Everyone deserves to enjoy a festival that they’ve waited so long for and our job was to help make that happen at Glastonbury this year. It’s important that festival-goers feel safe in an environment with hundreds of thousands of other people and if someone is putting that at risk then security and the evictions team step in. Reasons for eviction can range from possession of unlawful substances to sensitive cases such as sexual assault.
It is important to have great people skills and communication in a team like this and knowledge in mental health is also a very beneficial factor. We dealt with people from all different walks of life, with ages ranging from teenagers to people in their retirement. It is an eye-opening job but can be rewarding knowing that you can help music-lovers have a great experience at a well-loved festival.
Glastonbury runs a strict ID process with the tickets displaying the name, address, and photo of the ticket holder to help prevent scammers and fake tickets. Unfortunately, even in genuine cases, if someone doesn’t have a ticket which matches their identity then they cannot enter the festival. This caused upset amongst some attendees, as some people had been gifted tickets from family members who had caught COVID or who couldn’t attend for various reasons at the last minute. As the festival is the most popular in the UK, their policy has to be strict with no exceptions so as to avoid potential over-crowding.
NR Events will be involved in the evictions teams at a couple of other UK festivals this summer so it will be interesting to see whether they follow the same trends as Glastonbury or whether the nature of the ticketing process and being allowed to have your own alcohol anywhere in the arena makes it an anomaly.
Aside from the work, Glastonbury offered a fantastic weekend headlined by some of the biggest names in the world. Natasha has been a number of times before and her favourite act was Pet Shop Boys and she enjoyed the Glastonbury on Sea area which she had not visited before. It was Emily’s first time at Glasto, having always wanted to go and her favourite act was Foals and enjoyed the walk around Shangri-La and seeing how creative the design was.
We hope to return next year and that any 2022 visitors had an incredible time after a long three year wait!
