd behaviour is dynamic and diverse, that they are capable of great cooperation, and to work with the crowd, not against them.” But, he says, “it’s hard [for festival organisers] to learn lessons if you don’t have an open environment for reflection on what went wrong … because these are businesses. But at the same time, there are many people in the industry who are trying to change that, and share what they’ve learned.”
Anne Marie Chebib, chair of the UK Crowd Management Association (UKCMA), has been working in the industry for more than three decades. “The days of running a festival with a couple of radios and a clipboard are long gone,” she says, and “the types of risks we face now are more complex and more layered. Back in the 90s, things were a bit more organic and chaotic. Today’s risk landscape includes everything from weather to health scares to targeted violence” – she says one of the most worrying concerns to emerge in recent years is “the deliberate use of vehicles as weapons in crowded spaces”.
There are many things festival organisers can do to mitigate excessive density – clear wayfinding, robust communication channels and real-time crowd monitoring are essential, and festival apps with site maps and real-time updates are not just helping fans navigate (when phone reception isn’t overloaded), but allow organisers to track interest in particular acts and forecast which will become busy: earlier this month, organisers at Manchester’s Parklife festival shut an entire stage down due to overcrowding concerns.
Eavis says Glastonbury uses push notifications on their app as a way of communicating any updates to the masses, and she acknowledges some walkways “essentially have their own ‘rush hour’ where we sometimes need to restrict access or put in one-way systems”. Scheduling is also a critical component: placing two major artists with overlapping fanbases deliberately so that they clash might annoy some punters – as is the case with Charli xcx and Doechii at Glastonbury this year – but helps split up crowds across a festival site.
Emergency protocols are also evolving rapidly. Astroworld has “become a touchpoint in training and planning conversations worldwide,” Chebib says. Travis Scott was criticised by some for continuing his headline show while fans screamed for him to stop; he has since said that he was unaware of any problems in the dark crowd below. In other cases, the message has got through and several major artists have stopped shows to ask fans to step back, and take a breather to reduce density. “The language around stopping shows has become more prominent but also more debated,” Chebib said. “The industry has always had the ability to stop shows but the culture around when and how to use that power is shifting, for the better.”
Congestion doesn’t have to reach emergency levels to really ruin the day for audience members. To be sure, a festival is a complex organism with many variables which might influence the behaviour of its attendees: from their age to the day’s weather, from the exact running order of performers, to site location and design, to subcultural norms (rock and rap fans like moshing; trance fans might dabble in class A drugs). But these are hardly unpredictable in the way that say, an earthquake or a terror attack is.
Charli xcx’s recent headline show at the new Lido festival series in London’s Victoria Park left some fans disgruntled – with a sold-out crowd of 35,000 squeezed into a space ill-equipped to handle the number of attendees they had sold tickets to. “It was a mess,” one friend told me, with waits of 30-45 minutes for the ladies’ toilets, and excessive density across the day undermining the fun and making mobile phone connection impossible. “To pay £68 for that is madness. It felt unsafe and it felt profiteering.” A spokesperson for Lido called the festival series “a great success” but acknowledged: “Unfortunately the new layout caused some toilets to be harder to find resulting in longer queues at other toilet blocks … we’ve taken steps to address it for next year’s event.”
So what can ordinary festivalgoers do? Not much, except enjoy themselves, look after each other, and if it seems like event organisers are cutting corners to maximise profits, then they can vote with their feet and not come back.
But as long as everybody is kept safe, then it’s worth remembering that the gathering of tens of thousands of strangers in a field appeals as much as the artists topping the bill. Eavis says that it used to be the case “that I couldn’t give Glastonbury tickets away” but today, in “a world that can feel quite bleak, having festivals that stand for positivity, unity, peace, joy, sustainability, new ways of thinking and just treating people decently is so, so important right now”.
“Behind every risk assessment, every protocol, every camera feed, there is still a simple purpose – helping people come together to enjoy themselves safely,” Chebib says. “Helping people feel joy, bringing communities together, creating space for culture, that’s what festivals are really about. Let’s not lose sight of what we’re there for.”