Campervan hire at Glastonbury Festival has become a really popular and cool way to enjoy the festival. The Festival is now more geared up than ever to provide facilities for campervans and motorhomes, but there are some important points you should note regardless of whether you bring your own vehicle or take advantage of one the companies that offer Glastonbury campervan hire.
To use the allocated fields for campervans and caravans, you will need a special ticket. These are available for an additional fee (it was £75 in 2009), and they can be purchased at the same time as your Glastonbury Festival ticket. Although only one is required for each vehicle, every person staying in the campervan does need a weekend Glastonbury Festival ticket, you will not be allowed in if you haven’t.
Campervans must have ’suitable fitted facilities’, this means the campervan must have purpose-built fitted sleeping facilities and either fitted cooking or washing facilities. Any converted vehicles must clearly be live-in vehicles. This does not mean simply a van with a piece of foam cut to size for a bed, and a bucket for washing! A team of campsite staff and security staff will check that campervans and caravans coming into these fields have bona fide living accommodation. No other vehicles will be let onto these fields under any circumstances – not even late replacement vehicles in the case of a breakdown. If your vehicle is considered unsuitable for the campervan fields which includes unconverted vans, will not be allowed entry and will be sent to one of the festival car parks – and security patrols will not permit sleeping in any vehicles in these car parks.
Facilities provided in the campervan and caravan fields are water, waste-water containers, toilets, and a food trader open 24 hours a day. The fields are surrounded by steel shield fencing and patrolled by security staff. No electricity is provided for field users.
Glastonbury Festival does not rent caravans to ticket holders, or have any arrangements with contractors to rent caravans. You can of course hire a campervan and bring it to the Festival, provided you have purchased a weekend Glastonbury Festival ticket and a campervan ticket.
The only access to the campervan and caravan fields is via the Blue Route, along from the A37. A windscreen sticker will be sent to you with your campervan ticket, which will permit access to the Pylle Road via the Blue Route, and allow you to park in the fields. You will be allowed access from 8am on the Wednesday before the festival. To enable traffic to exit the site, Blue Route becomes one-way outbound from 2pm on Sunday afternoon until 6pm on Monday evening. As a result, no vehicles can access the campervan and caravan fields during this time. Do not leave the campervan and caravan fields in your vehicle and expect to get back to the fields during these times, or arrange for others to pick up during this period, as access will be refused.
For hired campervans there is a system with the contractors delivering the campervans/caravans so that they can use the hire document/delivery note to bring the vehicle on to the Festival site. Your campervan hire company will have more details of this.
The Fire Officer will not allow ticket-holders to camp beside campervans or cars due to the risk of contiguous fire, but it is permitted to camp behind them. You can bring a Winnebago or extra large RV however, for all vehicles longer than 7 meters it will be necessary to purchase two caravan/campervan tickets, to cover the extra space required.
You can use an awning, but only manufacturers awnings are acceptable. The Fire Service does not permit people to sleep under these awnings because of the risk of contiguous fire between vehicles.
Stewards will be on hand in the campervan fields to advise on siting vehicles. It is not possible to reserve a specific area as space is allocated on a first come first served basis.
There are some things that you cannot bring: Absolutely no generators are allowed on site. Also, glass is not permitted anywhere on festival land. The security staff will also check for any other items not permitted on site, as specified in the terms and conditions on weekend tickets. Security staff will confiscate any such items and may refuse entry to the site. The decision of the security team will be final.
Motorhome and Glastonbury campervan hire specialists, Motorholme, have been providing a hire service for many years. Many companies do not wish their campervans to go to Glastonbury, but this is fine with Motorholme. Each year there is a system in which you can reserve your campervan with a small deposit and if you don’t get a ticket, then automatically get your deposit back. Artist promoters may also consider using a Glastonbury motorhome hire service to provide corporate accommodation during the festival. For more details call 0800 612 8719 to find out more.
Members of The Dramatists Guild of America, the organization of playwrights, of which I have been an active member for many years, was in an unusually feisty mood in a review they let howl at a theater critic in the Windy City. What was the occasion of the lambasting?
A long-time critic for The Chicago Sun-Times reviewed some musicals that were works in progress at Theater Building Chicago, a venue that has been attempting to nourish the struggling art form for many years. The critic, one Hedy Weiss, had deigned to review its showcase performances in previous years but apparently her opinions were not so flagrantly intolerant for the head of the theater to ask her to absent herself until one or more of the works might mature enough to be presented in a more critic-friendly manner. Not so this year.
The unsuspecting critic wrote: “The eight deeply flawed new musicals seemed to suggest the art form has fallen on very hard times.” She went on to maintain that none of the wannabe hits, “whether in semi-staged or concert-reading style, was ready for prime time.” Worse yet, she had the ill-advised temerity to admit that she had not sat through any of the shows because of their poor quality.
Enter the howling dramatists.
Edward Albee: “Irresponsible.”
Stephen Schwartz: “Ignorant.”
Tony Kuchner: “Incapable of understanding standards of professional and ethical conduct.”
And, as I noted in the Guild’s latest newsletter, Stephen Sondheim weighed in with “Art isn’t easy. It becomes close to impossible when the creative process is violated as casually and unprofessionally as it was in this case, eight times, by Ms. Weiss.”
John Weidman, the usually affable president of the guild, fired off a letter to The Sun-Times, accompanied by 22 emails from irate members. His missive called her review “a shocking and irresponsible betrayal of one of the fundamental understandings which makes the creation of new work possible.” He also called attention to the fact that the workshop process “provides an opportunity for writers to evaluate their work as it evolves, protected from the consequences of critical appraisal.”
From our viewpoint her transgression is not so much an occasion for vitriol but for lament, not for her lack of propriety but of wisdom.
If you look back at the very few critics we’ve had who one might generously apply the word great in describing, they have known we are all tending the same garden, and, while it’s fine to harvest in its time, it only helps create a famine to decide on the quality of the sprouts before they have time to mature. Whacking them precipitously means, not only less nourishment for all, but less produce worthy of the connoisseur’s persnickety palate.
Ms. Weiss allowed herself a written response, stating that she had reviewed the festival in the past without objection and no one had told her she could not review it this time. She also called attention to her understanding that the festival is a public event, with an advertising campaign and tickets. “If you are given a press kit and if you are given pictures,” she asked a reporter of The New York Times, Campbell Robertson, via telephone, “what are you supposed to do with them?”
Meanwhile, Joan Mazzonelli, the executive director of Theater Building Chicago, finds herself in the uncomfortable middle of the squall. She is, after all, condemned to continue in Chicago and has, of necessity, distanced herself from her defenders. She has also admitted she hadn’t made the festival’s policy clear to Ms. Weiss: “Call it an error of omission is the best I can tell you.” She added the sad refrain, “What’s in my hands is that Hedy Weiss, who is a major reviewer, is upset with me.”
But probably not as upset as the librettists, lyricists, and composers at whose budding works she did most unwisely swing her sharp and heavy scythe.
About The Author
Tom Attea, humorist and creator of http://NewsLaugh.com, has had six shows produced Off-Broadway. Critics have called his writing “delightfully funny,” “witty,” with “great humor and ebullience” and “good, genuine laughs.”
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